We all love a great success story. We love to listen to a successful real estate investor tell us that he or she started with nothing and now they have 20, 50, 100 doors or more. And if he or she is a good story-teller, it almost seems like “magic” the way they moved from rags to riches. We ask ourselves, “How can I get that fairy-tale ending?”
If that investor and story-teller is honest, they’ll tell you that a lot happens in the middle part of the story. Nope it’s definitely not sexy or glamourous or anything resembling a fairy tale. Typically, that investor starts with one property. The key here is that the investor began: he or she took action with that first property. Maybe they were a renovator with knowledge and experience, or maybe they invested cash, or maybe they used a good credit rating to qualify for the mortgage. How they invested in that first door doesn’t seem to matter in all the great investor stories we hear. The key is that they stopped dreaming or analyzing, and definitely stopped “wishing on a star.”
Do you know the book, “The One Thing—The Surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results?” Well, Gary Keller might as well have written that book specifically for real estate investors. Sure we need to multi-task sometimes, but getting to 100 doors is about focusing on “the next one thing,” and then doing that over and over again. Are you a Working Partner in the real estate game? What’s the next thing you can do to leverage your skills, knowledge and expertise? Are you a Money Partner investing with strategic team members? Who do you need to connect with next? Maybe it’s time for a “big picture” session with your lawyer and accountant: how exactly will you protect your estate and your legacy as you continue to grow your portfolio? Or what if you’re already in the real estate investing game, and it’s still hard in Calgary in 2019? Well, you didn’t cause the political and economic climate that has created these challenging times, but you CAN decide to focus on what you CAN control: hint: paint always works wonders!
So it turns out that those “fairy tale endings” and fabulous “rags to riches stories” have quite a boring and hard-working truth to them. Each choice led to an action that led to “the next one thing,” and so on, and so on. I love a good story as much as anyone, but I believe in the power of building a real estate portfolio one property at a time. Let us know when you’re ready to begin or expand your journey: we are currently creating and building momentum on our path to Financial Freedom.
