Create Your Own Luck in Real Estate Investing

Howdy!  As I am writing this in early October, I’m celebrating my one year anniversary of quitting my job as well as our 50^th deal, as we closed deals 48, 49, and 50 last week.  We are also a couple of weeks away from our one year anniversary of our 1^st deal back in late October 2012.  So as I reflect back on these milestones and the last year, I wonder how to attribute our early success.  Was it luck?

Sure, you can call it luck.  I’m fine with that.  So let’s talk about how to get lucky.  But first, let me tell you a quick story about our 1^st few deals.  We started researching real estate investing and wholesaling real estate last spring (2012).  We started reading some books, reading real estate investing blogs, and listening to podcasts.  That summer we finally got into the game and started doing some marketing – bandit signs, driving for dollars, and yellow letters.  We started going to REIA (Real Estate Investors Association) meetings religiously. The 1^st few deals we put under contract went nowhere for various reasons – bad title, priced too high/won’t sell, seller backs out – we learned a lot. We also started to get very discouraged and nervous about this working out.  Bad luck right?

Then in October of 2012 we finally did our first deal ($5K) and we realized that this stuff really works and is for real and obviously gave us a massive confidence boost.  In November we did (2) more deals – small deals – but we were gaining some momentum and learning along the way.  With one of those deals, the seller told us they had (12) more properties they wanted to sell.  So I went ahead and said we would take all of them for a good deal and wrote up a purchase contract for all (12) – $275K – and we had to close within a few weeks.  Crazy huh?  Crazier yet was that the next week we got (2) more deals under contract that had to close within a few weeks (before Christmas).  We had done (3) deals in our entire lives and now we had (14) deals that we had to close on.  Would you consider that lucky or just us being freaking nuts?  Well let’s find out what happens next.

So we go into “hyper house selling mode”, because we don’t want these properties, we want to wholesale them off before we have to close on them.  It was a beautiful thing.  The stars aligned for us.  People actually wanted these properties at the prices we were selling them at.  Within a week we had (12) out of the (14) sold – under contract with cash buyers.  We priced them to sell and probably could have made more on them, but we got them sold, we were happy and our sellers were happy.  They all closed the week before Christmas and (10) of them on the Friday before Christmas – on my deadline with the seller.  So (12) deals in one week & (10) closings in one day!! (thanks Suann, my Super Title Guru!)  2 of the properties slipped to 2013, but the sellers were happy.  And we were especially happy because we had just made more money in one month wholesaling than we would have made in several months at our prior 9 to 5 jobs.  Pretty lucky right?

Like I said, sure, you can call it luck.  I don’t mind.  I’d rather be lucky than anything else.  So how did we create this luck?  Have you ever heard the phrase – “the harder I work, the luckier I get”?  I can relate to that.  But I prefer – “Luck is what happens when Preparation meets Opportunity”.  Our Opportunity was having (14) deals fall into our lap at once.  Did it magically happen, or do you think we did some marketing to get those leads?  And having gone through the trial and error of doing the deals the months leading up to that prepared us for doing this many deals (not really, who’s prepared to do 14 deals at once?) but we knew what we had to do.  So our Opportunity met our Preparation and we got Lucky (and we got paid for it!).

So how do you create your own luck?  Here’s a list of things you can do so you can be lucky in Real Estate Investing and Wholesaling Real Estate:

1. Expect to be Lucky
2. Create Opportunity – always be putting out marketing for motivated sellers
3. Create Opportunity – get out of the house and network and talk to people
4. Get Prepared – learn the business – read books, listen to podcasts, go to meetings/seminars
5. Get Prepared – build a network of people that can help (Realtor, Title person, Contractors, Other Investors, etc.)
6. Be Aware, Attentive, Listen – always keep your eye out for Opportunities
7. Stay open minded and think creatively & positively – trust your gut
8. Act Quickly
9. Adopt a resilient attitude that turns bad luck into good luck
10. Never Give Up

Hey we have lucky months and unlucky months, but we will keep trucking along and luck will keep on happening.  Follow the steps above and you will be falling into some luck as well.  If you want more help on being luckier, let us know how we can help.

Make it a great day!

Matt Larsen