Real estate investment isn’t an exact science. If it were, you wouldn’t see so much competition in the market, and it’s not like having competition’s a bad thing. When it comes to real estate, you can actually learn from your competition—take the path most followed, as it were.
Here are some ways to be successful for new and aspiring real estate investors.
Research Your Market
Market research entails many things, including discovering crime rates, average income, unemployment rates, and even the wage gap of the people in your target neighborhood.
By staying on top of these pivotal statistics, you can tell when good or bad times are forthcoming and take appropriate measures.
Be Sure to Check the Crime Rates
A neighborhood may look serene and peaceful during daylight hours, but it might take on a completely different personality after dark. Anything from a misdemeanor like leaving an empty beer bottle at a stranger’s doorsteps to peeing on said doorsteps could drive away old, new, and future tenants.
There’s more to crime rates than just looking them up on the internet, checking the local news stations, and writing the area off as a lucrative one. You’ve got to dig deeper by checking online reviews, talking to the locals, and scoping it out yourself.
Keep Your Private and Investment Funds Separate
We should probably preface this point by saying bookkeeping is essential for any real estate investor. They can record rents, maintenance, expenses, and returns, segregating them based on different properties, tenants, and so on.
A failure to do so may result in mixing up your private and investment funds. Your private funds are usually the returns you’ve made on a fix and flip, new construction, or rental property. Whereas your investment funds are the ones you have to keep reusing and seeking loans to replenish as a new investment opportunity comes along.
In a nutshell, you need to apply for a loan if a property requires it instead of putting your own cash into the business, which you can only do by keeping the two separate.
Curb Your Repairs
When investors first start flipping houses, they often feel guilty about not giving their 100% to a property. As a result, they might end up overdoing the renovations and overshooting the fix and flip funding they received, killing any chances of a profit.
You can match the aesthetic of a home to its neighborhood and even add contemporary fixtures to it while staying within your budget. Moreover, having a finished product in your mind might help direct your renovation and prevent unnecessary repairs and replacements.
Get off to a great start in your real estate investment business with the help of Insula Capital Group. We grant hard money loans to contractors, real estate investors, and individuals from all walks of life. Our loan programs are diverse and available to everyone, nationality notwithstanding.
Learn more about flip loan financing, construction loans, single-family financing, and mixed-use private loans offered by our hard money lenders.
Talk to us for any questions about hard money lending rates.