11 WAYS TO GET STARTED IN REAL ESTATE RIGHT NOW

Welcome to the channel and welcome back to another video. On this quick video, I want to talk to you guys about 11 ways that you can get into real estate starting today. So I want to have this conversation with you guys because I want to help some of you guys realize that real estate is not just for rich people. Real estate is not just for people that have a whole bunch of money. Anybody can get involved with real estate today if you desire to do so. Hey, my name is Eric and I write a blog over at smartmoneybro.com. On that website, I help regular people, ordinary people just like me, just like you become better with their money, be extraordinary with their money and with their real estate. I've owned and managed real estate for over 20 years and so I try to bring that knowledge to other people. I want to demystify real estate. Real estate is not some pie in the sky, big time, hard to capture or hard to do thing that only people that have a whole bunch of money can do. Anybody can get involved with real estate and I'm going to give you 11 ways to do so. Again, don't be intimidated by real estate. If this is your first time stopping by this channel, please do me a favor, subscribe to the channel and if you get anything at all out of this video, smash the like button for me. It helps the algorithm push the video out to more and more people and if you're a returning subscriber, thank you so much. I appreciate it. This channel continues to grow and grow and grow. As you check out this video, pay attention to number six. It's the way that I've made most of my money in real estate over the last 20 years. So, let's jump into the 11 ways. Number one, the very first way you can make money in real estate is simply by buying or purchasing your own property to live in. Your primary residence. Now, this means you have to have some down payment. It means you have to maybe work on your credit or make sure your credit is up to a certain level. It also means you have to do some research on your own and you have to ultimately find an agent to do so. But this is a way where you can get into real estate by simply home ownership and over the long haul, over the course of 10, 15, 20 years paying a property down or off, you can build wealth just through paying off or paying down your own primary residence. It's an easy, low-hanging fruit way for some of you guys to actually get into real estate. Now, you may buy a house for your own self to live in and after five to six years, you say, you know what? I want to rent this home out. I want to go buy another home. It gives you options. You're also building equity in the property as well the whole time. The second way that you can get into real estate is through what we used to call bird dogging. In other words, you go out and you find properties for investors. A lot of investors don't have time to actually go out and find property. So, they're willing to pay a small percentage to someone or a small, what we call finder's fee to people that are actually going to be out there on the grind, doing the research, finding the property, talking to sellers, and actually locating solid properties for investors to actually invest in. The third way to get into real estate is by simply what we call lease to own. And when I say lease to own, I mean, you actually rent the property out, but you're renting it out with the option to buy the property. Now, there's two ways that you would do a lease to own. One way is called a lease option. And a lease option means at the end of the lease, you have the option to actually purchase the property if you desire to do so. Now, the other way is called a lease purchase. A lease purchase is where you are obligated to actually purchase the property. You don't have an option. You must purchase it. So, think about that. If leasing to own a property, perhaps you don't have the right credit score right now, or you don't have the money down right now, you can lease the property with the option to purchase or lease the property with the mandate that you have to buy it. Either way works, but you're getting into a property when you really don't have maybe what it takes to actually go out and buy your own primary residence right now. I think this is an excellent option for a lot of people. You just have to find the right seller that's willing to lease you the property, and maybe even use your rents each month towards your down payment. A lot of different ways that that can be structured. If you do a lease to own a property, be sure you read the fine print. Number four, the fourth way you can get into real estate is through what we call wholesaling real estate. Now, what this means is simply you go out and you find a motivated seller, and you find a motivated seller that wants to sell the property for well under the market price. Now, you simply purchase the property, put it on a 30 to 45 day contract with a contingency in there. During that 30 to 45 days, you go out and find a potential investor that wants to buy the property from you. For example, you find a property that's $75,000. You understand that this $75,000 property could be worth $150,000 if it's fixed up and taken good care of. During that 30 to 45 days after you've purchased the property for $75,000, you go out and find an investor that's willing to buy the property for say $100,000. You make the $25,000 spread from what you purchased it for versus what you sell it to the investor for. You're the middleman in between. You're finding the properties at a very low price, and then you're turning around and selling them immediately to investors. That's what wholesaling properties is all about. You can make good money. It takes a lot of grind and a lot of work, but that's a way that you can get into properties with very, very little money down at all. Number five is a really popular way to get into real estate, and that is flipping properties. Buying properties low, selling properties high. Buying properties low, repairing, fixing up, getting it ready for the market, and selling it high. You buy the property for $75,000, you put about $25,000 or $30,000 into the property, and then you list the property for sale for $150,000, and you make the spread. Whenever you're doing that type of thing, be it wholesaling or even the flips that we're talking about, always want to make sure that you have a good CPA and you're paying taxes. Very, very important. But that's another way you can get into real estate today, simply flipping properties. The sixth way is one of my absolute favorites because it's the way that I've made most of my money over 20 years in real estate, and that is the buy and hold strategy, where you're buying a piece of property to rent out and you decide to hold the property for years and years and years. You could take advantage of the hedge against inflation. As inflation goes up, your rental rates go up, or you can take advantage of the equity that's being built up in the property over the long haul. You bought the property for $75,000 in 2022, and then you turn around and sell the property 30 years later in 2052. But now that $75,000 property is now worth $200,000. And all along the way, for the whole time, you've collected rents. So that's one of my favorite ways to be involved in real estate because you're taking advantage of so many different things. The tax write-offs, the equity that's being built in the property, the rents that you're collecting on the property on a regular basis. So that's another way that you can get into real estate today. The seventh way is what we call an Airbnb, or I like to call it just renting out a room. Maybe it's a room in your own personal residence, or maybe it's the basement of your own personal residence, but you're renting out a piece of property. Now we say Airbnb. Airbnb is just a website. It's a marketplace. It's sort of like eBay is a marketplace to sell goods. You got Amazon and Alibaba and Shopify, and you have so many, and Poshmark. You have so many different places. Airbnb is just a place on the internet where you can actually list a property for rent on a short-term basis, or a room or two rooms for rent on a short-term basis, a day, two days, a week, two weeks, a month, two months, just on a more short-term basis as opposed to six-month or a one-year lease. Now as rents become ever so expensive for people to actually maintain, it's very, very difficult for some people to pay what rents have become. So I believe that renting out a room in your house is going to become more and more popular as time goes along. So that's something to think about. If you actually own a piece of property right now, and you have an extra room or a basement, or you have what they call like mother-in-law quarters, or you have a downstairs that you don't use, you could rent that area of your home out, and you can put it on a site like Airbnb, or you don't have to use Airbnb. You can just rent it out. That's a really low-hanging piece of fruit that some of you who already have a property could utilize to get in the game of real estate today. Number eight is simply invest with a partner or partners. So any of these ideas I'm giving you, if you don't have the money, if you don't have the credit score, if you don't have the know-how, you could get with somebody who has some of those things. Maybe it's three of you. One person has the researching and the know-how, one person has the money, and the other person has the credit. You could come together, form some type of LLP or a partnership, and you all could end up purchasing property as a small group, as a small investment group. So what you're doing there is you're leveraging the expertise of other people along with you. But it's another way that you can get into real estate, is by partnering with other people. Number nine is another inexpensive way for you to get into real estate. And that is through what we call REITS, R-E-I-T-S. And a REIT is a Real Estate Investment Trust. It's a company that invests in income producing real estate. And when I say income producing, we're talking like commercial real estate, or we're talking like apartment buildings, warehouses, hospitals. So instead of you going out and buying property, you're going to invest in a company that goes out and buys those properties. So you're not actually going to have to worry about maintenance, upkeep, repairs, collecting rent. You're not worried about any of that, because the company, the REIT itself is doing that. You're just investing in the REIT. So REITs pay dividends. REITs can be publicly traded on the market. So with a REIT, you're buying a share of the company and you would purchase a REIT through a specific broker. But you would do your research on that, because that's a way where you can get right into real estate and not have to worry about some of the pain points that a lot of people don't like about real estate. Number 10 is what we call digital real estate. Now it's kind of new and it's kind of odd to a lot of people at this point, but it's out there and it's a way for you to invest in real estate. It's a little less conventional than some of the other ways I've talked about. So digital real estate, you have places like the Metaverse, you have places like Decentraland, or you have places like Sandlot or OpenSea. These are places on the internet that actually sell digital products, art, music, and real estate. So these places are where you can buy virtual real estate in a virtual world. Now I'm not trying to sound like I'm out there, but it's out there for you to actually look into, do your research about digital real estate. Because I really believe that over the next five, 10, 15 years, digital property and digital real estate is going to become more and more a thing that people do. Now, some of you may not be comfortable investing in something that you can't feel and you can't touch and it's not in the real world, but digital real estate is going to become a thing. So keep it in mind as a possible way for you to get involved with real estate. Number 11, the final way you can get into real estate is simply real estate agent. Now what an agent does is goes out and finds property for potential home buyers. Now they're going to show properties. They're going to do a lot of the leg work of helping people look for property and they work really hard. Really good agents are very, very important. So if you want to get into real estate and you're considering it, you might consider becoming a real estate agent. Of course, based on your state, there's going to be licensing that you have to do, tests and credentials that you have to obtain and maintain. So keep that in mind as well. You can become an agent in this real estate game. With that said, hey, those are my 11 ways that you can get in real estate today, starting right now. And there's many more that I didn't even mention. If you've got anything at all out of this video, motivation, inspiration, explanation, do me a favor, smash the like button. The best person to take care of the old you is the young you. Do me a favor, take care of yourself, but also take care of other people. Until the next video, peace.