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how to Buy your first investment Property

The search never really ends, or does it? …NOPE. You either prospect and don’t get the deal, or you get the deal and start the process for the next one. Whichever the case, the search never ends.

More commonly, the former is the case. You have spent an eternity on MLS and every listing platform that you can find, skewering for that one deal that meets all your “is this a good deal” criteria, and you find one.

You get excited, giddy, perusing the images over and over and over, looking to see if you will spot something about the house that you did not see the last fifty times you checked – (google lets you know how much of a stalker you are by with ‘you visited this page 3 times on xxx/xxx/2018’ discreetly at the bottom of your search results… mind your business google.

I digress!

So you found the one, and called for your realtor to schedule a viewing appointment. Fast-forward to viewing the property, it looks good, some minor repairs needed as expected, but maybe the price could be a little better.

Remember that the goal is to buy below market value, add some value to the property and then rent it, and refinance. But typical realtors don’t always get the logic because they are only looking at the price and property from a personal buyer perspective – I guess that is what they are trained to do. So don’t let their opinion of it being a ‘good deal’ be the only influence for your decision. The only thing that makes it a good deal is if the numbers are right, the numbers usually don’t lie.

So you put in an offer, based on numbers that make business sense for you, and many times it will be declined. Down goes all the excitement, the cycle starts, look for the next one and repeat the process.

The purpose of this is to let you know that you are not the only one going through the cycle, and it should be expected as part of the prospecting phase. So don’t let it get to you, just move on and sure enough another property will come up.

Another way to mitigate this is to make multiple offers; this is risky if you still have finite funds, because you may be on the hook if more than one of the offers is accepted. I am just pointing out that this is a possible strategy.