It's a fact that those who travel down the real estate investor path have one ultimate aim in mind: total financial freedom. But while this is the common uniting thread in the way they do pretty much anything, different real estate investors have different ideas about how to get there. This is why many tend to either take a really long time to get rich, or simply stop as they are getting there because the going is too tough.
As a real estate developer who has become rich by practicing what he preaches, I can both understand the problems involved and the mental set that causes them. Investors of any kind are naturally cautious and quite rightly so and real estate investors are even more cautious than the rest.
Over the course of my career, as I chased my target, I invested in both single, and multi-family investments, looking at holding a diversified portfolio that included businesses as well as commercial real estate. This strategy has given me almost a unique perspective in the real estate industry as I was ideally situated to make direct comparisons between the two and see which one works best.
Now I know that most people reading this will be in one of two camps and will want me to pronounce for one or the other but, realistically, that's not how real estate investing works. Certainly, in the journey towards my target, multi-family dwellings made more sense. They made it easy to spread the risks of unoccupied properties, provided liquidity when I needed it and allowed me to have what every investor loves most: a breathing space which provided peace of mind when things got tough.
I have, as you can imagine, bought houses, flipped them quickly and used the money to buy apartments but I have also held onto single-family properties when it made good sense. The obstacles that most real estate investors put in place when they consider which path to take in their careers come from false perceptions and they can easily be dispelled.
For instance, think that getting into apartments means a lot of trouble with tenants and toilets. As the owner of several apartment developments, I can say that none of this needs to happen. I outsource all the hard work, getting competitive bids from specialist companies because I can offer economies of scale and a growing opportunity to do more business as my portfolio of apartments grows and expands.
This means I can get a better deal in caretaking and even repairs and I do not have to talk to or see a single tenant. If you are ready to make the same journey I have to total financial independence then what you really need is to take a step back and think big, you will then find the rest tends to follow.
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