Every real estate investor who wants to make money works under the same imperatives:
- The need to minimize the risks he is taking in terms of his own exposure.
- A certain amount of pressure to find ways to increase his profits.
Because working in real estate is all about being creative with the one resource you cannot get back:
- your time
- the amount of effort you put into each real estate purchase you make has to be closely linked to your expectations of making a profit from it
- or setting up a parallel income stream.
This is where the strategic vision that guides you comes in. Either you decide early on that you are going to focus on single-family dwellings, for instance, or go for multi-family dwellings.
The distinction here is an important one, hence the need for a ‘strategic vision’ in your planning.
Without that the decisions you are making are purely opportunistic ones and, as a result, you end up with the market running you instead of you running the market.
This is not to say that you preclude the one from the other.
Quite the contrary, the real estate investment market thrives on opportunities and when you find one passing it up because you are blindly following a by-the-book strategy makes about as much sense as leaping off a cliff because it’s fashionable to do so.
What a strategic vision does, however, allows you to decide when and why you should deviate from your chosen goal and it also enables you to assess what you can expect to gain by deviating from your game plan. In my career, for example, I have bought and sold single-family dwellings because I needed to make fast money for a bigger investment in multi-family dwellings.
While my focus and the thrust of my personal strategy have always been on the latter I have always known when to deviate and get involved in the former so that I can create more opportunities for myself.
It is exactly this approach that enables a focused real estate investor to make gains in everything he does every single working day.
How to formulate a working strategic vision, how to choose what’s right for you and how to stick to it is something I cover extensively in courses I give and in the boot camp weekends I run.
The thing is that without that strategic vision to guide you, you are left almost rudderless being blown about by the market conditions and unable to do much to actually affect your own destiny and that, is simply no way to run anything much less a lucrative real estate investment career.
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