How to get started in real estate investing like a business

A lot of people get started in real estate investing but they don’t treat it like a business.

Here are some quick tips to help you treat your real estate investing as a real legitimate business, not just a side hustle.

Hi, I’m Lyle Leads with DFW TOP designed for winners to optimize profitability, you’re a winner, and you’re here for a reason that’s to optimize your profitability.
And the best way to do that, as Real Estate Investors, is to treat your real estate investing like a business.

I see a lot of people, you know, I just had a group meeting with some wholesalers and the wholesaler talked all about I’m going to drive for dollars and I’m going to be calling people and I need lists and all this stuff. But all they’re doing is actions or tasks.

They’re not treating it as legitimate business. So how do you treat it as a legitimate business?

Number one, make sure you’re tracking things. If I’m going to drive for dollars…
I’m going to map out an entire area
I’m going to zone out those areas.
I’m going to take a map.
I’m going to print it out and circle the area.
I’m going to go to that one area of a circle.

Next I am going to go to that area. I’m going to do research. I’m going to pull Market data for that specific area.So when I see a house, I know that automatically, what’s happening in that area so that I know what I can and cannot do with that specific deal.

That’s a drive for dollars as a wholesaler. As a real estate investor of some things we can keep track of buyers and sellers. Now, you’re saying what to keep track of sellers. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Lots of reasons.

Number one. I keep track of sellers because they are moving to another house, right?
They’re going to be making more friends, and somebody in their new area might want to sell their house, and we want to keep them in mind.

We can help, we help them and we can help their friends as well. So we’re going to send reminders.

Hey, just letting you know, I was thinking about you today.
Hope everything is going well that CRM or customer relationship management tool.

It can be as simple as a spreadsheet. At The top of mind, just remind ourselves to touch base with these people.

We’ve got a mortgage company that helps us with our house and about every two to three months I’ll get a little email from them. Just saying a little bit of details.

Hey, here’s update on your house.
Here’s what’s going on.
So you want to keep track of your sellers.

Now you want to keep track of your investors who have given you money for your deals.
Why do you keep track of them.. to keep in touch with them.

Find out if their criteria has changed.
What is their criteria?
How are they open?

So you might have somebody that wants to give you money at 6%, but they only have 50,000, but somebody else would give you eight percent, but they have 200,000.

Well, those two deals, depending on what your deal is coming up. You got to know who is who and what they deal with, what kind of deal they can bring with them.

Now I know there’s a lot of tools, you know, propio and propleads and all these other things that you can use for CRM, but keep it simple. Don’t overcomplicate.

You want to side for buyers, and you want to side for sellers, if you have multifamily property, might want multi-family residential, but you want to be able to segment these people.

So you can pull the list and communicate with them. And I suggest having SMS contact and email contact when you do this. This is very important.

Again, I’m Lyle. I’m a business coach, keep that in mind. That’s what I do is I’m here to coach you as a business coach. Okay, and the key here is make sure you have permission.

Don’t pull this off the internet and start sending SMS Messages don’t SMS people houses that you’ve never talked to before. You can get in lots and lots of trouble with the trade, Federal Trade Commission, with that kind of stuff Trade Commission, whichever one does the communication systems, FTC? that’s right, but make sure you’re doing it correctly.

You have some kind of legitimate way that they’ve opted in. So I personally have one simple way to do it. If you’re just getting started, create a Google form.

If you have a Gmail account you have forms automatically get their name, their email and their phone number and then Little checkbox below. The phone number that says, do I have permission to text you about upcoming deals and specials we have going on.

Something that affects what they’ve given you permission now. Yes, you have my permission to text me any system you use. I don’t care if you’re using some system that’s online or some SMS texting system. Make sure you have that permission data.

If you don’t have permission data, you’ve got to have where they signed up on your form.
You’ve got to have the exact IP address and everything that they use to get that signed up on.
If you don’t do that, you can get in trouble. We don’t want to get in trouble.

Treat your business like a business, do it correctly, email, same thing emails a little bit more forgiving because they can unsubscribe. Make sure you have an unsubscribe and you actually have your address there.

Now, talking about, treating it like a business, you need a business address if you use your home address, that’s okay to get started, but eventually I want to get a real legitimate address.
You can use a co-working space. I don’t suggest using a UPS Store. UPS stores and a lot of people do that, but people don’t want to look up your business online and see a UPS store, that’s going to just kind of say, this person is not real.

We talked about websites. We will talk a lot more about that but have a legitimate business address and a legitimate business phone number. Don’t just use Google Voice. Don’t just use your own cell phone. You can, multiply this will give you an extra free line.

Use one of your old phones on that, just use it for phone calls and just use it for your business and you’re treating it like a business, be a business, use a DBA, an assumed name certificate make sure, you have some idea of what you’re calling your business.

Don’t just call it my name Investments. That’s kind of boring. It’s kind of weird.
So be creative. Think about it. Go Do some research, do something that validates your brand.

Watch the one on the website. We tell you a bit more, maybe to help you out there.
So you want a legitimate name. You want a way to connect with customers.

That’s investors and buyers and sellers. Yes, all three of those things and you want to make sure you’re communicating in a way that’s legal and legitimate to help you.

Run your business as a business. Make sure you’re doing the same thing with accounting. Make sure you have some kind of accounting software, free one online.

If you don’t have one right now you can go to waveapps.com., I think it’s waveapps.com.
It’s free accounting software is just like QuickBooks, but you don’t have to pay anything for it.

It’ll connect your bank account. You can build people through it. You can do invoices, you can do all that in the system and it’ll pull from your bank and your PayPal account and I’ll put them into one place. It pulls them for you. So you don’t have to do a lot of input.

You do have to check and make sure they go in the right place, but that’s something so you count on your people to account for your money. What else do you have to account for your marketing?

Think about it.

You have to set up a marketing plan, set up a marketing plan for your real business, set up a marketing plan. So, you know, where to go marketing is telling people what you do and why you do it. Those are the three key things that you want to do.

If you want to set up your business and real estate investing as an actual business.
Don’t run as a hobby. Don’t run a side business because eventually you want to quit working your job.

Investing is a whole, but some people really love their jobs and like looks, even though I’m making a ton of money. I’m still going to work on my business, that’s totally fine.

But if you’re not setting up a legitimate business, you’re going to lose a lot of the benefits of doing so, and that involves tax benefits and all those kinds of things but we’re not going to get taxed on this one.

Make sure you understand the simple steps. It tracks your people, tracks your money and tracks your marketing. If you’re doing those three things, you got a good start on setting your business up. Your real estate investing is as an actual business.