If you’re trying to get into real estate, here’s some advice: You need coaching.
Probably a lot of it.
This is not us trying to dissuade from joining the real estate industry, but rather trying to help you out before you make too great a mistake. Even the greatest athletes and the most accomplished sportsmen still need their coaches to point out what their weaknesses are and how they could improve. Similarly, you also need someone to guide you through the real estate industry.
But it does not mean you need to pay hundreds and thousands for it. In this post, we will look into how you can get valuable mentoring for free.
Before we jump into the specifics of how you’re going to get free mentoring, you’re going to need to know how things are within the education space in the industry.
When I first started in real estate, there were very few people providing coaching. And the people who were doing it were almost all experts who had successfully navigated the financial crisis. These were people who knew their stuff inside and out. They had spent their time in the trenches and knew all there was to know, at the time, about the real estate industry. This made it easier to get solid training and education.
However, today we have two problems: The first is that there is an oversaturation of coaches and gurus and teachers and whatnot. Not all of them are good and rooting out the good ones is a considerably difficult task.
Then there is the fact that you still have the same people from 8-10 years ago still selling their courses from way back when. Nothing has been updated, nothing changed. You might ask why that’s an issue, after all, how much difference can there be between flipping a house 10 years ago and flipping one now, right?
So why update the courses at all?
While the very fundamentals of real estate might not have changed in that time, there are a lot of factors involved in real estate that have. Markets have shifted, the buyer networks are entirely different and the entire industry has so much technology involved. All of this means that real estate training needs to be updated to better reflect today’s world.
Sadly, in most cases, the only things that have changed in certain courses from then and now is the pricing. Drawing on personal experience, training that I paid somewhere around $200 to $300 is now being sold at a whopping $5000. Everything being taught at the course is the exact same things that were being taught back when I was learning… but the prices have been hiked up by a lot.
Most of these mentors are also simply just pushing their products. They may say that you can call them at any time and ask questions, but when you do call, you will likely just be connected to an intern who will just go through the same old material again and try to push more training down your throat.
Something else to consider is, of course, the fact that paying big money for a famous coach might not necessarily be the best course of action if you are not operating where the coach is operating. This varies from business to business, of course, but real estate is a very local industry. What I mean by that is that the real estate trends in a certain city will not be the same as those in another. If you want a proper coach, you are better off looking for someone in your own area and that makes it even harder to find a good coach.
All in all, the industry’s education space today has a number of issues and it makes finding good coaches hard. But you still need mentoring...
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...but one more stop before going into the actual methods of finding free mentors: the importance of having a basic education.
Before you can find yourself a free mentor, you need to be able to understand what they are talking about. If you’re serious about working in the real estate industry, this is the time to invest maybe a hundred bucks on yourself and buy yourself some books on real estate so that you can learn the language, learn the basics of strategies and learn other fundamental things.
Whether it’s by reading books or listening to podcasts like ours or joining meetups and talking to investors and taking a lot of notes, you need to be able to speak the language. All of this will ensure that you come off as someone with some experience and as such, you will be able to get free mentoring more easily.
There is no excuse for not learning. As we said, a hundred dollars will get you several books from Amazon, you can borrow from your local library, there are podcasts, there is YouTube — you have an impressive amount of resources and you have no excuse for not taking advantage of it. So, before you go and find yourself a mentor, do the groundwork and learn the basics of the real estate industry.
After all, if you really want to learn, you don’t chase the money, you chase the knowledge.
Now, finally, to the matter at hand: how to get free mentoring.
There are three ways, three different things you can use.
The first way is time. First of all, if you want to learn how to wholesale, you need time.
Wholesaling is not a part-time business and anyone who says it is either trying to sell you something or they do not know what they are talking about. If you think it is, or believe that you can somehow make ten or fifteen thousand a month right away with very little work… You are wrong and this might not be the business for you.
That being said, if you do have a lot of free time and you really want to get into the real estate business, you can use your time as a way to get free mentoring. What you need to do is find yourself an investor who is successful, go up to them and essentially just say, “Hey, I have a lot of time, I know the basics of real estate and I want to learn more. What can I do for you?”
That’s it.
The truth is that as people already working in the business, we don’t have a lot of time. We have our business to run, we have our properties to manage and our flips to… flip. Take myself, for example, I have so many things to do on a daily basis that I don’t have time. So, when you come to us and say you have time and you want to work, we’ll put you to work. Teaching you strategies, pay for your marketing, pay for your time, even.
And when you get work like this, it’s not just, work. It’s a learning experience unlike any other. If you’ve found yourself a good mentor who is willing to invest in you and your time, you will learn everything there is to know about real estate from the ground up. You’ll do some groundwork in the beginning, cold call people, knock on doors and whatnot. But that’ll teach you how to generate leads from nothing. Then, just by watching how the experts handle deals, you’ll be able to learn how to handle your own.
Further, if you show and interest and if you go to your mentor and ask questions, trust me, they will be more than happy to share, simply because you’re putting in the time. You’re giving them a lot of value and they will know the worth of giving you value back. In a hot market, time matters a lot and we know it.
When you learn like this, everything will be engraved in your brain a lot better than they would if you were sitting through hundreds of hours of training. You're going to remember every single step and you're going to learn how things work in your area.
The best part, of course, is that you’re going to get this firsthand education for absolutely free.
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If you have enough knowledge and are halfway decent at finding your own deals, you can even use that to barter yourself some further education. If this is the case, what you can do is take good deals you have to investors who are creating notes, flipping houses, or acquiring rentals, and tell them that you have a deal that you want to partner on and tell them why.
This is a great opportunity for you to learn how that strategy is done correctly. What you need to do is watch what they do and take note of everything. You’ll make some money off it, but again, the money is not what is important here — remember, don’t chase the money, chase the knowledge.
Don’t worry about the money and instead learn as much as you can. Once you’ve done this a few times and they’ll have taught you all they can now you can do your deals yourself, take them all the way to the close and keep all of the proceeds.
This also has an added benefit: having partnered with the right people also gives you a lot of credibility. Now, when you’re talking to other people and ask you what you know about the business, you can simply say, “I’ve worked for a while with the team at this business or that” and people will understand that you just might know what you’re talking about.
Say you don’t have the time and you are not yet all that great at finding deals but you do have money. If this is the case, you can use your money to get yourself some free education. You might be asking “How am I getting a free education if I have to pay for it?” right now. But the thing is that you aren’t paying for your education, and you aren’t necessarily paying either.
What you can do is this: You go to somebody who can teach you what you want to learn — somebody who is acquiring flips, rental properties, or somebody who is doing whatever it is that you want to learn — and you tell them that you will fund their next deal as long as you can tag along and learn. You tell them that you’ll bring the money and give them favorable terms over whatever their money lenders are giving them but you want to be involved every step of the way and that you want to learn the process.
Obviously, you need to make sure that everything is done correctly and that your money is protected, but beyond that, you leave the negotiating and whatnot to the experts and watch from the sidelines.
What you want to focus on is learning the strategy, how they are negotiating terms, how they’re running their numbers and making their decisions. In essence, this makes you an investor as you are using your own money protected by somebody else's experience and knowledge and now you’re also making a little money off of it. More important than that, of course, is the fact that you are learning.
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So, there they are. Three ways you can find yourself a mentor, for basically free: Use your time, bring the deal or bring the money. I can most assuredly tell you that there are plenty of people in your own market who are both able and willing to help you and speaking from experience, I can attest that real lessons learned from real people who are doing it day in and day out are the best education you can get.
Something you do need to keep in mind is the fact that markets will evolve and change, and it is always good to find new mentors to teach you new strategies. Once you’ve established yourself, finding new mentors won’t be hard at all, as you’ll have more knowledge than you did when you began and you can more easily find someone who has need of whatever it is you have to offer, whether it’s time, deals or money.
As always, good luck on your learning journey and feel free to reach out if there are any questions we can answer for you!
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