Remember that book by Stephen Covey that was printed in 1989, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? In it’s day it was a best seller, and even now it’s still great advice. I found my old copy on my shelf the other day and I started to wonder… what would the seven habits of a successful real estate investor be?

After some thought, I realized that a successful real estate investor is not a special breed; I personally believe that anyone could become one if they really wanted to. However, they would need to practice these seven habits:

Habit One: Know Your Goals

The first thing that most of the real estate investors that I know start out with is a goal. One of the investors I know in Toronto sold his home and bought two lots side by side on which he built a townhouse complex that had 8 units. Successfully completing that project gave him the start he needed, and now he has a company that sells and builds hundreds of homes every year. As with anything in life, goals that you set can be simple but may lead to big things; whereas larger goals may have to be broken down into simpler shorter term goals.

Habit Two: Make Your Money when you Buy

It’s not a good plan to pay above current market value for a property with the expectation that the rent you will be able to charge will increase, the neighborhood will become more desirable, and/or the value of the property will go up. The tried and true principle for success in real estate investing is to buy a decent property below market value in a neighborhood that has potential for future growth.

Habit Three: Hire Help

Unless you want to take on a few extra jobs when you buy a property, I suggest that you think about hiring a property manager, an accountant and a real estate agent. The property manager can do repairs to the property and collect rent. The accountant can do your bookkeeping and yearly taxes, and the real estate agent can work with you to find more real estate investment properties. Just make sure that the people that you hire are trustworthy and will help you achieve your goals.

Habit Four: Use Just the Right Amount of Leverage

Serious real estate investors use leverage to get what they want. If you keep buying property with cash every single time, even the richest person in the world will soon run out of money. Leverage is when you invest a small amount on a much bigger amount. In other words, it’s possible to put $10,000 down on $100,000 house. If that house makes $5,000 a year, then you ROI ( return on investment) would be 50%. If you had paid for the whole $100,000 up front, then the return would still only be 5%. However, the downside of putting a small amount down is that it does not protect you from fluctuations in the market. If that same house drops to $90,000, you can wind up owing more on that home than the property is worth.

Habit Five: Find Good Partners

My husband and I are millionaires thanks to our real estate investing, and we owe a large part of that success to the investment partners that contributed equity to our investments over the years. If we hadn’t had those partnerships, we would likely own only half of the properties that we currently own today. It’s hard to reach your financial goals if you aren’t willing to enter into partnerships with others- and partnering with other investors is essential if you are starting out in the world of real estate investing without a lot of money of your own. Family members, friends, or colleagues could be potential partners.

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The other characteristic of every real estate investor I have ever met is that they never ever give up. You will hear “No” a lot. Get ready to face the objections and find creative solutions. In our experience we’ve been turned down by:

– Potential partners that are not able or not willing to get involved with a deal,

– The banks – on just about every deal we had trouble getting financing and had to deal with multiple lending issues,

– Family – sometimes we try the bank of parents and we almost always get rejected but we still try because the interest rates are so favourable,

– Insurance companies – if you don’t live in the same province as the property you are trying to insure, most insurance companies don’t want to do business with you. We have approached and been turned down by numerous insurance companies that won’t insure our Ontario properties because we live in British Columbia,

– Property Managers – sometimes the company you want to hire doesn’t want to manage the property you own.

And even though we have been turned down by all of the above at one time or another, we keep pushing ahead to reach our goals.

Habit Seven: Research – Always be learning

– The best investors are the ones that ask a lot of questions, keep their eyes open for new opportunities and do a lot of research. Many get right into the details of a city. They go to the municipal offices and pull the official plan. They get zoning details and applications. They talk to the city councilors about plans, they attend city council meetings and know everything that is happening in an area.

Not every good investor I know possesses every one of these habits. And I know there are habits that many good investors have that I haven’t covered. But as I thought about the most effective and successful investors that I have met or read about, I realized that almost all of them did possess each of the above habits. And, that anyone could really do what they did if they set out to establish these habits and practices in their real estate investing.

Learn How to Retire a rich real estate investor with Julie’s free Real Estate Investing Starter Tips Guide. Learn how to create financial freedom, positive cashflow and massive wealth with tips like: How to find quality rental properties, finding and keeping great tenants, and easy ways to make rental property recordkeeping simple and more profitable.