Suppose you can send a short message to yourself 5 years in the past.
What would you say?
Any significant lessons about business or life you wish you would’ve known back then?
BUY MORE HOUSES, THE MARKET IS GOING TO EXPLODE.
And yes, I would yell at myself.
Now that I have that out of the way, I would state that I would tell myself to work “ON” th business and not so much in the business. And to automate the business more so that you can get your time back.
You know, it’s funny… when people hear that you bought real estate during the last recession (anytime from 2009 - 2014), they’ll usually come back with,
“Wow, you really lucked out! That was a great time to buy!”
But they either don’t remember or simply don’t know what a difficult time it was to be a real estate investor.
This was a time when nobody knew if or when housing values were going to come back. For a while there, it seemed like we’d never find the bottom.
It was almost impossible to get a loan from a lot of banks.
When listing a good property at a good price, it would often sit on the market for months before getting a single offer (which would inevitably come in far below the asking price).
I remember seeing many articles from reputable sources talking about how real estate values might be permanently depressed and jobs might never come back, etc.
It seems obvious in hindsight, but there was a ridiculous amount of uncertainty at the time. Even when buying a property with huge upside potential… you never really knew if/when values would go up. Every move felt like a gamble (to me it often did, anyway).
It always seems easy/simple/obvious in hindsight, but it’s much harder to be confident in your decisions when you don’t have the benefit of knowing when and how it’ll all pan out.
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Jump in US real estate and start from Land.