By Minh Pham, Investor/ Mentor/Author www.GuaranteeProfits.com

I would like to share some personal insights with you that I believe will really help you to move forward in your real estate investing business goals. I studied many successful and wealthy real estate investors and besides all of the strategies and techniques these people reveal as part of the “success formula,” there are actually three common traits shared by all of these successful entrepreneurs. These traits have allowed them to grow their businesses to generate such extraordinary incomes.

Trait #1: They Just Plain Got Started

Most of the investors I talked to had little or no prior knowledge of real estate when they first got started investing. Typically, this was their first real estate business. Some just owned only their own homes! And that is the first point I want you to know. It doesn’t matter what your knowledge level is when you start. The important point is you need to begin.

You don’t have to do everything well. In fact, you don’t have to do anything well when you start! But you have to start. Take the first steps, no matter how small, to move your investing business dream into reality. These successful entrepreneurs did not wait until their knowledge was complete or until they knew everything there was to know about making money in real estate investing before they got started. They’re living proof that you don’t need to be a real estate guru to start making serious money in this business. I am sure you, too, have a great desire to create wealth for yourself and your family percolating in your brain. You just need to start.

Trait #2: They Focused On One Thing and Did It Well

The second common thread I want you to know about is that each one of these people focused on just one investment strategy at a time, did it well, maximized profits, and then moved on to the next one. That’s why they also said that they know there is so much more they can do. There are many ways you can promote your real estate investing business. The good news is you don’t have to put a lot of pressure on yourself believing that you have to do it all or know it all. To follow their lead, focus on just one technique such as Lease Purchasing or Wholesaling and really master it before you explore other strategies that will make you money. As a beginning investor, Lease Purchasing and Wholesaling makes a lot of sense because the risk is low, and if you make mistakes using these strategies it’s not as bad as losing $40K in a major rehab. Learn all you can and apply the knowledge as you learn it. This is how you can generate $100,000 plus from your real estate investing business, by focusing on one investment strategy at a time.

Trait #3: They Modeled Success

That leads us to the third common thread I want to share with you which is that all of these people have committed to educating themselves in the most profitable strategies. These are techniques that fit their goals and visions. They learned the strategies that fit their styles rather than just going after the money. These successful real estate investors confess to having made mistakes, costly, frustrating, and time-wasting mistakes that could have saved them lots of time and money. This is the hard way to learn and they did these things too. They all said that they earned a much bigger income much faster because they modeled the success of others. It is much easier to learn from other people’s mistakes. After all, you don’t have to be the one who makes the mistake to learn from it.

By following successful investors, you don’t need to personally conduct your own trial and error experiments to discover what the best methodologies to use are, or the best resources are the most helpful, or which overall marketing campaigns produce the best results. You get success that ‘ALREADY WORKS’ so you increase and often times guarantee your results because it already worked before. Others have already cut a path through the Real Estate jungle for you. Just get on the right trail and apply the strategies and techniques as you learn from them. Great ideas are transferable. What works for others can be adapted to work for you too.

Building a successful real estate investing business is more of a journey than a destination. The learning process never stops. The fact that the real estate continuously changes is the number one advantage you have over your competition if you stay ahead of the learning curve and they don’t. Make a commitment to continuous learning. Make it a habit to continually learn from successful businesses as well as successful real estate investors.

Many successful entrepreneurs are regular people who did not start out with multi-million dollar advertising budgets, huge staffs, or advanced technical knowledge. In fact, most of them started out with almost no budget, by themselves, and with little prior knowledge of real estate at all. Your business does not have to be perfect to make money, but you can’t make money until you start!