Real Estate Investing Education

The need for real estate investing education can be summed up in these words from former Harvard president Derek Bok: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Real estate is very expensive to learn using the trial and error method. In fact, one error can wipe an investor out before he even gets started. Investing in your real estate education before you start doing deals is just common sense.  That is why everyone here at CleverInvestor.com takes great pride in the fact that we ONLY provide the highest quality, most entertaining real estate investing education available.

Real Estate Investing Education Courses and Materials

There are plenty of educational materials on real estate out there – everything from articles and ebooks to home study courses, boot camps and full mentoring programs. What is right for you?

Part of that answer depends on how quickly you want or need to get up and running. If you are not sure if real estate investing education is right for you, you may start out by reading articles and maybe investing in a low-cost course. If you find that you want to learn more, it’s time to start looking into the programs available and find one that’s a good fit for you.

There are many different niches in real estate – wholesaling, buy, fix and hold, fix and flip, commercial, land, probate, short sales and everything in between. It’s best to get a good background in real estate investing as a whole before you start investigating each little niche. Too many times investors chase after bright, shiny objects, trying one niche, then another and never stick with one thing long enough to get proficient at it and make money. Just as with any business, you need to set a course of action and follow that course.

Many investors start by bird dogging real estate and then move into wholesaling. These two areas allow you to learn your local market and dip your toes in the water without making a long-term commitment. From there, you can branch out in the direction you want to go. In real estate, there’s something for just about everyone and learning how to invest in real estate is easy now that you found Clever Investor!

Is there such a thing as “Too Much” Real Estate Investing Education?

The answer to that is yes and no. There comes a point in your real estate investing education where you have to go out and start doing deals. Many people suffer from paralysis of analysis. They are so careful about analyzing a deal, making sure nothing can go wrong and preparing for every possible contingency that they never pull the trigger on a deal. There is some education that you can only get by going out and doing deals.  There is no substitute for “real world”, transactional education when learning how to invest in real estate.

While the purpose of a real estate investing education is to help you avoid mistakes, the lessons learned best are the ones learned through real world experience.

Just as the best athletes hire coaches and trainers, people in real estate often use mentors and teachers to help walk them through their real world deals. Even experienced investors will get counsel when they are doing a deal in an area they are unfamiliar with. For example, if you have only invested in single family houses and have decided to move up to a commercial apartment building, you will want to get advice from someone with experience in larger multi-unit projects.

While you can never have too much real estate investing education, you do need a mix of both course study and actual experience. A mentor can help make that transition from theoretical to real world and sometimes give you that one little push of confidence that you need to get you on your way.

A real estate investing education will give you the basics to get you up and running and will help shorten your learning curve considerably. It will save you from costly mistakes. But real estate constantly has new twists and turns, situations come up that no one has planned for. Your education can help you deal with those situations when they do occur, but there is always room for innovation and creative thinking. Real estate investing is an on-going learning experience.

Even the best and brightest in the creative real estate world talk over deals with other investors. That’s why being a member of a real estate investing group, whether it’s a formal or informal meeting, is so beneficial. If you run up against a problem, chances are someone else has either come up against it too or you can get different perspectives on how to handle it. Two heads are better than one and three or four heads are even better than two.

The person who has stopped learning has stopped growing. In real estate, there is always something new to learn or a new strategy to test. As long as you’re in real estate, your real estate investing education should never end.