How to Invest in Real Estate in 2024 (Step-by-Step)

Dave:
Hey everyone, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. My name’s Dave Meyer, and today I’m going to be sharing with you a recent webinar that I gave about making 2024 the best year ever for your real estate portfolio. I actually gave this webinar a couple of days ago, right around the new year, but it went really well and it seemed to really help a lot of investors, whether they were brand new or a seasoned veteran, get ready and get kick-started for what could be a great year for real estate investing.
In the webinar, I sure address the elephant in the room, the housing market, and whether or not it’s a good time to buy for real estate investors. I also talk about building the right systems and processes that are repeatable and can help you land good deals regardless of what market you’re in or what macroeconomic conditions change over the course of the year. There’s tons of great information, there’s tons of great tools that you can use to build your portfolio, so you’re definitely not going to want to miss this webinar.
So that’s it. It’s a great webinar and I really think it’s going to help you start taking action towards your real estate goals in 2024. So without further ado, let’s jump into the webinar.We’re going to be going through nine powerful tips that will help you do just that. So first things first, again, thank you for joining. You guys could be doing anything with this time, but you’re spending it here with me and this whole community of BiggerPockets people trying to improve their financial situation, and that is really special. It means that you’re ready, you’re willing to take action on your goals for 2024, and that makes this the exact right place that you should be.
Hey, guys. It’s only the 4th of January, right? That means you’re probably doing better than like 95% of people on whatever resolutions or goals they have. So congratulations on being here. So let’s just start with a question here, and this might sound like some big hypothetical question, but I’m actually asking you this right now. Are you looking to make a change this year? Are you thinking about 2024 and hoping that you’re going to buy perhaps more real estate or generate more passive income with working not as much, or maybe you are really into the big equity injections that flipping houses can get you? Or maybe you’re like me and you really invest in real estate for things like spending more time with your family and friends or sort of, again, like me, again, I made this deck to travel.
Traveling is one of my personal passions. It’s one of my personal goals, but I put that as an example. This doesn’t have to be travel. It’s really about whatever you’re hoping to get out of real estate investing, whether that’s time for a hobby or just reducing your financial stress and anxiety or just generally more freedom.
Are these things that are appealing to you? If you’ve answered yes, and I’m guessing you have because you’re here, then ask yourself one more question. I know I’m asking a lot of questions right now, but ask yourself, could this be the year of your pivot? Now, if you haven’t heard this term pivot before, a lot of people use it in business to describe a shift. It’s like a change in direction. If you’re familiar with basketball, you probably hear this all the time.
It’s not like totally upending and changing your entire life. You don’t need that for real estate. It’s just a bit of a refocusing, a shift of priorities, and it’s like a pivot, a move towards your long-term, financial stability and goals. We’re going to talk a lot about this today because I think this idea of pivots is really important. People often think that they need to get into real estate, they need to make some drastic shifts, but that’s honestly just not the case.
All it takes is these small shifts sustained over a long period of time, and that’s what gets you to financial freedom. It’s not a get rich quick scheme. So if you’re looking for that, I’m sorry, it’s probably not going to be the right webinar for you. This is more about pivoting your mindset, implementing a proven system, sustaining that over a long period of time. I know that sounds boring, but that’s the thing that actually works. If this sounds good to you, this pivot, this idea, then think about whether 2024 could be the year of your stack.
So we’ve learned what the word pivot is. Now, we’re going to talk about stack. And the stack is the system that you use to sustain these pivots over time. It’s not like you have to make all these decisions on your own. Today, I’m going to show you a system that you can use that hundreds, honestly, literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have used before and you can use too.
And the basic idea behind the stack is that to achieve financial freedom or to achieve a considerable amount of wealth, it takes multiple properties. I hope every property you buy improves your financial position, but one is just not going to cut it. So the stack is this proven, scalable and honestly relatively low risk approach to growing your real estate portfolio to the necessary size to unlock those goals we just talked about, whether that’s financial freedom, time with friends of family, all that stuff.
So the idea here is simple. It’s like start in 2024. Just come up with a modest goal, buy one unit. Then in the next year, maybe two years from now, maybe you need to save up some money, buy two units. Then in the following year, buy four. And that might sound like this huge ambitious things, but it’s not because once you buy that first one, you’ll see that it’s not that hard and you’ll see that buying two is actually not that much more work than buying one.
Same thing goes with going four. And you keep going and you maybe buy eight or 10. This isn’t some magic system. Once you learn how to buy these properties, you can scale it to really any size and you may think that you need a huge amount of time or money or skills, and we’re going to get to that. But I just want to make clear upfront that you don’t need it all today. That’s the whole point of pivots. That’s the whole point of stacks. And I’m telling you this upfront.
So you remember that your pivot for 2024 could be to get just one single property, one single unit. That in itself is enough to set you on the right course to reach financial freedom. All it takes is just a few pivots, like the ones you can be making today. I put a quote in here from Jim Rome, which I love. It says, “Life doesn’t get better by chance. It gets better by change.”
And this is important because you can’t just wait around for these pivots to happen to you. No one is going to go and tell you how to make that small adjustment that’s going to help you get that first real estate deal. You actually have to proactively go out there and make those pivots that you want to see in your life. So today, yes, it’s about real estate investing, it’s about pivot, but it’s really about change. Today, I am going to work hard to provide you with the tools and confidence you need so you can make that change.
I realize this isn’t… Again, it’s not a short-term thing, but the life you’re dreaming of may still be three, four, five years down the road, but the decisions you make today will determine if you’re going to get there. So this is what we’re going to be talking about today. Today is about change and making it your best year ever. So commit yourself to that. That’s going to be our goal today. It doesn’t mean you have to buy the most real estate this year. It could just be one. It just means that you’re going to start making those good decisions.
But change like we’re talking about today is not easy. Sometimes it’s really hard to change. Change is hard, and that’s because their resolutions don’t necessarily work that well. I think that there’s nothing wrong with them per se, right? We’ve all got them. But I think the real challenges are, one, usually they’re not specific enough. Like someone just say, “I want to get wealthy”. That’s not super specific. That’s really big.
The second is that they lack a plan. You have this big ambition, but you don’t actually have the steps together to figure out how you actually want to get there, and there’s no way to force action. So those are some problems I think we all see with resolutions. So the question is what’s the alternative to a vague resolution?
Well, I call it the shift change formula. We’re not going to be talking about resolutions today here. If you want to use them elsewhere in your life, you can, but we’re going to talk about a proven system to achieve whatever goals you want in life, and that means you need to have the right goals. So you need to set specific goals, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. They need to be specific.
We’re going to [inaudible 00:07:21] with the right plan, which is a system that you can copy from other people and we can also talk about right actions. So those three things together, if you combine your goals, your plans, and your action, you can make the changes, you can make the pivots that we’re talking about. And by the end of this webinar, you will, I assure you, you will have a day-by-day plan for actually achieving your goal.
So this is not some vague resolution. You’re going to actually know what you should be doing tomorrow or you should be doing the rest of this week and you should be doing the rest of this month. That’s what we have on the agenda today. So on the agenda, like I said, I’m going to just explain some things about BiggerPockets. Then I’m going to talk a little bit about today’s market, which if you know me at all, that’s kind of my thing. Then I’ll get to the nine steps to make you 2024, incredible. And then we’ll do some real live deal search and analysis to show you that real deals do exist today.
Now, if you don’t know anything about BiggerPockets, I’ll tell you quickly, but you’re on this webinar, you probably know about the stuff we make. We have podcasts, we have a website, we have all these amazing things. But I also want to tell you about what we believe in. I’ve been working at this company for eight years, and the reason I stay is because BiggerPockets has beliefs in a mission that I truly believe in. And the first one is that real estate investing is the single greatest tool on the planet for the average person to build wealth and passive income. Truly believe that, and you’re going to see this for sure through just in this community that we’re showing here today that average people, normal people can do it. If you’ve ever BPCON, you’ve seen this in action.
Second, I’ve said this a few times, but real estate is not a get rich quick scheme. I’m not here to tell you that this is going to happen overnight. I’m going to teach you a system that you can follow overtime to achieve sustainable wealth. The third is that the goal of wealth building is not necessarily money for money’s sake, it’s to live life on your own terms with the freedom to do whatever you want. For me, that’s spending time with friends and family or traveling, but for you, that could be something totally different.
But what I love about real estate is that the financial freedom it gives you, allows you to unlock all these other amazing parts of your life that aren’t necessarily financial. And then the last one is that anyone can invest no matter how much money, experience or time, and we’re going to get into that. I mean, I know this might sound like pie in the sky and not as realistic, but this is what happened to me.
If you don’t know me, I started investing, like I said, just a year out of college. I was waiting tables. And I’ll get into the details, but I basically saw real estate as an opportunity, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I literally all the cash I had in my life was in my bedside table. I didn’t have a bank. But I started going out and I looked for deals. I was very young. I was about 23 years old, but I made so many mistakes. I bought my first deal. I was a terrible property manager. I almost gave up. I started to spend money on the wrong things. I didn’t know what deals to look for, but I kept buying. I kept going with it. I didn’t realize for a long time that my problem was that I was just going by the seat of my pants.
I was just making these instant decisions about what to buy and I didn’t follow this system, but I hustled. And those two things combine I think is what really got me to where I am today because my slow start, some things went wrong, but ultimately things went right. I started being a bit more proactive and being a little bit more deliberate about the things I was doing. Rather than just buying random deals that came across my computer or my desk, I started setting very specific goals. I defined the processes that were going to get me those goals, and I just started hustling my butt off.
So those are the things that I think really differentiate people. It’s not necessarily your background or your experience level. It’s following those goals and then putting in the effort. What I’ve also learned that I want to share is that it doesn’t take that many properties to achieve financial freedom. I know this is probably not that common something people say on Instagram or whatever, but it honestly doesn’t. I don’t own thousands of units. I’ve just been very deliberate about finding the deals that work for me and my personal plan. And it’s really not that hard. It just takes, again, the right goals, the right plan, and the right action.
With that, let’s jump into the keys to success. We are going to talk about the nine steps it’s going to take you to succeed in real estate in 2024. But actually guys, I kind of lied. I said it was nine steps, but I added at the end, the 10th one, and that is the elephant in the room. So this isn’t actually a step, but it is something I wanted to talk about before we get into the nine steps and it’s probably on everyone’s mind. Can you invest successfully in 2024? And tell you that you can invest in any market?
That is something almost every investor I know knows. Should you change your tactics based on the market? Yeah. You need to be maybe a little bit more conservative in this kind of market. Maybe certain strategies or certain decisions might not work as well on this market, but there is always an type of investment that works. Just for example, interest rates are higher right now, but there’s way less competition. There is no such thing as a perfect market. You just have to adapt. And we’re going to talk about that today.
The second thing is timing the market as possible. Guys, take it from me. I literally analyze the housing market for hours every single day, and I don’t try and time the market. It is not possible. And so you need to really focus on the long-term about the housing market in the long-term, the appreciation, the cash flow, the loan pay down because those are the things that are going to matter to you in five, 10 years, not what happens in the next six months.
Okay. So that’s number two. And then the third one is that every investor I know is still active and investing right now. And this is cool, right? Because I think a lot of people think, “Oh, real estate, it’s really hard right now.” But what experience investors know is that this isn’t a get rich quick scheme. I’ve said that before. It’s about setting yourself up for the long-term. Short-term conditions are just not as important. They are important, and I’m not saying buy anything. You need to be able to spot a good deal, especially in this market, and we’re going to talk about that.
But trust me, by the end of this webinar, you’re going to know how to find good deals and you’ll see how great investors can grow in any market and you can too. So we’re going to talk about that. So with that out of the way, I just wanted to address the elephant in the room. Now, we can get to the nine steps to succeed in 2024. And as a little bit of a preview, the steps are going to follow this funnel pattern.
So they’re going to start really broad with the biggest goal, and then they’re going to narrow down to very specific actions. So just remember that as we’re going through the nine. They’re going to start broad and get a little bit more. And also remember, this webinar is about making your pivots. So this steps are what can make this your pivot year. These are the steps that I recommend you take for the pivot so we’re going to start at the biggest one, and then we’re going to get down to the things that you can do today or tomorrow to start growing.
So number one is define your why. We talk about this a lot in real estate investing. And what it says is, “Do you know why you’re actually investing in real estate?” I know a lot of people say, “Oh, I just want to be rich. You’re financially free.” But there’s got to be more to it. Right? You have to have an idea of why you want money. Is it to spend more time with your family? Do you want to be a mogul and own thousands of properties? Do you want to just move up your retirement date?
Maybe you just want more spending money. All of these are worthy goals, but the point is not what the goal is, it’s that you have a specific goal because you can’t pursue someone else’s dream, right? That’s not motivating. You can’t just take my why and use it for yourself. You need to know what you’re in it for because real estate, it’s not really that complicated, but there are tough days. There’s going to be challenges. And knowing exactly why you’re doing it is going to help you keep you motivated over the long run and keep that goal in mind.
So this is the most broader things I’m seeing. So to sort of hammer this point home and all the other nine points, we’re going to actually follow this fictitious, but hopefully relatable investor we’re going to call Harold. Now, Harold has his goals. His why is he’s tired of working his nine to five. He wants to spend more time with his kids. He wants to see his kids grow up and he wants to travel the world. I think these are relatable goals. I mean, maybe do you like these goals? I don’t know. Hopefully you do. Hopefully you relate to it. Whatever yours is, I recommend you try and visualize it. Something like this, right?
It’s not necessarily complicated. It doesn’t have to be some big matrix, beautiful mind thing. Just write out a couple of things that you want. For me, my why, I’ll just tell you, mine has always been a dream of balancing financial freedom and having fun. When I was 21, I really had a lot of financial anxiety and I really wanted to build a name for myself and build up some wealth. But at the same time, I was young and I wanted to have fun, and I saw all of my friends making trade-offs.
Some of them would work really hard and build up that financial strength, but they would sacrifice time with friends and family. On the other hand, some of my friends would prioritize experiences. But that came at the expense of building wealth. And I just had a dream to marry those two things, and that has always been my why, to be financially stable, but to enjoy my life as much as possible. And that’s what I think about every time I make a decision when I’m talking in real estate investing.
So that is step number one. Number two is commit. So this is something that’s really important and it’s a little harder. It’s a little less tangible. But commitment is super important because there is a difference between wanting something and being committed to it. Who here has wanted to learn another language? I’ve lived in the Netherlands for four years. I’ve been saying I’m going to learn Dutch for four years. I speak probably four words of Dutch.
So there’s clearly a difference between wanting something and being committed to it. I’m sure we all have these things and you just need to translate those desires into action. Being into real estate, it’s a common desire. Most people want more money, but how do you know that you’re actually committed to something? It’s when you dedicate time to it. So you dedicate your time and your actions start to match your desires. That’s how you know that you’re committed, and it’s something that I think you should be really focused on because if you find yourself not committed, maybe you need to revisit your why because it’s not motivating enough to you.
Because if your why is true and you really feel motivated by it, you’re going to be committed to it. So that’s step number two. And for Harold, he embodies this in a way where he’s not just desiring it. It’s not something he just talks about randomly. He is really committed to it and he sees no other option to doing it, to achieving that financial freedom. I encourage you to do that. But also want to commend you all for showing up today because this is a good first step.
You are taking action and that is true commitment. And lucky for you, I’m going to give you seven more steps that you can keep those commitments. So number three here is define your five-year vision. So figuring out your why. Again, that’s the broadest. We’re doing this funnel thing where you start with the why and that’s where you want to be specifically. That is what motivates you, but the vision are the specific outcomes that you’re looking to achieve.
So let’s just take a minute and imagine where you want to be. It’s 2029. That’s five years from now, right? It’s 2029. Imagine where you want yourself to be. Do you want to be retired? Do you want to be spending 10 more hours a week with your family? Do you want to be doing two vacations a year? These are the type of things that you should be thinking about, and I recommend that you balance them between things that are financial and supporting your why.
So if you want to say, “I want to take more vacations every year,” how much does that cost and how much cash flow or wealth do you have to build to get that? So I’ll show you an example of this in a second, but I just want to explain why we’re doing this because I think this is where a lot of people get lost. You ask people where they want to go, they know their why and they’re just like, “I want to be rich or I want to be retired.” But that’s really hard.
If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing it for, if you don’t know what those numbers are for, you can’t chart the path forward. I actually put this in my new book, Start With Strategy. There’s a great quote from Alice in Wonderland. I won’t get into the whole thing, but Alice basically goes and asks the Cheshire Cat like how does she… What path to take? She gets to a fork in the road. And the Cheshire Cat says, “Well, where do you want to end up?” And Alice says, “Well, I don’t know”. And the Cheshire Cat says, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
I love this quote because if you don’t have a destination in mind, the path you take is completely irrelevant. So I really encourage you to think about your why and then come up with a specific five-year path. Does it have to be money? Is it passive income? Do you want free time? Don’t just write a million lists of things. I know it could be tempting to put down 20 things, but be realistic. I think come up with a couple of things that are really important and start with the end and why.
So let’s get back to Harold and talk about him. He says in five years Harold wants to be, one, generating $5,000 per month in passive income from rental properties and, two, doing two flips per year for a total income of a hundred thousand dollars per year. That’s an amazing goal, right? Personally, I would take that, right? Five years into my investing career, if someone told me I was generating five grand a month and making a hundred grand a year, I would take that all day long.
And this is an awesome five-year vision one because it improves his financial situation, but it’s more about how specific this is. This directly supports Harold’s why, why he’s doing it, and it’s specific enough where he can say, “These are goals that I can see in my mind, I can envision them and I can work towards them.” To be on track, when you think about this for your five-year goal. Then the next step after you’ve done this five-year goal is to figure out what do you need to be on track?
And so again, we’re basically just going down this funnel. So you can probably guess we’ve gone from why, to commitment, to five-year goal, to one-year goal. Not super complicated, but this is really important because you have to go in this order to build out this plan. So next step is to narrow it down further to a one-year goal. If you haven’t invested yet, you have not invested your first goal, you know what you should goal be, just get in the game. Do one deal. Maybe you get two that would be great, but you can say one goal, that would be an awesome first-year goal.
You do not need to hit a home run. You do not need to hit a grand slam. When I think about my first deal, it was nothing close to a home run, but remember this is about making pivots. It was about starting to build momentum. And so when I first got started, my goal is to get in the game and I did that and that enabled everything that came after. So think about a goal that is achievable and is going to help you. Doesn’t have to be complicated, just get your first deal.
So for Harold, his first deal, you remember his five-year goal is to get 5,000 in cash flow, flip some deals. But for Harold, his first deal is just buying a single family property. And honestly, I love this because it’s not a home run. He’s just making the pivot. I’m not saying he should just buy anything and neither should you. You shouldn’t just go out and say, “I had said I was going to buy a deal, so I’m going to buy anything.”
But just focus on a deal that is attainable, and I think Harold is doing this perfectly. I put a lot of quotes in here, but this one I love. “A goal is a dream with a deadline.” We’re going to talk about that a lot today. We already are that a lot of these things, it’s different to actually do something than it is to desire something. And make sure that that goal has a deadline. So it has to be by the end of the year. That is the timeframe here.
So you can’t make it so big that it’s like, “I just want to be rich, or I’m going to get 12 rental properties and you haven’t done one yet.” It’s got to be something specific and that you’re going to hold yourself accountable to by the end of the year. So now that we’ve done five-year, one-year, we’re going to narrow it down a little bit further and go to quarterly goals. Guys, this isn’t rocket science. Remember, we’re just doing the funnel. So now that we have a year, narrow it down to orders. And I really like orders because it just helps you stay on track for your one-year goal.
A year from now a lot of things can happen. So you have to break down your goal into further parts. And I think a quarter is a really good time horizon because it’s short enough that you can see the finish line. You have an idea of what you’re doing in 12 weeks. You probably have plans in 12 weeks so you can see the finish line, but it is still long enough to get stuff done, right? It’s not like next week I need to buy a rental property. That’s not going to happen.
But 12 weeks from now, you can get a lot done and you can sort of chart out what you’re going to do in those 12 weeks. So I really like that. I actually do this every quarter. I do this planning process where I go through my entire portfolio. I look at what deals are working, what plans are working, what I need to change. Do I need to redistribute my resources?
So I do this on a whole portfolio level every single quarter. This is actually a tool for my new book that you get for free if you buy the book, but it’s something that I’ve been using for years and I think it’s really helpful. Whatever stage you’re in, I just recommend it’s the beginning of the year. What are you going to do by the end of the first quarter? What are you going to do by the end of March that is going to move you towards that one-year goal, that’s going to move you towards that five-year goal?
If your goal is to buy a property by the end of the year, educating yourself right now is an excellent goal, and then maybe the next quarter you start offering on property. So for Harold, for example, his end of Q1 goal is to put one property under contract by the end of the year. We’ll talk about how we’re going to get to that, but I just wanted to show you that how this worked for Harold, his one-year goal was to get a property, but he’s broken that down into a little micro step that is achievable in 12 goals, in 12 weeks, excuse me, which is just getting this under contract.
So this is what I mean when I say at the beginning that it only takes small pivots, like, “Yeah, you made a big goal. And yes, your why should be ambitious and be super motivating to you.” But right now you only need to get one property under contract. That sounds doable, right? You’ve gone from this wildly ambitious thing and just in five or six steps. Now you’re like, “Okay, I can do that in the next couple of months. I can actually go put a property under contract.” So that’s the next step.
Now, when we get to number six, I really like this one. This is a really important one, which is about real estate process. So far, most of the goals have really been about defining what you want, but this one, number six, defining your real estate process is really about how to go about doing these things. How do you get a property under contract? A lot of this is about habits, right? A process is something where you can follow it and you don’t actually have to worry about each individual outcome, and you have trust that if you follow this process that you are going to get your achieved result, your desired result over time.
And Hal Alarati is a great speaker, talks about this a lot. And I think this is super important in real estate because not every property you look at is going to be good. Not every offer you submit is going to be accepted. You need to follow this process to keep doing it. So what I recommend, everyone has a different process, but the one that works for me is, again, it’s another funnel. Sorry, I really like funnels. So we have this funnel and basically it goes in four steps. Starts at the top. Again, the most broad thing that you need to do to acquire real estate is to get leads.
And a lead is basically just a property that you’re considering buying. So you need a lot of those. You need to be able to look at a ton of different properties. Then the next step is to analyze those leads because not every deal is going to be good and you need to be able to sort which ones are good and which ones aren’t going to work. And that is you do that during deal analysis.
So you start with all the deals you can find and you analyze them. Then maybe one out of 10, maybe one out of 20 of the deals you analyze are ones that you’re actually going to make an offer on. That’s the pursue step. And then the last one is success. So just as an example, say you need a hundred leads. You start with a hundred leads, then you’re going to analyze 30 of them because 70 of them, you look at them, you’re like, “This is garbage. I’m not going to do it.”
Then you look at 30 of them and after you analyze them, maybe one in 10, three of them look like good deals. You offer on three of them and you just get one. That’s it, right? That’s all you need to do is to follow this process. I know it sounds like that’s a lot. I’m going to show you that doing this is actually not that hard. We’re going to get to that in just a minute. But remember that this is a repeatable process. Remember, if you’re trying to get your first deal, your 10th deal, this works. What you have to do is expose yourself to as many leads as possible, analyze, pursue success.
Just as an example, guys, I’ll just tell you, I spent the day before New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day looking at properties the last couple of days. I know it’s wonderful. New Year’s Eve, right? I spent and I looked at maybe 19 properties and I hated all of them, but one. That’s fine. That’s all it takes, right? Because you just need to find that one deal if that’s your goal. And it’s just a numbers game, finding a lot of leads and analyzing them.
So this is the process that I recommend you follow to actually go out and acquire the deals that are part of your quarterly goal, your one-year goal, your five-year goal, all of that. So for Harold, the way he does this and makes a process goal. It’s not his one-year goal. It’s not his quarterly goal. What he’s doing is making a goal about the process he’s going to follow. So what he says, he’s going to connect with five investor friendly agencies chosen. BiggerPockets can help you with that. Just go to biggerpockets.com/agent.
Then he is going to send each of those agent his buy box, the things that he’s looking for in his next deal and help work with them to scour the MLS for leads. That’s how you mostly get leads. I know a lot of people talk about off-market deals. Those can be great. Invelo is an excellent source for off-market deals, and you get that part of BiggerPockets Pro. So that’s great. But you can also use MLS. Both are possible. You don’t have to go off market. You don’t have to go on the MLS. It’s up to each individual investor how they’re going to source their leads.
The important thing is that you get those leads. Remember, that’s the first step. And so this is what Howard is committing himself to. In addition to that, he’s also going to commit himself to analyzing five real estate deals that he gets from the MLS and making offers on at least one of those. Now, if all five are bad, he shouldn’t make an offer on that, but I’m just sort of giving you an example that hopefully one out of five hit. And as we talked about, he’s also going to educate himself by listening to two podcasts per week and maybe he’ll even read my new book, Start With Strategy.
Great job, Harold. Thank you. I just want to remind you the reason you need this process and the reason that you need to LAPS is because that 99% of properties out there are not good deals, and that is okay. Do not get discouraged, right? You have to look at a lot of stuff to find good deals and you just need to learn how to analyze them. The next step after analyzing and doing the laps, you have that LAPS process now is to actually get out there and do it.
So I put a quote from one of the great books, one of the best business books out there right now, Atomic Habits by James Clear. And basically he says that the ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity, right? It’s like I’m the type of person who goes to the gym. I’m the type of person who analyzes deals. And it starts to become this thing where it’s not necessarily even about the specific deal that you’re doing, but it just becomes this part of your life that becomes who you are.
I know not everyone is there yet, but I encourage you to just try and do this for two weeks, right? Do the LAPS funnel for two weeks and it will start to become a habit. You’re going to get good at it. And so I promise you if you just follow that for a couple of weeks, it’s going to become second nature for you and you’re going to get better and better at the LAPS funnel.
Now, for Harold, what this looks like is on every Sunday night he’s going to spend 30 minutes looking at his calendar and time blocking his weekly process. He ends up analyzing two deals per day. That’s a great goal and that’s more than his goal requires, and he submits offers every single week, sometimes just verbally, but he tracks his progress. And remember, this process, habit, these are what gets you through the challenges. These are the little pivots that you make that ensure your success.
But ultimately it really comes down to being persistent. All of these things that I’ve shown you are really good examples and tools that you can do, but you have to stick with it. You have to keep going. And there are a couple of different things I recommend for that. You’ve probably heard of mastermind groups or accountability groups. I personally love them. I love a to-do list. I can’t go to sleep until my to-do lists are done. So that’s why I’m up at two in the morning right now giving this webinar because my to-do list isn’t done. But I also love accountability. I love to tell my wife or my friends what my goals are. So self peer pressure basically, but it was.
Number seven, guys, sorry if you’re writing this down, was plan your week and execute daily. That’s basically trying to do some time blocking for laps. Take that lap system, break it down into what you’re going to do each week. And then again, number eight is just to be as persistent as possible. Now, for Harold, he joins a small mastermind group of four peers working on the real estate investing business. And every single week they meet, every week they meet for 60 minutes to outline their goals, they set their commitments and encourage one another to be persistent.
So it’s funny. I actually was talking to someone about the real estate, the BPCON today and he told me a story about how this group of people met at BiggerPockets Conference in 2022, and they met every single week, every week without fail between 2022 and 2023. And then they all met up again in Orlando for BiggerPockets Conference 2023 and all had really progressed in their investing and grown their portfolios over the last year. I think that’s a great example. It’s honestly what BiggerPockets is for. You can go on the forums, meet all those excellent people out there trying to accomplish some similar goals from you.
Real estate, it’s really not competitive. It should be collaborative. You should be working with each other. And for Harold, because he’s persistent with his actions, he finally gets his first offer accepted. Congratulations, Harold. It’s a single family home that he estimates will produce $300 a month in positive cash flow. And just remember, maybe it takes Harold analyzing 10 deals, or it could be 20, it could be 50, but his persistence pays off. And guys, Harold is fake but I’ve seen this so many different times. This is a real representation of literally hundreds, not thousands of people. And this is how it works. You do it and you are persistent.
And the $300 a month, that is momentum. That is something to ignore. It might not be your long-term goal, but Harold is making the pivot. He’s not going from zero to a hundred. You need to crawl before you can walk. And if you are persistent and follow these things, you can make those steps right now. And then the last step number nine is to use BiggerPockets to help fill those gaps. As I’ve said before, listen to the community that’s here and talking right now. All of you are coming from all over the country, all over the world, all different experience levels, and there are millions of other real estate investors waiting to help on BiggerPockets.
We honestly have everything you need there to become successful. The ability to be a successful real estate investor, you guys have that already. Everyone can do it. It’s not rocket science. We just have some extra knowledge. We have some extra tools that will help you on the way to help you avoid some of the mistakes I know I’ve made and other mistakes that other investors have made. So go and use those tools to help fill any gaps in knowledge or information that you need.
Now, for Harold, although he didn’t… Let’s just finish up the example with Harold. Though he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, he used BiggerPockets, he met local investors, he networked, he met vendors, he analyzed deals, and ultimately he was able to use a lot of the tools that are available to everyone on BiggerPockets to find that first deal. So congratulations to fake Harold, but I hope you all understand that this is exactly what tons of people have done and could do.
Now, just to recap, I know some people were asking for some of the steps. Just remember the nine steps are, one, to define your why then commit to that, translate your desires into action. Number three, define your five-year vision. Set a one-year goal then narrow it down even further to that Q1 goal to find your real estate process. Then plan your week, be persistent and use BiggerPockets. So those are the nine steps to make 2024 great.
Now, let’s wrap up with two simple questions before we go. The first is similar to what I asked you all in the beginning. Do you want to make 2024 the year that changes everything for you? Is this going to be where you make your first pivot? That’s the first question. I’m seeing everyone, “Oh, wow.” I’m so excited I’m knocking my microphone out. So here’s the second question. Do you believe that if you have the right why, we talked about that, if you are fully committed, if you have the right goals, the right plan and the right action, that you will find the success you want?
I hope you think yes, because that was my goal today was to show you that these steps that tons of people have done are the same steps that you can do. And if you answered yes and you are ready to get started on that 2024 journey, I want to just show you a couple of the tools that we have here at BiggerPockets that can help minimize risk, increase your confidence and get you to that one-year goal, that five-year goal and help you pursue your why.
The main tool that I’m going to talk about right now is BiggerPockets Pro. It’s basically a one-stop shop to start scale and manage your entire portfolio. It’s basically, we’ve built this over years BiggerPockets has been around a long time and we’ve designed it to give you everything you need to succeed in real estate investing. And you might be wondering, how can one subscription, how can one tool provide all of that? Let me show you how you can help make 2024 that year.
So BiggerPockets Pro, it’s got those investment property calculators that we’ve been talking about and that’s super important for the LAPS system. No matter what you do, you have to get good at invest and analyzing real estate deals. That is a requirement for real estate investors. And so that’s one of the cornerstones of pro. You’ve already seen how powerful that is. You can actually go test it out for free yourself as well.
You’ve also seen the Rent Estimator, which is one of the hardest parts of analyzing deals if you don’t have a data-driven tool like the one that we provide at BiggerPockets Pro. We also have landlord forms so that you can download… No matter what state you’re in, you can actually just go download all the legal stuff that you need. I spent so long on this the first year of my investing career. It’s crazy. And now you can just download this.
So hopefully you guys see what I mean, right? Everything you need to successful investing. You need to know what rents are. You need to analyze deals. You need a lease, we got it all, but we also got way more than that. If you want property management software free with Pro. Do you want to find portfolio tracking? Free with Pro from Stessa. What a great partner.
So all of these things together, when you look at them all together, it actually provides a ton of value. We have all these negotiated exclusive discounts and we can offer you amazing networking tools like your Pro badge that actually lead to three times more connections than regular free members. So if you’re looking to network looking for tools, we literally have all of this together.
So last thing here, in addition to all the things I also showed you, if you want Pro exclusive videos, workshops, webinar replays, 50% off all the boot camps taught by amazing teachers like Henry Washington, Matt Faircloth, Ashley Care, you can get all of those things. And those are amazing features. But the number one reason to consider going pro is honestly, it works. I have worked at this company for eight years and in that time, one of the greatest joys I’ve had is to see literally tens of thousands of people use BiggerPockets and BiggerPockets Pro to become successful investors.
It is a real thing. Take it from Aaron who said, “The BiggerPockets calculators or go-to for analyzing properties. There’s no way I could analyze the volume of properties I do without being a Pro member.” And think about that because you have to do the volume like Aaron was talking about. So how much is BiggerPockets Pro? It’s $390 for Pro, but for the New Year’s crowd, we are going to knock 20% off of it down to $312 for a year full of pro, which is an amazing discount.
All you got to do when you go check out for Pro… But guys, I’m feeling especially generous. I’m in a New Year’s mood. Maybe I’m a little slap-happy because it’s the middle of the night right now, and I’m also going to give you my book for free. It’s a gift for all of you if you go Pro right now. You can get my book, Real Estate by the Numbers. I wrote it with the incredible J. Scott. It teaches you all the numbers in math. It’s really not that hard to analyze deals successfully and it comes with all this other bonus content, property analysis tools, finance templates, all these great things.
So that’s the deal. I know you guys were saying, “I want all these amazing deals.” So this is amazing, awesome. People are saying it’s an amazing read. So if you want BiggerPockets Pro, you got all of these bonuses that we’re giving out today are worth $750. And just remember, we want people who are Pro to actually use it. If you go on try it, test it out, and it’s not for you, within 30 days, we’ll give you a hundred percent of your money back guarantee. Just email [email protected] because we are that confident that you are going to like BiggerPockets Pro and it’s going to help you get to your first deal, your quarterly goal, your yearly goal, all of those different goals. So check it out biggerpockets.com/pro.
I’ll leave you with some parting words. If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. And I hope you guys take that to heart with your real estate investing. Any other goals that you have for 2024, it really comes down to you taking action and hopefully have helped you narrow down how you can actually take action today, tomorrow, and into the rest of 2024. All right. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate your time. This has been a lot of fun for me. I always enjoy doing this webinar and I really hope that this is a start for an amazing 2024 for you.
Guys, if you have any questions, you can hit me up on Instagram where I’m @thedatadeli. You can also of course find me on BiggerPockets. Guys, I hope you have a wonderful year. Thank you so much, and let me know how I can help. Have a good night.