3 Mistakes I Made In My First Year As A Multi-Family Real Estate Investor

My husband and I decided we wanted to get into multi-family real estate investment because we wanted to be able to have some passive cash flow, build up some equity, and leave a legacy for our kids.

We started looking and asked our real estate agent to help us.

The real estate agent that had helped us get our single-family house knew nothing about investment property. Though she tried her best, she really was completely ignorant about what we needed to look for, and alas, mostly so were we.

The commercial brokers who could have helped us were not interested in speaking to "small fries" who had no real experience in multi-family investing.

We were looking for a fourplex in Los Angeles where we live, and the prices were unbelievably high. It was really hard to find a deal where (a) we could even afford it and (b) where we'd be making any money.

I was incredibly frustrated and eventually despaired that we'd ever find anything.

Then, fate stepped in, as it often does when you're on the right path...

I met the man who would eventually become my first real estate mentor.

His name is Robert Helms and he's the co-host of the "Real Estate Guys Radio" podcast. He's also a real estate investor and developer with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of deals under his belt.

A 10-minute conversation with him changed my life.

In that ten minutes I realized where I'd been going wrong - our three big mistakes:

1. We were looking in a market where the numbers didn't make any sense for what we were trying to do. 

He said “Live where you want to live. Invest where the numbers make sense.” I never thought of looking outside of the market where I live. That had been a huge mistake because my market was neither affordable nor landlord-friendly.

2. We were not taking advantage of leverage.  

Robert opened my mind to the idea that instead of trying to get one fourplex by ourselves, we could partner with a group of investors and get a 100-unit or 200-unit building (i.e., syndication). We could have a much bigger payout with less work and less risk.

3. I realized I wasn't around people who were thinking big enough. 

In my previous crowd, everyone thought getting a 4-plex was a big deal. No one I knew would have conceived of investing in a 200-unit apartment building!

I decided right then and there, I wanted to be around folks who were thinking much bigger and to learn to think like them.

That night I went home and told my husband what I’d learned and about an upcoming syndication seminar in Phoenix. We signed up and bought our plane tickets.

We attended that event in January 2016. That year alone we attended a dozen other different real estate conferences all over the country, a real estate event in Belize, and a real estate investor cruise. We joined two real estate mentorship groups. We watched dozens of hours of training videos and read half a dozen books. We invested hundreds of hours and over $60,000 that year alone to learn how to successfully invest in real estate and it really paid off.

What we've learned and the community with which we surrounded ourselves really helped us to collapse time frames and increase cash flow and profits.

Over the course of that first year, we passively invested in a 320-unit property in Dallas and a 454-unit community in Atlanta, syndicated a 109-unit mobile home park, and a 77-unit building, and a 51-unit building in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We got into over 1000 doors in one year!

And we accomplished all this for less money than we would have invested to buy that fourplex in Los Angeles.

I'm not sharing this to brag, but to show what is possible.

And all that was great. But…there was one big thing I noticed was largely missing from all the trainings I went to: the feminine presence.

I'd look around these rooms where I was learning incredibly valuable information and usually less than 10% of attendants were women!

There are relatively so few women in the real estate investment realm, and it is my desire to change that.

That desire led me to create the Real Estate Investor Goddesses.

We created an online membership community, blog, and podcast that will help you quantum-leap into real estate investing at a fraction of the time and cost I did, and with a heightened dose of pleasure.

I know that many women who would love to learn this information do not have tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to invest in learning these concepts like I was blessed to.

Even if they do, many more simply do not desire to do so - especially in the uber-masculine way I was taught this information. That's why I created the Wealthy Goddess Program and this community - to help other women avoid the mistakes I made and create wealth through real estate like a goddess!