Welcome back,
As real estate investors our businesses often times revolve around the decisions of other people. While purchasing property we often times can find ourselves mentally crossing-our-fingers or saying our prayers in hopes a seller or buyer will make a decision which favors our wallets. These unnecessary and ill placed expectations can often times lead to misunderstood suffering and anxiety in your real estate business.
For the health and well-being of your business and sanity keep in mind that there are some activities and decisions you can control, and others you cannot control. Keep focus on the items within your control and eliminate the expectations of the others from your mind.
A few tasks and decisions on which you may not want to place high expectation:
- A seller’s decision to accept your purchase offer
- A buyer’s decision to buy your property
- Your buyer becoming approved by his/her lender for financing
- Any underwriting decision
- Your handyman’s productivity
- The speed of your closing company, bank, lender
- Setting an appointment with any specific fsbo before you first call them
A few tasks and decisions on which you may want to place high expectations:
- How many offers you make per day/week
- How many new fsbos you call per day/week
- How much effort you exert on advertising and marketing your business
- How much you network with other investors
- How much effort you put forth in your business
- Which escrow companies or attorneys you work with
- Which sellers and buyers you work with
As touched on in the bullets above the only tasks and items you may wish to place high expectations upon are the tasks and items which depend on your direct and complete activity. If you succeed or fail in performing these tasks then the success or failure is solely on your shoulders. When you start including other people, either buyers, sellers, assistants, closing attorneys, outsourcers, contractors, handymen, title agents, etc you have less and less control. This is not a negative or a positive, it simply is something to understand and compensate for.
In short, items and tasks which only involve your physical and mental energy to perform are within your control. Any items or tasks you outsource are outside of your control. Place high expectations on items that you solely control – these expectations with time deadlines are often times called goals.
When real estate is involved tasks often times have the outcome of taking longer and costing more than expected to complete. For this reason it can be sage advice to expect things will take twice as long to complete and three times the amount of capital as expected. Whether you are accounting for holding costs, repair costs, marketing, selling time, or repair time always err on the side of caution and factor in extra time and costs in to your deals.
Be the happiest real estate investor you can be. The less stressed and less you suffer the happier and more likely you will be to consistently put forth effort in your investing business and take daily action.
Love what you do daily,
John Fedro
