What Did You Learn

Rule #1 Don't lose money! Ha!

Seriously though, when you are buying a property that already has people living in the property make sure they qualify under your regulations and not the previous landlord before the closing or ask that they be evicted before you will close.

One that I can make note of is: do not purchase a property based on somone else's information on a property. Do your own due diligence. People will tell you all kinds of things to get you to purchase a property.

Was a flip - the biggest lesson I learned, I learned ahead of time thank God! This was to run my numbers. I had to walk from so many because no matter how much I wanted them to work - the numbers DONT LIE. Know your after repair sales price, less ALL expenses - closing costs, holding costs (taxes, utilites,insurance etc), rehab costs (pad these), dont forget permits, inspection fees, and realtor fees on closing. When you do your numbers right - you will know whether your purchase price will profit you or whether you should walk.
Right now I am in the process of purchasing rentals-one long distance in Wisc and the others here in Jersey. Again - numbers are number one....and if you are purchasing a property with tenants in place - require documentation of rent checks and leases. And of course - comp the area fully and run your numbers based on the low end - then if you get more its a bonus in your pocket!
Be smart, take action, and succeed!

When I purchased my first two rentals almost 10 years ago I believed the wholesale investor. This was a bad idea.
He told us that he was going to give us properties that had at least 10% equity, cashflowed and currently rented.

None of this happened. We purchased the homes and had about 2% equity from an appraisal we had done, no cashflow and the renters were actually squatters paid to live in the house.

Just as ddowd said and I will add - check your OWN number, values and understandings.

My first 2 deals were not flips or buy and holds or assigns. the reason I never posted it was I didn't think it was worthy of a post until Matt told me to post and it might help someone out. Hey they weren't big money makers like Matt's deal or even Deans deals.
They were 2 bird dogs for $500.00 for each deal. This happened about 3 months ago and I was bird-dogging for an investor from my REI club. I guess he liked what I was doing, but saw I was spinning my wheels. Anyway, I made $1,000.00 to use towards my daughters wedding and learned valuable lessons. Now I have people looking for me!! Yeah I got people too!!!....Jan

Without Risk, there is no reward.

My first flip went better than my rentals. But, what I did was purchased a home too big for the area. The home I purchased was 3700 square feet (if I remember correctly) and the surrounding area was about 2000 square feet or less.

This hindered my buyers and lowered my value considerably which in turn highered my days on market.

On my very first deal I learned that if you never sk you will never receive. I asked for owner financing on one house and got it on three. I also learned that when you want stipulations in your real estate agreement you should say so in plain english and not use all the real estate and legal jargon to go around in a circle and then get told no - when you could have just stated what you wanted plainly and gotten a yes.

is to MAKE it work. If you have a great deal, make it work no matter what. if you can only find a GOOD deal, use it to leverage yourself on to a GREAT deal! Don't just sit and wait.
Getting paid to learn is the best kind of tuition. I didn't make a WHOLE lot on my first sale (basically just a year's worth of rent plus a few thousand dollars) but I learned a ton! About renters, landlording, realtors, buying, selling, fixing, decision-making, etc. a lot for a 20-some-yr-old.

Rina

I learned that if you don't get out in time, the market will turn on you. I purchased my first home 6 years ago. I bought a foreclosure for 60K with the market value of 120K. I put in about 15K in renovations and rented it out. Then I took out an equity loan to purchase 2 more foreclosures, fixed them up and rented them out as well. Then more and more. At one point I had 10 of them. Properties started going up in value to a point when I could sell them at 100% profit but I didn't. I sold 2 only. I waited too long and market has turned.

There are 2 lessons. One -- know when to quit and two -- have a gameplan before you act. Make sure you have a strategy because I didn't. I just went with the flow of things, riding the wave (until I crashed)

Yuri