Diary of a group of newbie real estate investors...

Hi folks, 

Boston AREIA recently started a group mastermind/coaching program, so I thought it might be a good idea to chronicle and blog some of the things we are doing.  

The first week was really our getting to know each other meeting.  We have a diverse group of folks within the group.  We have one licensed Realtor in the group (besides me) who also has interest in house hacking and short term rentals.  We have one buy/hold investor who is an app developer and wants to move to the industrial warehouse buy/hold space.  We have a local police officer who is interested in wholesaling, rehabbing and short term rentals.  We have 2 folks who are wholesalers who are revamping their wholesale business.  We have a musician who just came out of a job as an estimator in large scale real estate.  We have someone focused on house hacking but also interested in short term rentals.  Our app developer created this great app for buy/hold investors, check it out - https://www.ballparkdeal.com/ , pretty cool!  

We also set a weekly schedule where we would meet via zoom for the first few weeks with a plan to have an in person meeting in January.  We talked about available tools and training and set a plan for folks to access the training the first week as well as sending out some direct mail pieces to our lead flow started.  It doesn't matter what area of real estate you are want to focus on, focusing on lead generation is the number one thing you have to do in your real estate business.  When you become the finder of the deals, you dictate the exit strategy.  You determine if you want to rehab and hold the property, rent it out long term or short term, wholesale it to a rehabber or rehab it yourself and sell.  You cannot take action on any of your preferred exit strategies if you don't develop your lead generation systems.  Our police officer brought a potential deal to the table that she found on MLS.  Our Realtor offered to set up a showing.  Unfortunately, the sellers had accepted a contract before we could get in to check the property out.  All in all, our first meeting went well.  

During the week, some folks got on to the training we outlined.  Our app developer had some fun meeting commercial lenders and agents, some that he had researched and some that I introduced him to.  Our weekly zoom was focused on mindset, lead generation, a potential project, training and software available to create an online lead funnel.  We got to celebrate our house hacker who successfully put a 3 family under contract that is scheduled to close in Feb.  The best part for me was when we were talking about an abandoned property, our wholesalers offered to go with folks to check out the property and discuss how to get in touch with the owners.  They met separately on a zoom and scheduled a time that day to go visit the property.  Part of this mastermind is learning from the strengths of others, having others learn from yours and potentially joint venturing on projects.  So to see folks meeting outside our weekly zoom to move towards their goals is really exciting for me.    

This coming week, everyone is focused on the holidays, but we are planning on jumping on a zoom on New Year's Eve.