Real estate investors now come from all financial backgrounds, investment experiences, and locations. Investing success can be achieved in different ways by different people. No two investors’ success stories will be the same.
By observing many real estate investors and their people, we have identified a few key characteristics. These characteristics are beneficial to organize and invest in the right way. When it comes to investing, especially long-term investing, building discipline and strong fundamentals are important.
Here are 4 main characteristics that can lead to investor success in real estate:
1. Having a clear sense of financial goals:
Having a clear knowledge of why and where you want to invest can give you detailed knowledge of every other decision you make as a real estate investor. Without defining what success means for you, you may not identify potential obstacles or properly assess the timeframe you have available. You’ll be at risk of making investment decisions that don’t actually serve your best interests.
2. Patience:
Patience is one of the most frequently used traits in successful investors and one of the simplest. But it’s relatively rare to find it practiced to its full potential in the investment world. For real estate investors, time is an especially valuable trait.
The power of patience in this industry is related to the investment itself’s nature as a physical, hard asset. Commercial real estate’s value depends on a range of factors that can’t be hurried. Before they can deliver an optimal return, many properties require investors to add value through renovation, ground-up construction, and most importantly, the time to generate income from tenants. It can be slow-growing, but you can see a real estate investment really grow and blossom. Real estate, when handled correctly, the returns can be worth the wait.
3. Research on market history:
When considering the validity of an investment, it’s easy to suffer from short-term memory. Successful investors, however, often have a longer-scale sense of the market. Understanding a market’s history can help an investor contextualize and weigh the significance of varied developments. Without a big-picture view, an investor’s at risk of misinterpreting or miscalibrating their reactions to market changes, which they may not fully understand. No market is predictable, but history does have plenty to teach in terms of patterns, likelihoods, and signals.
4. Understanding how to balance risk and reward:
Every investment has its own risk profile and an assessment of its projected risk against its potential return. Many of the most successful investors don’t just choose a single level of risk that they’re comfortable with. Instead, they find a balance of risk levels and return expectations across various investments, and they benefit from the big picture, overall performance.
In real estate, that means distributing a portfolio across a range of properties that cover a spectrum of low, medium, and high risk/return projections. Each investor can weigh their particular risks and expected returns based on their own sense of risk tolerance and goals. When optimized, the result is more stable in overall investment with the possibility for higher returns.
“Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.” -Warren Buffet