The Most Important Lesson I Learned from Real Estate Investing

I want to share with you the most imporant lesson, one that caused me to rethink my approach to real estate and wealth building altogether.

Next Level Investing Involves Teamwork

To get to the next level, in addition to creating systems, planning for scale and working through the discomfort, I learned that I must stop thinking and behaving as if real estate is an individual sport, like golf or tennis. When one scales and begins to take big strides in the business, real estate becomes a team sport, like basketball or football. Similar to the financial power of leverage, the human resource power of leverage allows for synergies to be created from complementary skillsets, diverse backgrounds and experiences and collaboration of various personalities.

The Hurdle to Scale

I learned this lesson very quickly after getting to two single-family rentals. Getting my first rental was a thrill, and going to two caused me to take this business seriously. But the prospect of buying a third, fourth and fifth as an individual using my own resources caused me to rethink how I would scale to the vision of multiple apartments.

I realized to get to 40 single families could take a lifetime, but to get a 40-unit apartment could take just a few years with a team. So I decided to abandon the individual sport that so many play and build a team of partners to acquire multi-family assets.

Learn from The Greatest

America was built on teamwork and we are blessed with the privilege to come together and build great companies, organizations and portfolios of assets that change the world. The greatest companies, Google, Amazon, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, were built on teamwork and are syndicates, pooling funds from investors to make a big vision happen.

Both active and passive investors do much better when they work as a team towards a bigger vision. Of course, there is a trade off: you have to get out there and meet people and form solid business relationships. But I would say that it is well worth it in order to achieve the largeness of making a larger difference and scaling your passive income and wealth to a greater degree.

Wouldn’t you say?