What Are Your Main Costs of Doing Business as a Real Estate Investor?
In this post, I wanna deal with the question of: “In addition to education, what other costs do you need to take into account for your real estate investing business?”.
Although I can show you multiple ways to buy houses without cash or credit, it would be to your advantage if you have at least a little money to cover some “costs of doing business”, to run your business more effectively.
If you’re just starting out and/or strapped for cash, then I’ll show you how to keep those costs to zero or at a minimum. The good news is that you’d be spending some of these costs anyway, even if you weren’t doing real estate investing, so then it just becomes a matter of redirecting your time and money in a way that works “for” your bank account, instead of “against” it.
In any event… as you hopefully know by now… I operate under the principle of “No Excuses”. I believe and have demonstrated that if you can’t afford to pay for something, you can make up for that with good ol’ fashioned legwork until you “can” afford to outsource some things.
✅ Marketing
The first and most important thing you may want to spend money on is marketing. You’ve got to market to find properties to buy that are gonna be good deals. Marketing creates prospects and deals, so without marketing, you don’t have a business.
There are free, cheap, and paid marketing methods. When you get into paid marketing methods, the budget can range from low to high.
The expectation is that the more you spend on marketing, the less legwork you have to do, the easier it is to run your business, and the more leads you should generate.
With more leads, you should be able to do more deals and make more money to justify the added marketing costs.
If you’re strapped for cash, then you should be looking at free or cheap marketing methods.
👉 Examples of Free Marketing Methods
So just to throw out a few free marketing methods there are things like driving for dollars. So, obviously you’ve got some gas costs in that… but guess what? Even if you don’t have a car, or gas money, there’s nothing to prevent you from walking around neighborhoods and looking for vacant houses.
So that’s what driving for dollars is. You’re going around looking for vacant houses, and/or houses that may fit your investment criteria. You can do that walking if you don’t have a car or gas money. So there’s basically no excuses. Whether you have money or you don’t, there… are… no… excuses!
Another thing you could do for free obviously is to look on sites that have houses for sale by owner. As of right now the biggest one being Zillow.com. That’s perfectly free. Just go on to Zillow.com and start looking for houses.
You can also do a Google search on: For Sale By Owner (FSBO) websites and find people that you can contact on the phone, or whatever contact method they provide on the site.
These are all things you can do for free.
👉 Examples of Paid Marketing Methods
Now let’s talk about some marketing methods you could do that will cost some money.
Maybe you’re sending out letters that you’ve got to mail. Postage costs money. Paper cost money.
Sending out postcards? Again, you’re dealing with postage and printing, so that costs money.
And if you’re dealing with bandit signs, the signs cost money. The stakes cost money. The printing costs money. Of course you can save a few bucks on printing by handwriting the signs with a King Size Sharpie.
You need to document how much of this activity you’re planning to do for the week or for the month, and then set enough money aside to make it happen. Based on these examples, you need to add up the total costs of how many letters, postcards, or signs you plan to put out on a weekly or monthly basis.
Of course, you can also make adjustments to your marketing budget on a weekly or monthly basis.
If you’ve already got a full-time job, you may wanna consider putting in some overtime, or even getting an after-hours part-time job, to help feed your marketing budget for your real estate investing business.
Obviously, the goal for most people is that they will eventually be able to replace their income on their job(s) with the money they make from real estate, but I just wanted to give you some realistic, proven ideas on how to get started when you’re strapped for cash.
So, again, marketing is the number one thing that you need to look at as far as additional costs other than education.
Remember I said what costs should you consider “other than” education right? You can start out with free education, but eventually you’re gonna wanna move on to some paid education to get more detailed and comprehensive instruction.
So, once you’ve got your marketing in place and you’ve got all these deals coming at you, guess what? You’re gonna need to determine property values.
✅ Determining Property Values (i.e. Running Comps)
There are free ways to determine property values.
You can Google “property valuation”, “property valuation websites”, “websites to determine property values” or other similar search terms (without the quotes).
As of this date, I have not found a free resource that I love. There are some free resources out there and some of them are fly by-night. Some may work well, or they may not.
One of the main deficiencies of free resources, is that the information is not presented or organized in a way that allows me to sort it, or export it, the way I’d like. Ideally, I’d like to be able to easily export it to a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, etc.
So I suggest paying for information to determine property values as soon as you can afford it.
You can Google something like: “property valuation software”, “best online property valuation services”, “best services for real estate comps”, “comps for real estate investors”, or similar search terms (without the quotes).
You’ll find both free and paid options in your Google search. You want to look closely at the stuff that’s not free, pay attention to the pricing, and set aside some money accordingly.
How much is that gonna cost? As of right now, you should expect to spend around $1,000-$1,200 per year give or take. Even if you have to spend a little more, the bottom line is that it’s well worth it.
In real estate investing, the common terminology we use for compiling the data to determine property values is “running comps”.
The word “comps” is short for “comparable sales data”, meaning “recent sales of houses similar (i.e. comparable) to the one that you’re interested in buying”.
👉 The Multiple Listing Service (MLS)
The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is the system that realtors store all of their data in, and it’s the system they use to extract the data to run comps.
Realtors will obviously usually include photos on most properties in the MLS. You can also usually get photos of comps from free FSBO sites like Zillow as well.
The best comps information is from the MLS. The beauty of the MLS is that it contains “insider information” comments put in there by realtors, that are NOT available to the general public.
These realtor comments may include information about the seller, the seller’s motivation, feedback from potential buyers, financing concessions, property condition, etc.
When you buy software services from other non-MLS places, they’re not gonna have these “insider information” comments from Realtors. These non-MLS services are just dealing with public records data.
The only people that have access to the MLS are realtors. However, I am NOT suggesting that you become an agent JUST to get access to the MLS.
My suggestion is that you focus on being a real estate INVESTOR, not a real estate “agent”, and instead simply develop good working relationships with agents, as described in the next section.
👉 Realtors / Agents
Most realtors will offer to “run comps” for you for free. They make this offer because they work on commission, and this is a common way for them to get clients. They hope and expect that for any properties that you buy, you will use them as you’re agent, so that they will earn a commission
However, all we’re concerned about at this point is getting comps. We do NOT want to be tied to working with a particular agent, simply because we want to find out how much a particular property is worth. Especially, if it’s an FSBO deal with no agents involved.
You see, once you start working with an agent / realtor in ANY capacity (i.e. running a comp here and there), then they will be expecting you to allow them to represent you on ALL of your deals, and that’s definitely not what you want… because you’ll be generating deals on your own that have NOTHING to do with that agent or their efforts.
It’s not fair to ask the realtor / agent to work for free, and we will be needing property values at a moment’s notice, which the agent won’t always be able to accommodate anyway, especially for “free”.
So I don’t even want you get started down this path of having agents running comps for you for free, because they’re gonna quickly get burned out and not even want to see you. They’re gonna start avoiding you in public and start avoiding your phone calls, lol 🙈😂💯
And the answer is “no”, it probably won’t work… but if you move away it’ll probably start working! LOL
But seriously, if there are houses where you live, then yes, the methods that I teach of buying property without cash or credit will definitely work in the area that you live!
That little joke comes from the fact that most people are always looking for an excuse to talk themselves out of their own success… Whereas successful people are always looking to be the exception to the rules of mediocrity, that others choose to live by.
Anywhere there are houses, there’s always a demand for real estate investing, because everybody’s gotta live somewhere.
And the situations that allow us to buy houses without cash or credit occur to everybody, in every area.
People are having job transfers, people are losing their jobs, people are getting promoted, people are getting demoted.
People are dying, people are being born. As the family expands, the family may need to get a bigger house, and eventually they may need to move to a different school district.
When there’s a death in the family and the deceased owned real estate, that often creates probate and estate settlement situations.
The reality is that they may insist on doing it for free. And it may make sense to let them do it once or twice for you for free, when you’re starting your business relationship with them, rather than fighting with them about it.
But after that, I strongly suggest that you work out a deal where you can pay a realtor for their time to give you comps on a regular basis, whenever you need them, 24/7 (or as close to it as possible) without any expectation of a commission attached…
Whether you’re gonna use them as the realtor on a deal or not. Maybe you can use them on some deals from time to time! But the point is that when it comes to comps, you want to be paying them for their time or access to the comps and NOT on a commission basis.
I don’t want you getting into a situation where the realtor is getting mad at you because you’re not buying any houses through them and they’re not getting their commissions.
The amount that you pay them for comps, and/or access to comps, has to be an amount that they are more than happy with for their amount of effort and involvement.
🎯 There are a LOT of full-time and part-time agents out there who are struggling, and/or not making much money as a realtor. These are the ones you should target, as they will be more likely to take you up on your proposal to help them supplement their income.
Ideally, you should work out an arrangement that gives you 24/7 access to run comps (although you may have to work up to that point) and be paying about the same monthly figure as you would pay a non-MLS service.
You may wanna start out paying the realtor hourly and/or on a “per-comp” basis to give both of you a chance to see if it’s a good fit, then work up to a monthly fee proposition, or a proposition where you offset a portion or all of their Realtor fees.
If you wanna learn my scientific way of running and analyzing comps, in step-by-step detail, that I learned from one of the biggest property buyers in the USA, then check out my Wholesaling 101 course.
✅ Cell Phone
It almost goes without saying that you need a cell phone in order to conduct business. You need to be able to communicate with sellers, buyers, tenants, realtors, contractors, etc. But cell phones “do” cost money, so it must be mentioned on this list.
✅ Laptop (or Desktop Computer)
You should also have a laptop. Of course you “could” use a desktop computer, but there’s no substitute for the mobility of a laptop and being able to work anywhere… like from a beach, living a vacation lifestyle preferably! 😊💯
I prefer doing most of my work on my laptop vs. my cell phone. Now if you don’t have a laptop, guess what? You can go to the library and use computers for free! God bless America. There are no excuses!
I know of a guy who makes millions and millions of dollars online, and he got started by going to the library, educating himself on YouTube, and building his business from scratch. And it all started by using computers at the library!
✅ Answering Service and/or Voicemail
A couple of other costs that you want to look at are: an answering service and voicemail system. These are costs that you can add on later once you’ve started making some money.
When sellers are calling me, I don’t want to talk to them personally at first. I first want them to be pre-screened by my answering service because I might be out salsa dancing, conducting seminars, coaching real estate investing students, or otherwise enjoying myself 😄💯
For this reason, I prefer to use a 24-hour live answering service to take my calls.
On the other side of the equation when I’m dealing with prospective buyers or tenants, I usually want those calls going directly to a dedicated voicemail service. Not a live answering service, but a voicemail service to capture their messages, and get caller id on very caller, even if they hang up without leaving a message.
I don’t want this to be my cell phone voicemail because I want them to be able to call 24/7 and hear a consistent outgoing message. The greeting message will either be about a house that I have for sale or for rent.
It’s possible that I could also use a separate voicemail number (different from the one I’m using for buyers and tenants) as a “We Buy Houses” number to receive calls from sellers.
That’s an option that you may want to consider if you’re not ready to pay for a 24-hour live answering service to receive seller calls, but you don’t want to take the calls yourself. It’s always better to have a live person answering seller calls if at all possible, but that may not be in your budget yet.
Google Voice can be a free, starter voicemail service, including caller ID. They may (or may not) severely limit the time you have for an outgoing greeting, so be aware of what the time limit is. Eventually, if you find Google Voice too limited, you may want to make the move to a paid voicemail service. I have used Google Voice a lot to sell and rent houses.
✅ Outsourcing / In-House Assistants / Virtual Assistants
As your business grows, another cost that you might want to consider is outsourcing some of your tasks.
In the beginning, I think you should do most or all of your tasks yourself. The more knowledgeable you are on each task, the easier it is to communicate the required steps when delegating to someone else.
At one time, I had a full in-house staff of 4-5 people, plus outside people that I outsourced my website design and technology to. I’ve since scaled back to just one part-time assistant, with me taking over the web design work, and I still outsource some technological tasks.
Sometimes you may come to the realization that you are the bottleneck in your own business, due to procrastination on certain tasks.
If you can afford to outsource to a full-time, part-time, or virtual assistant, then you can start delegating some of the tasks that you don’t like doing, or that you continually procrastinate on.
There are also many sites online that you can outsource tasks to people to work in-house or virtually. You can just Google ‘outsourcing websites’, ‘best sites for outsourcing’, ‘virtual assistants’, or something like that.
Study those sites and see how they work. Usually, there will be options to hire someone for a fixed price on a per-project basis or to hire them on an hourly basis.
A lot of these outsourcing places will be overseas. As with hiring anyone, you need to make sure that their skill set fits the tasks that you want.
If you’re gonna have them talking to people on the phone, then you’ve got to take English fluency and accents into account.
Even people in the Philippines, where they speak English, will have different levels of accents so that may or may not be a factor for the tasks you want them to perform.
There are so many tasks that you can outsource online. I like to have an in-house assistant that I can personally manage and see what they’re doing, and change stuff on the fly without a lot of waiting or downtime for communication, but that’s just me.
If you have it within your budget, it’s definitely worth considering taking inventory of what tasks you could possibly outsource to in-house staff and/or virtual workers.
✅ Recap
So just to recap, these are some of the costs you might want to take into account when you’re building your real estate investing business…
👉 Marketing
👉 Running Comps
👉 Cell Phone
👉 Laptop
👉 Answering Service
👉 Voicemail
👉 Outsourcing / Assistants
Remember, you can always start with zero budget, or a very small budget, and then add on costs as necessary.
Ready to step up your game?
Check out my step-by-step real estate investing courses for both beginner and advanced investors.
Are you looking for a 1-On-1 real estate investing mentor?
Check out my Monthly Coaching and/or Hourly Consulting Programs.
In this post, I wanna deal with the question of: “In addition to education, what other costs do you need to take into account for your real estate investing business?”.
Although I can show you multiple ways to buy houses without cash or credit, it would be to your advantage if you have at least a little money to cover some “costs of doing business”, to run your business more effectively.
If you’re just starting out and/or strapped for cash, then I’ll show you how to keep those costs to zero or at a minimum. The good news is that you’d be spending some of these costs anyway, even if you weren’t doing real estate investing, so then it just becomes a matter of redirecting your time and money in a way that works “for” your bank account, instead of “against” it.
In any event… as you hopefully know by now… I operate under the principle of “No Excuses”. I believe and have demonstrated that if you can’t afford to pay for something, you can make up for that with good ol’ fashioned legwork until you “can” afford to outsource some things.
✅ Marketing
The first and most important thing you may want to spend money on is marketing. You’ve got to market to find properties to buy that are gonna be good deals. Marketing creates prospects and deals, so without marketing you don’t have a business.
There are free, cheap, and paid marketing methods. When you get into paid marketing methods, the budget can range from low to high.
The expectation is that the more you spend on marketing, the less legwork you have to do, the easier it is to run your business, and the more leads you should generate.
With more leads you should be able to do more deals and make more money to justify the added marketing costs.
If you’re strapped for cash, then you should be looking at free or cheap marketing methods.
👉 Examples of Free Marketing Methods
So just to throw out a few free marketing methods there are things like driving for dollars. So, obviously you’ve got some gas costs in that… but guess what? Even if you don’t have a car, or gas money, there’s nothing to prevent you from walking around neighborhoods and looking for vacant houses.
So that’s what driving for dollars is. You’re going around looking for vacant houses, and/or houses that may fit your investment criteria. You can do that walking if you don’t have a car or gas money. So there’s basically no excuses. Whether you have money or you don’t, there… are… no… excuses!
Another thing you could do for free obviously is to look on sites that have houses for sale by owner. As of right now the biggest one being Zillow.com. That’s perfectly free. Just go on to Zillow.com and start looking for houses.
You can also do a Google search on: For Sale By Owner (FSBO) websites and find people that you can contact on the phone, or whatever contact method they provide on the site.
These are all things you can do for free.
👉 Examples of Paid Marketing Methods
Now let’s talk about some marketing methods you could do that will cost some money.
Maybe you’re sending out letters that you’ve got to mail. Postage costs money. Paper cost money.
Sending out postcards? Again, you’re dealing with postage and printing, so that costs money.
And if you’re dealing with bandit signs, the signs cost money. The stakes cost money. The printing costs money. Of course you can save a few bucks on printing by handwriting the signs with a King Size Sharpie.
You need to document how much of this activity you’re planning to do for the week or for the month, and then set enough money aside to make it happen. Based on these examples, you need to add up the total costs of how many letters, postcards, or signs you plan to put out on a weekly or monthly basis.
Of course, you can also make adjustments to your marketing budget on a weekly or monthly basis.
If you’ve already got a full-time job, you may wanna consider putting in some overtime, or even getting an after-hours part-time job, to help feed your marketing budget for your real estate investing business.
Obviously, the goal for most people is that they will eventually be able to replace their income on their job(s) with the money they make from real estate, but I just wanted to give you some realistic, proven ideas on how to get started when you’re strapped for cash.
So, again, marketing is the number one thing that you need to look at as far as additional costs other than education.
Remember I said what costs should you consider “other than” education right? You can start out with free education, but eventually, you’re gonna wanna move on to some paid education to get more detailed and comprehensive instruction.
So, once you’ve got your marketing in place and you’ve got all these deals coming at you, guess what? You’re gonna need to determine property values.
✅ Determining Property Values (i.e. Running Comps)
There are free ways to determine property values.
You can Google “property valuation”, “property valuation websites”, “websites to determine property values” or other similar search terms (without the quotes).
As of this date, I have not found a free resource that I love. There are some free resources out there and some of them are fly by-night. Some may work well, or they may not.
One of the main deficiencies of free resources, is that the information is not presented or organized in a way that allows me to sort it, or export it, the way I’d like. Ideally, I’d like to be able to easily export it to a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, etc.
So I suggest paying for information to determine property values as soon as you can afford it.
You can Google something like: “property valuation software”, “best online property valuation services”, “best services for real estate comps”, “comps for real estate investors”, or similar search terms (without the quotes).
You’ll find both free and paid options in your Google search. You want to look closely at the stuff that’s not free, pay attention to the pricing, and set aside some money accordingly.
How much is that gonna cost? As of right now, you should expect to spend around $1,000-$1,200 per year give or take. Even if you have to spend a little more, the bottom line is that it’s well worth it.
In real estate investing, the common terminology we use for compiling the data to determine property values is “running comps”.
The word “comps” is short for “comparable sales data”, meaning “recent sales of houses similar (i.e. comparable) to the one that you’re interested in buying”.
👉 The Multiple Listing Service (MLS)
The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is the system that realtors store all of their data in, and it’s the system they use to extract the data to run comps.
Realtors will obviously usually include photos on most properties in the MLS. You can also usually get photos of comps from free FSBO sites like Zillow as well.
The best comps information is from the MLS. The beauty of the MLS is that it contains “insider information” comments put in there by realtors, that are NOT available to the general public.
These realtor comments may include information about the seller, the seller’s motivation, feedback from potential buyers, financing concessions, property condition, etc.
When you buy software services from other non-MLS places, they’re not gonna have these “insider information” comments from Realtors. These non-MLS services are just dealing with public records data.
The only people that have access to the MLS are realtors. However, I am NOT suggesting that you become an agent JUST to get access to the MLS.
My suggestion is that you focus on being a real estate INVESTOR, not a real estate “agent”, and instead simply develop good working relationships with agents, as described in the next section.
👉 Realtors / Agents
Most realtors will offer to “run comps” for you for free. They make this offer because they work on commission, and this is a common way for them to get clients. They hope and expect that for any properties that you buy, you will use them as you’re agent, so that they will earn a commission
However, all we’re concerned about at this point is getting comps. We do NOT want to be tied to working with a particular agent, simply because we want to find out how much a particular property is worth. Especially, if it’s a FSBO deal with no agents involved.
You see, once you start working with an agent / realtor in ANY capacity (i.e. running a comp here and there), then they will be expecting you to allow them to represent you on ALL of your deals, and that’s definitely not what you want… because you’ll be generating deals on your own that have NOTHING to do with that agent or their efforts.
It’s not fair to ask the realtor / agent to work for free, and we will be needing property values at a moment’s notice, which the agent won’t always be able to accommodate anyway, especially for “free”.
So I don’t even want you get started down this path of having agents running comps for you for free, because they’re gonna quickly get burned out and not even want to see you. They’re gonna start avoiding you in public and start avoiding your phone calls, lol 🙈😂💯
The reality is that they may insist on doing it for free. And it may make sense to let them do it once or twice for you for free, when you’re starting your business relationship with them, rather than fighting with them about it.
But after that, I strongly suggest that you work out a deal where you can pay a realtor for their time to give you comps on a regular basis, whenever you need them, 24/7 (or as close to it as possible) without any expectation of a commission attached…
Whether you’re gonna use them as the realtor on a deal or not. Maybe you can use them on some deals from time to time! But the point is that when it comes to comps, you want to be paying them for their time or access to the comps and NOT on a commission basis.
I don’t want you getting into a situation where the realtor is getting mad at you because you’re not buying any houses through them and they’re not getting their commissions.
The amount that you pay them for comps, and/or access to comps, has to be an amount that they are more than happy with for their amount of effort and involvement.
🎯 There are a LOT of full-time and part-time agents out there who are struggling, and/or not making much money as a realtor. These are the ones you should target, as they will be more likely to take you up on your proposal to help them supplement their income.
Ideally, you should work out an arrangement that gives you 24/7 access to run comps (although you may have to work up to that point) and be paying about the same monthly figure as you would pay a non-MLS service.
You may wanna start out paying the realtor hourly and/or on a “per-comp” basis to give both of you a chance to see if it’s a good fit, then work up to a monthly fee proposition, or a proposition where you offset a portion or all of their Realtor fees.
If you wanna learn my scientific way of running and analyzing comps, in step-by-step detail, that I learned from one of the biggest property buyers in the USA, then check out my Wholesaling 101 course.
✅ Cell Phone
It almost goes without saying that you need a cell phone in order to conduct business. You need to be able to communicate with sellers, buyers, tenants, realtors, contractors, etc. But cell phones “do” cost money, so it must be mentioned on this list.
✅ Laptop (or Desktop Computer)
You should also have a laptop. Of course you “could” use a desktop computer, but there’s no substitute for the mobility of a laptop and being able to work anywhere… like from a beach, living a vacation lifestyle preferably! 😊💯
I prefer doing most of my work on my laptop vs. my cell phone. Now if you don’t have a laptop, guess what? You can go to the library and use computers for free! God bless America. There’s no excuses!
I know of a guy who makes millions and millions of dollars online, and he got started by going to the library, educating himself on YouTube, and building his business from scratch. And it all started by using computers at the library!
✅ Answering Service and/or Voicemail
A couple other costs that you want to look at are: an answering service and voicemail system. These are costs that you can add on later once you’ve started making some money.
When sellers are calling me, I don’t want to talk to them personally at first. I first want them to be pre-screened by my answering service because I might be out salsa dancing, conducting seminars, coaching real estate investing students, or otherwise enjoying myself 😄💯
For this reason, I prefer to use a 24-hour live answering service to take my calls.
On the other side of the equation when I’m dealing with prospective buyers or tenants, I usually want those calls going directly to a dedicated voicemail service. Not a live answering service, but a voicemail service to capture their messages, and get caller id on very caller, even if they hang up without leaving a message.
I don’t want this to be my cell phone voicemail because I want them to be able to call 24/7 and hear a consistent outgoing message. The greeting message will either be about a house that I have for sale or for rent.
It’s possible that I could also use a separate voicemail number (different from the one I’m using for buyers and tenants) as a “We Buy Houses” number to receive calls from sellers.
That’s an option that you may want to consider if you’re not ready to pay for a 24-hour live answering service to receive seller calls, but you don’t want to take the calls yourself. It’s always better to have a live person answering seller calls if at all possible, but that may not be in your budget yet.
Google Voice can be a free, starter voicemail service, including caller ID. They may (or may not) severely limit the time you have for an outgoing greeting, so be aware of what the time limit is. Eventually, if you find Google Voice too limited, you may want to make the move to a paid voicemail service. I have used Google Voice a lot to sell and rent houses.
✅ Outsourcing / In-House Assistants / Virtual Assistants
As your business grows, another cost that you might want to consider is outsourcing some of your tasks.
In the beginning I think you should do most or all of your tasks yourself. The more knowledgeable you are on each task, the easier it is to communicate the required steps when delegating to someone else.
At one time, I had a full in-house staff of 4-5 people, plus outside people that I outsourced my website design and technology to. I’ve since scaled back to just one part-time assistant, with me taking over the web design work, and I still outsource some technological tasks.
Sometimes you may come to the realization that you are the bottleneck in your own business, due to procrastination on certain tasks.
If you can afford to outsource to a full-time, part-time, or virtual assistant, then you can start delegating some of the tasks that you don’t like doing, or that you continually procrastinate on.
There are also many sites online that you can outsource tasks to people to work in-house or virtually. You can just Google ‘outsourcing websites’, ‘best sites for outsourcing’, ‘virtual assistants’, or something like that.
Study those sites and see how they work. Usually there will be options to hire someone for a fixed price on a per-project basis, or to hire them on an hourly basis.
A lot of these outsourcing places will be overseas. As with hiring anyone, you need to make sure that their skill set fits the tasks that you want.
If you’re gonna have them talking to people on the phone, then you’ve got to take English fluency and accents into account.
Even people in the Philippines, where they speak English, will have different levels of accents so that may or may not be a factor for the tasks you want them to perform.
There are so many tasks that you can outsource online. I like to have an in-house assistant that I can personally manage and see what they’re doing, and change stuff on the fly without a lot of waiting or downtime for communication, but that’s just me.
If you have it within your budget, it’s definitely worth considering taking inventory of what tasks you could possibly outsource to in-house staff and/or virtual workers.
✅ Recap
So just to recap, these are some of the costs you might want to take into account when you’re building your real estate investing business…
👉 Marketing
👉 Running Comps
👉 Cell Phone
👉 Laptop
👉 Answering Service
👉 Voicemail
👉 Outsourcing / Assistants
Remember, you can always start with zero budget, or a very small budget, and then add on costs as necessary.
Ready to step up your game?
Check out my step-by-step real estate investing courses for both beginner and advanced investors.
Are you looking for a 1-On-1 real estate investing mentor?
Check out my Monthly Coaching and/or Hourly Consulting Programs.