What are your big goals for the next year?

If you are tired of cliche new year’s resolutions, that is understandable. Yet, this is still one of the best times of the year to invest in goal setting and planning for your finances, investments and real estate business.

You’ve got to have goals. If you are going to have goals you might as well set big ones. At a minimum we should all be shooting to beat our current personal best, and last year’s results.

However, there is more than one way to set your goals. Here are four of them to consider…

By Deal Volume

One way to set your goal for this year, and to build on your success so far, is to set it by deal volume, or transaction count. So, if you recently started in real estate investing, and did 10 wholesale houses last year, and want to 10x it, and go full time this year, you would set a goal of 100 over the next 12 months. That’s about 8.5 per month, or a little over 2 per week.

By Gross Revenue

When people say “I want to make $X this year.” they are often or typically talking about the topline, or gross revenue.

Depending on what stage you are at, that may be $1M, $10M, $1B or $1T over the next year.

Some count the dollar volume of real estate value they trade. So, 10 $100,000 would be $1M in volume. Though of course, you don’t get to touch all of that money. So, the gross income to your business or investment account would be a better metric. If you made an average of 10% per deal, then that would only be $100k in this scenario.

By Net Profit

It is probably far more meaningful to count the net profit you actually make in real estate. That’s the money you can actually use, spend, and reinvest in your real estate business.

This is important, because it is entirely possible to break your record for deal volume, and still actually lose money at the end of the year. Just ask Zillow. The same goes for gross revenue. Zillow was bringing in billions of dollars each year when it went bust.

Watching your net profit, including taxes, will make sure you are not caught by surprise in a similar situation. It will also help you focus your time, dollars and energy on the deals which are most profitable, versus just being busy and putting up vanity metrics to impress others.

By Desired Giving Or Impact

Giving and impact are often after-thoughts for many individuals and organizations. Even those that say they will give 10% to charity. Often there may be nothing left to give when they calculate their net.

If helping others or a certain cause is what you are really most passionate about, consider talking this another way with your goal setting.

You could make your main goal to give $X to a certain cause, or to house 100 families this year. Make it big, and you will be well compensated for achieving your mission.

Remember that achieving these goals will largely be driven by your marketing. Take this time of the year to back out the numbers on how much marketing you need to do to hit your goals. Hire the best help you can, and get ahead of the game.

 

Some of our biggest tech companies are increasingly becoming real estate businesses.

As we’ve realized that McDonald’s is predominately a real estate business, many big technology companies and tech entrepreneurs are also moving more heavily into the property business.

Amazon is one of the most notable examples of these new super-sized real estate players. Jeff Bezos’ baby has completely changed Seattle in terms of both property prices and the look of the landscape. It’s search for a new second Amazon headquarters has whipped up a frenzy in the media and has spurred competition by many cities to compete to be the location. Others, like Atlanta have shied away from it, knowing that it will also deplete affordability. Still, all across the country Amazon has been testing retail stores, taking over grocery stores, and setting up new distribution centers. Real estate is a huge part of its business model and company value.

Google has been a little quieter with its real estate moves, but has quickly become one of the biggest real estate investors in America. Google now holds a portfolio worth an estimated $14B. That includes recently buying a single property in New York for around $2.4B. One of the most expensive properties ever sold, with a new record price per square foot of $2,000. The company could own and control a lot more than most realize between all of its business lines and subsidiaries too.

Elon Musk and his handful of brands are deeply real estate related too. He is big into solar and has launched the Hyperloop in India. Then there is Tesla which has a home battery panel, and home car charging stations, which could eventually become a part of Tesla branded homes. His Space X venture could be the first to build residences on Mars.

Airbnb and WeWork recently partnered up to offer workspace and housing for the new generation of remote workers that has taken over. Uber’s former CEO, Travis recently made his own move into real estate, buying a controlling stake in a commercial real estate company that repurposes property for more modern companies.

This all only confirms how important real estate is, especially if you want to build a strong and lasting business, or even just boost your own personal income and retirement portfolio. You can mimic some of these moves or find your niche and help and serve the growing number of corporations, tech entrepreneurs and celebrity house flippers with inventory as a wholesaler. You can wholesale houses, commercial, residential, and mixed use property.

Smart real estate wholesalers look for a niche to dominate, and they stick to it.

The starting point for big wealth and incomes may be thinking really big. You want to be the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Donald Trump of real estate. To have a big empire and all the riches that come with it. But once you dig into these biographies you find that their success really came from, and often still relies on owning one niche. The same is still true of Google. Sure Google has Gmail and a suite of business apps, great maps, and even driverless cars. But all of that is built on dominating Google’s niche in search. Owning a niche is also what has turned Airbnb, Uber, and Instagram into multi-billion dollar companies. So if you want to go big in real estate – start small. Choose a niche and own it.

There are almost infinite niches to choose in real estate, and plenty of overlaying filters and hybrid choices. Trump has luxury condos. Warren Buffett has mobile homes. Sterling White has turnkey properties in Indiana, etc.

One of the biggest temptations when things aren’t going as fast as investors would like is to go broader and to imitate the competition whom they think is doing better than them. Note that most aren’t doing as well as they make out. And you don’t know if any of their individual strategies are really working for them or are producing great net ROI. Just look a Zillow which at least had be losing tens of millions of dollars a year using phone sales to sell online marketing. 20 plus year industry veteran and speaker Sam Sadat says that the truly rich think differently than everyone else, and one of the ways they do that is looking to create more cash and wealth, and riches in niches.

If anything you may want to get smaller in order to get bigger results. Once you have dominated the majority of the business, referrals, and web traffic for that niche, and only then – consider expanding.

Then in addition to wholesale houses you might offer turnkey properties or even jump into development. You might expand from your city to other key markets which are ripe for flipping and which turn on a different timeline in the real estate cycle to yours.

So what’s your niche?

 

Authored by Best Transaction Funding BestTransactionFunding.com is the leading source of transactional funding and hard money loans for real estate wholesalers in the US, where 100% financing, and saying “Yes” is what we love doing all day long.