As a Real Estate Investor you should consider keeping a note book of your best practices.
There continually seems to be better ways of performing an activity.
An example may be your rental agreement. The process you currently go through to search for and find the best tenants for your properties may already work great.
But let’s say you begin a conversation with another rental property owner/real estate investor, and he tells you this story about the issue he had with his tenants.
He reveals to you how he went about taking care of the issue, although it cost him a couple thousand dollars to do so. He mentions to you how he added a one sentence phrase to his rental agreement and is now able to prevent the same thing from happening in the future.
In essence he has added that clause to his policy and procedures manual or the way in which he goes about doing his business.
You begin to think to yourself, I could just simply learn from his experience and prevent a similar situation from happening to me. You approach your legal advisor about adding the same or similar clause to your current rental agreement, and they agree it is a good idea.
Bam! Now you have addressed that particular issue and changed the way you go about doing your real estate investing.
The point I’m making here is that there are continually new ways to improve your real estate investing results. So increase your awareness and be in search mode for new ideas and strategies to incorporate into your own policy and procedures.
Being a member of a local real estate investment group or property owners group has many benefits in addition to the scenario above.
Benefits of having a policy and procedures manual:
- You have a reference guide to address certain aspects of the business and do it in a consistent manner.
- You may grow your portfolio to a size in which you would like to hand over some or most aspects of the processes to someone else. Having a policy and procedures manual will guide them in taking care of the processes in the same way you would do it.
- If you should become ill and be unable to take care of the real estate business due this unexpected illness, you would have a reference guide for others to follow and keep the business running smoothly, until you recover.
So as you read through these blog posts consider copying and pasting some of the ideas into your own real estate policy and procedures manual.
A simple way to begin this process is to think about all the things you do when you are being active with your investment real estate and then make some subject headings regarding the major areas of the activity you do. Then record the appropriate information under each heading.
A few subject headings may be: Buying, Selling, Renting/Leasing, Hiring Contractors/Vendors, Move-out checklists, Move-in checklists.
Begin your manual today!
More To All and Less To None
Posted by SHANE CARR 