If you want to start a real estate business, the first thing you have to do is find the time. Between juggling your full-time job, extracurricular activities and family time, dedicating even a few hours to growing your business can seem impossible. Few people are blessed with the time — or patience — to do so, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn on the fly. In reality, if you want to learn how to grow your real estate business and work a full-time job, you have to manage your time accordingly.
Time management, whether in your personal life or career, is a critical tool for realizing success. As an investor, the question of ‘how to grow your real estate business with a full-time job’ will be determined by not only your ability to unearth free time from your job and family, but also maximizing it to be as efficient and productive as possible. Time can neither be bought or saved for later, so the importance of time allocation when starting a real estate business will be second to none.
4 Tips On How To Grow Your Real Estate Business
The inability to allocate time remains a major problem among new investors. In fact, a shortage of time is among the more common reasons why investors quit. Although investing in real estate offers the potential for financial freedom, the majority of beginners are not going to strike real estate gold overnight. In most cases, investors will need to retain their nine-to-five while concurrently working to build their business, as the transition from full-time employee to full-time investors may take weeks, months or even years.
The following highlights four tips on how to grow your real estate business while working a full-time job:
1. Evaluate Your Time
There are 24 hours in the day, but a large portion of that is dedicated to a full-time job. Generally speaking, this time frame will encompass anywhere from six to 12 hours of the day, including lunch hour and the commute. Aside from that, where does the rest of your time go?
The first step is comprehending how your time is spent. For the typical person, a full-time job — along with eating, sleeping and a social life — will constitute the majority of a day. However, when examined closely, there are still significant portions of time available to focus on your business. Evaluating your time, including a complete breakdown of how your day is spent, will help investors unearth availability in their schedule they never realized. For example, an investor may identify moments during their morning commute where time is available, or during their one-hour lunch break, as well as times after work.
No matter what, starting a real estate business will involve sacrifice. Investors need to review their daily activities and assess whether they are helping to move them closer to their destination or further away. Because there is only so much time in the day, it will need to be wisely spent.
2. Invest In Your Real Estate Goals
With limited time, investors will need to prioritize their time to make better use of it. This is especially true when you’re getting started in real estate. The first step is to establish a clear understanding of your real estate goals, including your purpose for starting a business. This will help align your free time with your top priorities. The benefit of setting real estate goals will keep investors from working aimlessly, and wasting both time and energy.
In addition to goals, investors will need to create a plan of action. A real estate business plan will not only help to outline where you want to go, but also how you intend to get there. Scaling your real estate business will come down to a combination of factors, and a real estate business plan is crucial to ensuring everything goes well. Otherwise, you’ll spend your free time spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.
3. Define Your Niche
Another way to create more time for your business is to narrow down the playing field. Rather than wasting time partaking in everything available in the real estate realm, investors should zero in on a particular field of interest. Generally known as a real estate niche, this will not only serve as a quality starting point for beginner investors, but also help them discover where their strengths and weaknesses lie. With a multitude of investment vehicles to choose from, selecting your real estate niche early on can help to save investors a significant amount of time.
The following is a series of questions that investors can ask themselves to reveal their real estate niche:
- What do you want from real estate? The type of investment you make in real estate will ultimately dictate how you earn income. A rental property will generate monthly income, while a fix and flip will produce one large sum. Whether it’s to quit your job or buy a dream house, investors need to determine what their end goal in real estate is.
- What are you good at? As an investor, learning how to grow a real estate business with little-to-no time comes down to doing what you’re good at. The ability to recognize your own strengths will shed light on where you should be spending your time.
- What do you enjoy doing? A real estate niche aims to streamline the work associated with achieving a goal. A niche is more or less like a guidance counselor, as it not only aligns your goals with what you do best, but determines the best approach to achieve them. In essence, it will serve as a guiding light to ensure you continue and follow through.
- Where can you add value? The last part to uncovering a real estate niche is recognizing where you can add value. The real estate market is a vast arena, comprised of a slew of investment vehicles openly available. To save time, investors need to be able to identify the areas they can improve upon and add value.
4. Consider A Team/Partnership
Lastly, investors short on time should consider the idea of building a real estate team or forming a partnership. The process of growing a successful real estate business is arduous, to say the least, so why not include the aid of a helping hand (or more)? Benefits of a real estate partnership include the ability to combine talent, expand networking and investment opportunities, introduce additional financing options, and share responsibilities and risk. How to grow your real estate business with limited time requires innovation, and adding a partner will alleviate the amount of time it takes to get it up and running. Additionally, a partnership will help to alleviate the risk on your shoulders.
Time remains something we can’t change. But if you want to learn how to grow your real estate business while working a full-time job, you will need to effectively managing your time and your resources.
