Making Real Estate Goals

Making real estate goals is vital to your victory in investing. With any luck you won’t need convincing of this statistic. Setting goals works, end of story. But are you making your real estate goals properly? Is it probable that you might be omitting a couple details that could benefit your goal setting even more? You’re about to learn the best practices for making real estate goals.

Real Estate Investment Goals

Setting goals has been described in much wider aspects over the history of time in other publications. In this article, I’ll emphasis on real estate investing goals since they have their own explicit characteristics. The top analogy of setting real estate goals is to compare it to conducting a Google search. If you are very imprecise, such as googling “real estate”, you will get inexplicit results, and many will not be particular to what you’re after. However, if you search for “How to wholesale real estate in Nebraska” you will probably get much nearer to useful information. But, you can also go overboard with unnecessary detail, such as googling “how to wholesale real estate in Omaha during the Winter part time in the mornings” and yield incorrect results (In fact, I did just that and the first result was Christmas Break Jobs for College Students!). You have to keep a gentle balance of points to hit the sweet spot

The Real Estate Goal Sweet Spot

To best demonstrate the real estate goal sweet spot, let’s breakdown a common real estate goal I hear often, “I want to make my first deal within four months.”

1. Fixed Period of Time

   Every goal must have a fixed period of time, or else, it’s just hopeful thinking. When you give a goal a date, it offers an outline in which to keep track of your growth. In our instance, giving a fixed period of time of 4 months was great.  NOTE: There’s no such thing as “too short” or “too long” of a definite period of time for a goal because, as you begin to proceed towards your goal, you’ll be able to make alterations. If it’s too short, you’ll lengthen it. If it’s too long, you’ll reduce it. The point is that there is a definite period of time.

2. Define the Result

   A massive error in making real estate goals is not describing the result clearly. “Make my first deal,” is NOT a definitive result. In fact, usually, making a deal is not the goal at all…but instead, making money is most likely the goal because you can do your first deal and lose $10,000! Losing money is usually not what an up-and-coming real estate investor means by a “deal”. Instead of “Making my first deal”, perhaps the explanation of the outcome could read as, “Buy my first Income making rental property that grosses at least $200 per month without having to use my own cash or credit to obtain the property” or “Close my first deal and earn $10,000 or more, in net revenues, after all costs.”

3. Get Rid of the “How”

   Goals are oddly powerful, but at times, you attain the results you indicated in ways that you least expected. To give a particular example, years ago, I set a goal to participate in lucrative investing deals all across the country but I never predicted that I would do it by mentoring people and then sharing 50/50 in the earnings. When I first set that goal, while observing all the homes from the window seat of a Southwest flight, my idea was to hire a lot of people and have a large company with hundreds of employees that were paid salaries while I collected 100% of the profits. In reflection, geeze, was that an awful idea. Appreciatively I didn’t accomplish that goal! Get rid of the how from your goal and just stipulate the result you are after within a certain period of time…the how will come as you get aboard to achieving your goal.

4. Review Your Goals Periodically

   This sounds so simple, yet it is tragic, just how rarely people actually review the goals they have set for themselves. At the least, go over your goals monthly, but even better is one time a week. Do not just read them, but question if you are on the path to reach them. And if not, why not? What needs to change to get back on the right path? Quite Frankly, if you don’t plan to go over your goals every so often to assess how close or far away you are from them, don’t bother making them.

Quick Note to Christians:

Talking just to the Christians here, there is one step that should be taken before those listed above. First and primarily, ask God what his goals for you are. There is an old quote, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” Christians throughout time have learned that making goals that they want to attain (and then making sure it’s also going to serve the Lord), was not the best method. Instead, ask God His plans for you and then write those down! Phil Vischer, creator of the Christian cartoon VeggieTales, learned this message the hard way. His book, “Me, Myself & Bob” is vital reading for any Christians in business. It vibrantly illustrates this point.

Quick Note to Non-Christians:

Be sure you’ve discovered why you want to achieve the goal you are after. If your reasons aren’t captivating, as soon as you hit a snag or a barricade, you’ll give up on it. And your reasons can be positive or negative. In fact, negative reasons are more influential. For instance, your key reason for hitting your real estate goals may be to no longer have to struggle financially. If you really, really dislike financially struggling, that will be very compelling and help you gain victory over the expected gloomy times that may lay ahead in your expedition to accomplishing your real estate goals.

Be Careful of Expectations

Be careful of the hazard of making expectations. Goals are targets you have drawn that you are trying to accomplish. Expectations are forecasts of the future that you may have very little control over. New real estate investors, either deliberately or unintentionally, at times develop expectations, such as, “because of this course I just bought, within 6 months, I’ll close 4 deals and be able to leave my job.” Even the best training programs, used in the ideal markets, at the perfect time, are not guarantees on future outcomes. There are numerous variables. It will often take longer than 6 months to get where you want to be. Or it could even happen faster! The problem is that when you create expectations that don’t happen, your essence can be crushed and it can totally demolish your drive and stop your growth.

In his outstanding book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankel shares a unearthing he made while confined in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. He saw that the prisoners who created optimistic outlooks in their minds, such as, “We’ll be out by Christmas,” were the first to die. Sadly Christmas would come and go and they wouldn’t be out so their spirit would be crushed and they would lose their will to survive. In the meantime, the prisoners most likely to survive were those who linked meaning to their anguish, such as concentrating on surviving so that they would guarantee that such an dreadful human brutality would never happen again.

When you don’t make half a million dollars in 6 months, maybe there is a purpose for it? Perchance the struggle will prepare you for things to come? Maybe there are other explanations which will reveal themselves many years from now as to the importance of not hitting your expectations? Set goals, not expectations.

What to Do When You Miss the Mark

When you miss the mark, rather than, feel sorry for yourself and ask destructive questions like, “why does this always happen to me?”, you should, ask yourself what you need to do in another way in order to get there? Who do you need to ask? What are you missing? What should be done differently? Then you can make some alterations, change the certain period of time of the goal, and go back at it. Everybody gets knocked down. Champions get back up. Go-getters find a way to reach their goals.