We’ve written many a time about the issue of millennial homebuyers. More importantly, a lack thereof. Millennials, our generation’s 20- and 30-somethings, are often saddled with student debt and financial hardships that cause them to delay life’s big milestones: buying a home, getting married, and having children.

To most of us investors, we think of millennials as our renters. Not our colleagues. For millennials, however, getting involved in real estate investment—particularly turnkey real estate investment—might just be the best route to homeownership and financial freedom.

Rent Affordability Could Be an Issue For Real Estate Investors

As a property management company reviewing hundreds of applications monthly for a handful of vacant properties, we get to see first hand the affordability and income issues that face today's renters.  However, is that a rental problem or an income problem.  Inflation is outpacing earnings growth and rental households have more than doubled in the last 15 years.  Yet, earnings have stagnated at best.  So, is this an issue?

How investors find and fund deals is always a huge question for companies like ours.  Of course, we are in the Turnkey real estate business, so much of the hard work as far as finding, renovating, marketing, renting and managing is already done.  

The part that the investor has to work on is the financing piece if they want to lever their investments.  There are many investors out there today who prefer to own property for cash, while still others choose to place leverage and borrow while rates are low.

That is not always possible for every investor based on many different factors.  Credit, time as an investor, number of properties owned and even levels of debt with other obligations all play a role in determining who can get and how easy they can get financing.

We have put together a few ideas of how investors can go about getting financing.  We have written a few brief comments about '6 Alternative Sources for Real Estate Financing' and invite all of our readers to leave comments on how they secure financing.  Any tips you can share with other readers are going to be very beneficial and we would love for you to share at the bottom of the article.

We could all use a confidence booster. When dealing with clientele, colleagues, or superiors, pretty much everyone struggles from time to time with their confidence. While we hope that our words and intentions will win out in the end, presentation is important in the professional world. If we expect others to have confidence in us — our business, our ideas, our input — we need to display confidence in ourselves.

Even if you have that confidence, there are subtle elements to professional confidence that don’t have to do with your thoughts and feeling about what you’re saying. No, many important keys to boosting your confidence and professional self-improvement are in learning good habits and unlearning the bad ones.

There’s power in a good communicator. Everyone knows one — that person that everyone else just seems to gravitate towards. You enjoy being around them. They make you feel heard and valued while saying just the right things to the right people.  Real estate investing is no different. 

Raise your hand if you like being in court. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? In all seriousness, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who enjoys court unless they work in law. And even then, they might not. One of the most stressful, taxing positions to find yourself in is when you’re being sued.

For real estate investors, legal pitfalls are many and varied. While a lot of lawsuits come against landlords or managers first, it certainly doesn’t mean the owner will be unaffected or not sued themselves.

Avoiding lawsuits isn’t as easy as we’d like it to be. Real estate arguably has the highest liability risk, so doing things right is key to protecting yourself and your investment.

Too many horror stories about investing begin with buying what appear to be very good deals on paper only to find out the property and team cannot even come close to performing the way an investor expects.  It is the difference between paper profits and real-world profits.  When investors find what they perceive as great deals before having a good understanding of the market and a team in place, they can often find themselves having more headaches than the investment is worth.

There are a lot of resources out there for real estate investors.We all have favorite books, blogs and podcasts. There’s so much out there, in fact, that is can be difficult to weed out the good from the bad: particularly when it comes to something like e-books.

One of the coolest gadgets to come out in the past few years is the Kindle and other e-readers. They provide on-the-go reading and books at a price that’s often considerably cheaper than that of print editions. On the downside, it’s fairly easy to get published Kindle e-readers. Their direct publishing system allows anyone to be published, increasing the author pool but decreasing, in many cases, the overall quality of options.

When you search “real estate investment” in the Kindle store, over 1,600 choices come up. That’s a lot! If you’re on the hunt for good Kindle books on investing in real estate, this list is a good place to start. Whether by public consensus of stellar reputation, these are just a few gems you can get right now:

We have a lot of fun here at Memphis Invest in the middle of working very hard to be the best at what we do.  The company has grown to 63 team members in three cities with multiple office buildings.  With so many team members across so many offices, we are always looking for ways to get better and get the team involved.

That is where this little book comes into the picture.

Many real estate investors like to keep a close eye on their investment properties. They believe local is best and they’ve got to be able to be there on the ground in order to truly be successful at real estate investing.  There is nothing wrong with that approach.  In fact, depending on the neighborhood and type of property you are interested in purchasing, it may be best to stick close to home and invest locally.  However, investing in your own backyard is definitely NOT the only way to invest in single-family rental properties.

There’s a great myth that the only markets worth investing in is the one you’re in. While yes, there are absolutely benefits to investing in real estate on a local level—after all, you know the demographics, the management companies, the other investors, and even that little je ne sais quoi that you can only get from being a local yourself.

People say remote markets are dangerous. You won’t succeed. You need to be an insider. It’s true that you should know the market you’re choosing to invest in, and as much as possible. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find success through investing in real estate remotely. In fact, you can have a LOT of success! It just takes the right approach.

We will tell you outright that we believe the best way to invest in a remote market, whether it’s in the state over or across the country, is through turnkey real estate.