As you complete more and more deals, you will begin to accumulate the insider secrets of what it takes to be a successful investor. Once you’ve eclipsed a billion-dollars’ worth of deals, then those secrets are worth billions too!
Karen Briscoe, a Principal of the Huckaby Briscoe Conroy Group, is an individual full of billion dollar secrets. Her group has sold over 1,000 homes valued over $1 billion. It’s also been named to the Wall Street Journal Top Realtor Team list. Karen condensed these secrets into a published book – Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day: Secrets of a Top Agent Revealed. In our recent conversation, she provided the top three secrets to her success and how you can apply them to your investing business.
Karen’s first secret can be explained through the lyrics of a Frank Sinatra song. “One of the top tips that applies to investors in particular is what I call ‘New York, New York’, the song by Frank Sinatra with the chorus ‘If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere’,” she said. “If you look at the fundamentals of a certain market and you find that investors are being successful in that market, then you want to go to the next market [over], or like Wayne Gretzky says, ‘Go to where the puck is going’ – if you want to go where the market is going, then find the markets that have similar fundamentals but are on the edge, or soon to be the next place where everybody wants to be, because that’s where the best values are.”
This “New York, New York” strategy is followed by corporate giants like Starbucks and McDonalds. They search for the fundamentals and trends that hallmark an emerging market, set up their locations there and wait for the market to surge.
The fundamentals Karen says to looks at are the rental pool, jobs, schools and metro access. Or, for a hack, she said, “you could just apply the Starbucks effect, the Frappuccino effect that is talked about – how there has been found that there’s a halo effect around Starbucks. So, you could maybe go to that next ring around it and look in that area for what is upcoming neighborhoods that could be trending into better values over time.”
For a comprehensive guide for evaluating and selecting a target market, click here.
Karen’s second secret, and my favorite, is to host a meetup or seminar. They type of individuals you’ll invite will depend on your business model and investment niche. As a broker, Karen said, “we’ve done investor seminars in conjunction with local lenders and other professionals like CPAs and financial advisors, because they too have a pool of clients who want to have real estate as part of their portfolio.”
There are many ways to structure a meetup group, and I wrote a piece for Forbes outlining a few successful methods. The main way Karen differentiates her meetup from her competitors is that hers is invite-only. She said, “I know that there are many agents that have done seminars that they open up, but we keep it invitation-only, and then that way these professionals are inviting their clients and offering a value-add service for their clients who have an interest in real estate.”
Karen’s final secret, which is also her Best Ever advice, is to start now. “There’s a Chinese proverb that the best time to plan a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is now,” she said. “I would say the same thing about real estate investing. I think the best time to invest in real estate was 20 years ago, and the next best time is now. I think many people become paralyzed with it, and I’m not discounting the fact that it has a lot of logistics associated with it, but the idea is just find yourself a real estate professional that you trust, find a lender that can work with you on getting financing that you can structure that works for you, and do it.”
Karen Briscoe, a billion-dollar broker, has three secrets to her success. They are:
Apply these secrets to your investment, which may require creativity on your part, and replicate her massive success.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action.