BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - The Fastest Way to Get Good at Real Estate Investing (Saves You Years)

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Today, we’re showing you exactly how to learn about real estate investing, so you can get your first property faster. There are thousands of videos, podcasts, books, and forums floating around. Where do you even start? The amount of information alone is enough to keep you stuck on the sidelines. Not to mention, there’s a lot of bad information out there. In this episode, we’re giving you a clear roadmap for getting all the information you need before buying your first rental property. Property management? Finding contractors? Those are tomorrow’s problems. To get in the game and buy a good investment now, there are only a few skills you really need to hone. We’ll show you exactly what they are and where you can go to learn all about them. These are specific tools for those who are learning the ropes—resources we wish we had access to when we were starting out. Stop trying to learn everything. Learn these things, in this order, and you’ll be taking down real estate deals in no time! In This Episode We Cover The best ways to learn about real estate investing (starting from zero) The number one real estate skill every new investor should prioritize Two “buckets” of real estate investing education (and which to pull from) Our favorite real estate books, podcasts, and other tools for getting started The biggest barrier to real estate investing in 2026 (focus on this) What we got right (and wrong) early on in our investing journeys And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠h⁠⁠t⁠t⁠ps://www⁠.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1319⁠⁠. Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is our exact framework for learning about real estate investing so you can actually start investing. There are thousands of podcasts, books, masterminds, meetups, forums, conferences, and more. Where do you even start? The amount of information alone is enough to keep you stuck on the sidelines. Not to mention, there's a lot of bad information out there. But we're about to simplify all of it. Today, we're giving you a clear roadmap for getting all the information you need before buying your first rental property. Property management, finding contractors, those are tomorrow's problems. To get in the game and buy a good investment now, there are only a handful of skills you really need to home. We'll show you exactly what they are and where you can go learn all about

them. These are the resources we wish we had access to when we were starting out. Stop trying to learn everything and learn these things in this order and you'll be taking down real estate deals in no time. What's going on, everybody? I am Henry Washington and I am here, as always, with my co-host Dave Meyer. What's up, Dave? What's going on, man? Today, we're actually talking about how to learn about investing in real estate. So don't get that confused with actually learning about investing in real estate. But you and I both know, there's a lot of people out there who claim to want to teach people how to invest in real estate. There's lots of resources out there where people can learn about real estate.

Obviously, bigger pockets is a huge resource for that. But there's tons of information on YouTube, on Instagram, on all these different social media platforms. And it's a little different than when I first started learning how to invest in real estate. There was a lot less of that. It's so different. And so I think people now kind of get a deer in the headlights look when it's time to start learning because you don't know who to trust. you don't know what information's right. For every person that says one thing is bad,

there's somebody else who's killing it with that thing. So it can be very confusing. I think having a framework for how to go about learning the skills that you need is actually really helpful because real estate, there's just so much to it. If you just go in and just like, I'm going to learn about real estate, you're going to be reading about commercial real estate

and single family real estate, every market in the country. it's going to become so overwhelming, so quickly, you probably will get lost and drown a little bit. So I think just trying to even prioritize what things you need to learn, in what order, and then figure out where to go and find that information that's really reliable and reputable. That's just goal. Like having that framework is so valuable for investors really of any stage, even if you've done a few deals, just like how do you get to the next step?

You should always be learning. All right. So let's jump in and get started. So let's talk a little bit about how we first started to learn about real estate investing. So how did you learn? I didn't. Did you learn? Did you?

No, no, I did it. I bought a deal before I learned, for sure. I kind of just went with the make it up as you go along approach to real estate investing. I learned a little bit because when I first was out of college, I was waiting tables, and I was just trying to find a different. job, like some way into a higher earning job. And I took a job cold calling for a tenant rep. So the woman I was working for was also a broker and just knew a lot about real estate, and was just kind of like talking to me a little bit about pricing and how good prices were

in Denver right now and how you could cash flow. And then honestly, a friend of mine bought a deal and he had no idea what he was doing and he was crushing it. I was like, if this guy could do it, I'm going to do it too. And so I relied a lot on my eight. agent and my lender at the time, because I didn't know what a mortgage was. Like, I just kind of went with the ignorance as bliss approach. Then I joined Bigger Pockets. And I was like, oh, my God, I've been doing everything wrong for six straight years. I could have grown so much faster, but so much more efficient, so many fewer headaches. My story is a little different. So I started in 2017. And at that point, Bigger Pockets was obviously a thing. And there were other real estate books and

podcast. So it wasn't like the golden era of online education yet. I feel like that came during the pandemic years, but there were still information out there. And so I was in Bigger Pockets forums all day long. I just started at episode one for Bigger Pockets podcast and I just started listening. I just wanted to learn as much as I could. So I started at the first episode, listened all the way through. One of the struggles I had, again, was which lessons in real estate made the most sense for me. the way I framed things, and I'm using the word frame impurposely, is what I wanted to do was put some guide rails around what I wanted to learn. In other words, like, I knew I wanted to focus on single family real estate. And I only knew that at that point because I felt like

it was affordable in my market and it was as low risk as I could get. So I wasn't trying to figure out how to make as much money possible. I was just trying to figure out how can I do this in my backyard and be able to afford it. So that kind of helped me narrow my focus. And the other thing I focused on was the things I was the most apprehensive about. And the two things I was the most apprehensive about are still the two things I think most investors focus on. I didn't know how to find deals at a discount. And I didn't know where to get the money. And so I started to kind of hone in what I was listening to and reading around locating deals and around financing. I would say that that's what really helped me is just selecting the kind of asset that I wanted

to buy and then figuring out where I was going to find those assets and then figure out where I was going to get the money to buy those assets. I figured everything else I could learn after that. If I didn't know those two things, I couldn't do anything. I think that's the right way to go though, right? Like you just kind of have to pick. Like what's the most important? or what's my biggest weakness, my biggest blind spot, and I'll figure everything else out later. I kind of learned this in the corporate world, which was when you have a big problem like that, that has like multiple facets, you start with the part of the problem that is the most immediate. Like, you can't move on to the next problem until this one is solved.

So I would say to people, if you're just starting your education journey, what's that lowest common denominator for you? what's the thing that you have to solve before any of the other things you're worried about even matter. Everyone should decide that for themselves. I'll just tell you, I think for a majority of people, it's deal finding right now. I think it's one of the clearer times in real estate where the one barrier is pretty much universal to everyone. Yeah.

And I know, like you said financing. Of course people are worried about financing. But like, honestly, there's not that much to learn about financing. Like, either you can afford a house or not. Like, I'm sorry to be blunt about it. But if you need to raise money for your first deal, that is totally fine. You still need to do deal finding. No one is going to fund you without a deal.

So, like, as Henry said, you have to prioritize deal finding. If you're going out and raising private capital or asking friends or family or whatever, having a deal is the way to do that. And so deal finding has to come first. I would be willing to lend money to, like a friend or family, if they came to me and they're Like, will you help me buy a house? I'm like, what's the deal? And you said, I don't know.

I'd be like, get the hell out of here. Go bring me a deal. And I'll tell you if I'll lend you money. So I think that's number one. When you were learning, though, was the podcast enough for you to learn about off-market deal finding? I learned a lot about off-market deal finding listening to the podcast. But what really helped me was when I would listen to guests who talked about off-market

deal finding, they would talk about strategies. That would let me know where to go dive deeper. So like I would listen to an episode about somebody who was doing direct mail and then I would go read a book recommendation that they have or I would go search something that they talked about and I would dive deeper. One of the things I did when I was first researching off market deal finding was I was trying to figure out like what list should I send mail to and the way I determined that was I just went back and listened to every podcast episode I could with like off market deal finders or wholesalers who were doing off market deal finders and wrote Dan. if they talked about who they were mailing to. And I just started to make a list of all these people. And then I decided to start mailing to the least mentioned lists on there because I didn't want to compete with the big dog. So everybody at that time, I remember vividly.

Everybody at that time was mailing to absentee owners. Like that was the number one by far. Everybody was doing that. And so I said, great, I don't want to do that. And so that's kind of how I narrowed down pulling up. my very first off-market deal-finding list. And how long did it take you of practicing that to feel like you knew it? Because there's this balance in everything in real estate between educating beforehand

or being dumb like me and just like jumping in and trying stuff. Like there is a balance that's hard to figure out. So how do you do it with deal finding? I probably spend about a month consistently, a couple hours every day, not just like here or there doing some research, but like every day doing a little bit of research. I probably spent about 30 days before I actually pulled my first list and sent my first direct mail campaign. But I remember being so scared and thinking, there's no way, I just don't know enough. And I was so scared to spend the money. I actually had to kind of talk myself into

spending the money by literally writing down like how much it was going to cost me. And so I had my number. And then I said, all right, if I lose this money, how can I minimize that impact? And for me, it was I put that cost on a 0% interest for 15 months credit card and I divided that amount by 15. And I said, all right, if I don't get a deal, then I have to pay $200 a month for 15 months. That's my punishment. Can I afford to do that with my current lifestyle? And the answer was yes. And so that kind of helped take away the fear of losing the money because I knew I could

absorb that loss. I think that's a really good way to think about it. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen? Real estate is forgiving. It's more forgiving than people realize. I've made some bad stock picks. I have made some dumb moves there. Not that forgiving.

Sometimes, you know, doing well on other ones. But, you know, that's a great way to look at it. $200, $200 a month. That's the risk for huge upside. Like, if you compare that to an upside, $200 a month risk versus I'm just going to make it up. But $500 a month in cash phone, you take that bad. all day. That's great risk reward. So that's, I really highly recommend that. That's a great way to do it. All right. Obviously, we've been doing this for a long time. The way we learned was different,

but some of the lessons in how we learned still apply. So thank you for sharing that. I think what I want to cover next is like, what are the options for people if they want to learn? Where can they turn to either online or in person to learn? But I want to dig into that right after the break. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle, active spreadsheets, active phone calls, active stress? Here's a better question. What if you could buy brand new construction homes, 10% below market value, and the best markets across the country, without making real estate your second job?

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This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. All right, we're back on the Bigger Pockets podcast. Dave Meyer and I are talking about how to learn how to invest in real estate. We've already covered how each of us got our education. But now we want to talk a little bit about where can people turn to for good educational resources. So obviously, we're going to say, biggerpockets.com is a wonderful place for you to start

learning how to invest in real estate. There's literally years and years of investors' experience sitting out there in the forums that have been there for a long time that you can start to go through. And then there's obviously hundreds and hundreds of podcast episodes of both professionals in the business and amateurs who are shamed. sharing their stories. But even that sometimes can feel like, man, where do I start? So what other resources are out there for people that you think are credible resources? I try and bucket information that I want to learn into two things for real estate. Like one is what is information I want from an expert, like the best person in their field? Those are things like when I

started getting into passive investing. I really wanted to learn how to underwrite passive investing deals. Like, I read the book, Hands Off Investor by Brian Burke. It helped me so much. Great book, if you're interested in passive investing. And then there's a whole other bucket, which is like, what do I need to learn from my peers? Which I think is something underappreciated where I want to talk to people who have experienced doing exactly what I do. And so that's like a different set of resources. So learning from experts, podcasts are obviously an example. I think YouTube is excellent. And I personally love to read. I think books are super, super helpful. Especially because in today's day and age, everything is so overwhelming. If you just go on

social media and you look, people are going to pull your attention into a million different directions. So if you have an intention to learn a specific skill, go buy a book and spend 10 hours reading and highlighting it and thinking about it and not getting distracted by everything else. And I have recommendations for good books, but I just think they're like dive deep on a topic and not think about the 10,000 other things you could be learning about real estate, because there are. Yep. Like I really am just a big book person. So maybe that's just me. I'm old school. I think that's a great idea. What I would recommend to people is use the online resources to figure out where you need or want to dive deeper. And then when you're ready to dive deeper, and then when you're ready to dive

deeper, that's where you use books or other written educational resources because you can just get so much more granular data in a book versus a podcast or even a YouTube video. There's only so much they can cover that's beyond the surface. So use the higher level, easier to digest information like the forums and the podcasts and YouTube videos, Instagram content. Use those things to give yourself the guide rails. Like, where am I going to operate in? What's that frame? And then once you have that frame, great.

Now you can go look for some books that are specifically teaching about finding off-market deals or specifically teaching about something even more granular, like using direct mail specifically for off-market deals. You can read entire books with a lot of granular detail. And that can really help you get a sense of like almost subject matter expertise before you ever done it because you're getting. such detail. But if you start there, you can end up wasting a lot of time. What's your favorite real estate book? And you can't say mine because I know you're going to say these are just so

incredible and flawless. You're right. You're right. You took the words literally out of my mouth. In reference to what I was just talking about, one of the books that really helped me when I first got started was Gary Keller's book, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, because I felt like it really gave you those guide rails. Like, it put real estate investing from an investor's standpoint, like into perspective for me and then helped me figure out where to go focus on. Yeah, that's a good one. I like that book, too. I'll say, I really like the hands-off investor because that, that, and there's a book called Lend to Live, too. They're both Bigger Pocket's Books, but there's just taught me strategies I knew nothing about. Like, I was starting pretty much from zero

as an LP investor. And I fell after reading Brian's book, I know enough that I can go have a conversation with a local investor and like ask questions and like get smarter. And then lend to live, which is like a private lending book, is really helpful too. Those are ones I've read in the last couple years that I really liked. So then the other part of this, though, like you asked me where to learn. Like these are kind of in my bucket of things I want to learn from experts. But then the other things you learn, honestly, I think more, you learn more from talking to people who are doing the stuff you're doing. So like I treat the book, kind of like I was just saying,

how do I not sound dumb when I go to and ask intelligent questions when I go to a meetup or post something on the bigger pockets forum? I'm like, how do I have a real question that takes seriously? I really think that's kind of a good framework. It's like, educate yourself enough to go get face-to-face with someone. Or it doesn't even need to be face-to-face. Go on the forums and bigger pockets and chat with people. that's where you're going to learn what deals are good in your neighborhood, what lender to work with, what contractor to work with.

That is education. Yeah. It's networking too. And for that, I mean, there's only two ways I know. It's either digital communities, like bigger pockets or some smaller mentorship groups or stuff like that. Or real estate meetups, like going to events like BPCon or going just to local meetups in your area. Like people call it networking, but it's also education. You learn so much from those situations.

It is education through net. working, absolutely. And I like the idea of educating yourself enough to be able to ask good questions because the better questions you can ask of a seasoned investor, the better answers you're going to get. And the more help, though, want to give you, because you're right, it is refreshing to get a good, well-thought-up question when someone needs some help versus just a generic question. But this also leads into the next question that I hear all the time. I'm sure you do two, which is how much education do I need before I do my first deal? Right?

And I think it's a fair question. In other words, I think people are just trying to make themselves feel better about spending so much time educating versus taking action. But I think the comparison is necessary. The way I think of this question is it's not necessarily how much education do you need before you can do your first deal. It's I think there are some key things you need to learn how to do and be comfortable enough doing them before you buy your first deal. And so the time frame is going to be different

for different people. But I think the key thing you need here is how to evaluate a property and underwrite a deal. Like if you are not comfortable looking at a property, analyzing it, and understanding, is this a good deal? Yeah. What's the price point I need to buy it at for it to be considered a good deal for me. And then what am I going to spend in time or money on getting this thing up to snuff so that it can produce the income that I want it to produce? Like, if you can't answer those questions with some level of comfortability, then you probably need to continue your education.

Because where people are going to get burned is they're going to overpay and they're going to underestimate things. Either underestimate the rehab or underestimate the timeline. And then they end up in a place where they may, may not be able to hold onto that property and they got to give it back or they're just bleeding cash on a deal because they jumped in a little too soon. At its core, that is being an investor. That is the most important job of investor is discerning what deals to buy and which ones to ignore. Yes. Everything else, property management, you could choose to outsource that. Even deal finding,

you can, you know, you can pay a wholesaler. Like, you can outsource that. You can outsource the decision on writing the check. That is, that is up to you. And so like that, That is number one thing. I completely agree. If you do not understand that, don't buy anything. Fortunately, it's not that hard to learn. It sounds intimidating. But, like, I mean, we've put out a million episodes of this podcast.

On YouTube, you can check it out, like, how to evaluate deals. It's absolutely something you can learn. So, like, if I wanted to learn that, I guess the podcast, I will say, like, my book, you know, I'm going to, if you want to learn the numbers, like, real estate by the numbers is a good book for that. I think it's really kind of one of the only ones that really gets into the math behind it if you're that kind of person. But I think even most rental property books go over that pretty well. Here's how I would break it down. How much education do you need enough to know whether you're buying a good deal or not? What does that entail? Here's the things you need to be able to do.

A, you have to understand your market enough to understand what a good deal looks like. Because a good deal in Seattle is different than a good deal in northwest Arkansas, right? Dave and I live in different markets and the price points of the good deals are very different. Even when you look at percentages, if you were to break it down on a percentage-wise, the percentages can be different. So you need to understand enough about your market to know what kind of a discount do I need to get on a property for it to produce the income I need it to produce to hit my goals. The second thing you need to understand is how are you going to comp your properties or how are you going to figure out what the after repair value is for your properties. This is the most important metric you need to know.

If you're going to flip properties, your ARV is how you're going to get to your max allowable offer. You back into your max allowable offer once you know what your after repair value is. So you need to figure out how am I going to comp properties? Am I going to do it on my own? Am I going to rely on an agent? How good are they at comping properties? but you got to figure out how are you going to determine what your ARVs are for the properties that you're looking to buy? Third thing you need to understand, how much is it going to cost to fix up the property? That was this biggest struggle for me when starting to evaluate deals because I'm not handy.

I did not understand anything about construction, building. None of that made any sense to me. And so this part of underwriting was the most uncomfortable for me. So the way I solved that problem was I found people. who were really good at it and I got them to walk properties with me to help me understand. That's that networking thing. That's how you learn. So those three things I would say are what you need to understand before you go buy anything. What's a good deal look like in your market? How are you going to determine how much properties are worth after it's fixed up? And then how are you going to

determine what it's going to cost to fix it up? If you are comfortable enough understanding those three numbers, you're probably ready to go ahead and start making offers on properties. The other thing I personally find as important is knowing the order of operations. In just the last couple of years, I started passive investing, I started lending, and I also did my first flip a year ago. So for a flip, like, I kind of got it, but I just like didn't really understand. Like, all right, do I meet with an architect before I close? When do I get my as built done? Like, I just wanted to. get the checklist and the order I needed to go through it because I have a high degree of confidence

in myself that I'll be able to learn those things when I get to the appropriate stage in the process. But I don't want to do it out of order. I feel like that's what really screws you up. If you totally forget to do something and then like you're two months into a project, you're like, oh, I should have filed for that permit and now I'm screwed. I just want to know what order to attack it in because like we were talking about before, you need to know what the biggest problem is. And so if you create sort of a calendar look almost of like, here's everything I need to do, here's the order to go in, I find that really reassuring and helpful. Because then you can go educate yourself as you get to each thing and learn as you go if you feel confident that you're not

going to miss something. And there's order of operations when it comes to a deal and how you execute a deal and there's order of operations when it comes to like a renovation and how you execute a renovation and like having a basic understanding of what the steps are. And those are things that there is tons of information out there on. You can find them in forums. You can also ask AI to help you with putting together a list of what are the steps that you need to learn. Please verify what it tells you. But absolutely those are things you can help build. You're right. And that's a good point too because a lot of people aren't chefs but can follow a cookbook recipe. Right. So it's very similar. Exactly. Because then if you get to, all right, you need to flambay some bananas and you're

like, what the hell is flambay? Then you can go look at it. But like, you know you're at the right step in the recipe. Well, all right, we'll go do some research on that. But you didn't need to know that ahead of time. All right. What I want to do now is talk about the kinds of education. There's free education. There's paid education. There's a lot of value in both. And I want to dive into what are the options for each right after the break. Buying real estate has a funny way of making the future feel very real. You start thinking about mortgages, cash flow, tenants, and suddenly you realize if something happened to me,

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If you want to do the same, visit BiggerPockets.com slash retirement to learn more. Quick note before we dive back in. This episode is brought to you by Cash App. I've been using Cash App for years to send and receive money and to online shop safely. More investors are thinking about where Bitcoin fits into a broader portfolio, not as a short-term trade, but as long-term exposure to an asset that behaves differently from traditional markets. Cash App makes that kind of Bitcoin strategy more straightforward.

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sources where people can invest in real estate and how much education do you need before you really start taking action. But now I just kind of want to break a couple of things down because education falls into two buckets essentially. There's free education and there's paid education. Free education consists of the things like podcasts, YouTube, books, these social media platforms, there's free forums, free Facebook groups, there's local meetups in Rios. Paid education consists of things like courses, mentorships, masterminds, and all of those are obviously going to come with a price tag. So what I'd like to talk about is like, what are the pros and cons of each? And let's start with free education. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say one of the pros of

free education is that it's free. Cost effective. Very cost effective. But what else makes this a good resource for people? I think most of the stuff that you need to learn about real estate should be free, to be honest. I think there are things worth paying for, but 75, 80% of the background information you need is free. So, like, I don't think there are a lot of secrets in real estate. There isn't secrets and real estate. There is not. So, like, if you're the kind of person who likes to self-educate, you can. You know, that's kind of the route I've gone for most of my career. Looking back on, I might have done things differently. But, like, you can definitely do it that way. And I think the diversity of opinion is good, too.

Now, that's a double-edged sword today because everyone has an opinion on social media. And some of them are really, really bad. So free, diversity of opinions, because you should get a lot of opinions. Like, you should learn from multiple people and get multiple perspectives. But that is one of the tradeoffs, too. And I think if you're just kind of like a sponge of information, if you're someone who really likes to go deep on things, like, there's so much to learn for free. So I think free education is like should be a part of everyone's education journey. As someone who gets paid for helping people how to invest in real estate, let me say that you do not need to pay someone to learn how to invest in real estate.

There is enough free resources out there. There is enough, even inexpensive resources that are out there if you want a little, if you want a little more organization to what it is you're looking for. I think the caveat with free education is you kind of have to choose your own advice. venture. You've got to piece together your own education. And you have to have discipline too. Yes. You've got to have discipline. You actually have to go through the information. You've got to hold yourself accountable. And then you have to leverage things like your RIA meetups and peer groups that you've built to help you understand if the things you're executing are you actually executing them correctly. But you don't have to pay for education to be successful. So what are the times

to pay for education? Like is it, I think it's to speed up, right? Because it, it, it, you, usually can speed up to learn a very specific skill. Like if there's an expert in one thing and you really want to get excellent at it, having a mentor makes sense to me. What people pay for with education or what I feel like people should pay for with education is one, organization of information. Two, a community of people doing the same thing that you're doing who hold you accountable. And so I think that paid education is good for people who don't have it. a ton of time, but they have a time horizon with which they need to get deals done in order to help them meet their financial goals. If you've got all the time in the world, you can do it

for free. But if you've got a time horizon, you've got to meet and you're a busy professional, it may not be the best choice to go and spend months and months on free education and then still feel like you're not quite sure what steps to take. So I think there is a right audience for paid education, but I think a lot of the best benefits, to paid education, it's the community, it's the built-in discipline, it's the organization, and it's the accountability. Those are the things that I think are valuable in paid education. For sure. And there's different formats. Like you have a community, obviously, and that's one thing. But like I think there are even tools like software that's like paid education that's worth it too,

or going to be Pekon or going to an event that are all worth it. I will say too, like it really depends on the type of investor you want to be. For example, I don't do off-market deal finding. If I did, I'd probably pay someone to teach me how to do that. Instead, I pay for people to find me a deal, so I'm just paying for it in a different way. Right? It's just like I, but that's fine. I'm okay with that. But like, you're going to have to pay for stuff in your invested career, whether you want to pay for education or not. Up to you. But it really depends, like, what skills you're trying to learn and how quickly. And it's cool that you mentioned BPCon, because my very next question to you is going to be like,

what about all these conferences? Because technically conferences are paid education. Do you feel like that is a good use of people's money? I stand by BPCon so hard. Like I think it's just so valuable. I've just seen so many people, yourself included, who have like really like transformed their investing career. Because I think the piece that we haven't really talked about is just like it's education.

with like so much motivation. That's what I love about conferences and in-person events is you get both for a pretty good price. Like BPCon for everything you get and for how fun it is is not that expensive. Even like the local events you and I have done, the Seattle events, the cash flow road show,

like those aren't expensive events. And it's just I teach at them and I'm like ready to run through a wall after them. I'm like so excited because you learn something and you're fired up and I just feel like you put what you learn into practice so quickly after them. them. That's just for me. I like, I like social events. So like for me, they're fun. I get for not

everyone they are. But I think even if you're not super outgoing, you still can learn a ton at these kinds of things. Conferences are great for the networking and the relationships that you build with the people at the conference. If you're able to build the relationships and maintain the relationships post the conference. But everything cool that's happened to me in my investing life, has happened because of a relationship I met at a conference. Like literally almost everything. Like I'm on this podcast with you as a co-host because of going to the very first Bigger Pockets Conference in Nashville.

The first like big efficient. Like that is that is literally how I got here because I went to that conference and I met people at that conference who I stayed in contact with and that's how I got to be here. I've gotten to go to so many cool places. I've gotten to buy cool properties. I've gotten to meet cool accountability partners. I've done so many amazing things, all because I attended conferences. It is by far been the best money I've spent on my real estate education is tickets and

attending conferences. You know, if I had to pick one place to learn from here until forever, obviously I love BP gone, but like I would just pick conferences in general because I just think it combines all the important elements of real estate into one thing. If you want to grab tickets, still available for BPGongo to biggerpockets.com slash conference. And Henry and I will obviously be there hanging out, teaching, learning, networking, with tons and tons and tons, dozens of other expert speakers as well, and your peers.

Like I said earlier, and I mean this, you learn as much from your peers as you do from experts. It's different things, but it's just as important. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast. I hope we have helped you by putting some framework around real estate education. Hopefully you have a better idea of where to start, what information you should get from certain resources, when it makes sense to pay for education, when it doesn't. But it's all you.

It's your education. It's your real estate investing career. So pick the path that makes the most sense to you. As always, thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast. And Dave and I will see you on the next episode.