This content was created by Ruth Kusemiju. This content was uploaded by Ruth Kusemiju. This is a YouTube video titled "Day 6 WriteRecord Challenge - 3 Lessons The Man in the Arena Taught Me" (created 2025-02-07T12:56:02Z). It is a spoken monologue by Ruth Kusemiju as part of the Write Record Challenge (Day 6) in which she shares lessons learned from her real estate mentor: the importance of defining an investment strategy (don’t jump at every deal), performing thorough property investigations (the “EC investigation”), accounting for hidden costs, and building a reliable team rather than trying to do everything alone.
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Hey everyone and welcome to day 6 of the Write Record Challenge. Today is going to be a day about lessons and I'm taking you further into my real estate journey and what I have learned for the past couple of months from my mentor in real estate. But I'm going to start with this: real estate can make you wealthy. At the same time, it can also drain you faster than you ever imagined. The difference is that learning from those who have already been through the battle, that's your edge. I wasn't born into real estate, like I said yesterday. I didn't have a blueprint. I had to learn through mistakes, lessons, and also most importantly, the wisdom of those who came before me. And when I stepped into this world of real estate, I didn't fully understand how brutal this industry could be. Deals would fall apart, people would overpromise and underdeliver. The market even would humble even the smartest investors. But the good thing was that I had someone in my corner. He's the man in the arena. He's a mentor who had been through the dust, the sweat, and the setbacks, and his lessons weren't just about making deals. His lessons were about avoiding the mistakes that ruin investors even before they got started. And today I want to share some of those lessons with you because learning from this mistakes doesn't mean that they have to be your mistakes. So you learn from these mistakes and know what to avoid. One, he always says that 97% of real estate professionals don't know what they're doing in real estate. 97%. So to be successful, you have to be a part of that 3%. One mistake real estate investors make is jump at every chance that comes just to get a deal going. That's one of the fastest ways to lose money, waste time, and burn out. It says don't just jump at every opportunity to get a deal. Define what your investment strategy is like before you start looking. Do you want to go into flipping? Do you want to go into wholesaling? Do you want to hold rentals? Because each of these paths actually require a different approach. And then ask yourself, does this deal— does it fit into my long-term strategy? If it doesn't, just walk away. Two, a lot of new investors in real estate, they focus on getting a deal done rather than making sure that the numbers actually work. And what do you do in this case? In his words, investigate. Detailed investigation. He calls it the EC investigation. Go deep into this property information. Go beyond the surface because sometimes the truths are hidden somewhere deep down inside. And so do your own profile investigation. Know the ins and outs about this property. Sometimes you would uncover some hidden truths that were not even glaring at the surface, right? And In that investigation, there are a lot of red flags that may come up telling you what to avoid. Um, don't get sucked into the overhype of overpaying for property, or don't fail to account for hidden costs— taxes, repairs, vacancies, different things. So when you do your in-depth profiling of whatever deal you're going into. It helps you uncover all these hidden facts. And another lesson is that investors sometimes try to do things on our own, my own, because you feel that you have to prove yourself to people that I can do this. That is a recipe for slow progress and costly mistakes. What you need to do instead is you build a team. Get a mentor, a real estate attorney, get contractors that you can trust, and you don't need to know everything, right? So work with a team. With teamwork, you achieve more, right? And real estate, I have to tell you, will test you. It will challenge you, and it will push you beyond your limits. So learning from the mistakes of others will help you move faster, build smarter, and then win bigger. And that's it for today.
