Tim Hubbard says fear, not money or knowledge, stops investors from buying rental properties in unfamiliar markets. He breaks down how to name your specific fears—bad returns, sketchy partners, hidden problems—then tackle them with research, inspections, and video walkthroughs before you commit.
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What keeps us from going out of our backyard and looking for investments in different cities in different states? Well, there's one little four letter word and that's what we're going to talk about this week. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick, actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Welcome back, everyone, to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Another week, hope you're doing well out there, wherever you are in the world. And this week I've got another topic for you, something relevant to every real estate investor, actually relevant to every person in the world. It's something that keeps us from doing something maybe we want to, and that's fear. Yeah, I might get a little pushback from this, but fear is the main reason that a lot of people do not go outside of the neighborhood or the market they're familiar with and invest in other markets where maybe they make a little more sense. Now, you could say, oh, it's because I don't have the money, or because I don't know that area, I don't know anyone in that city, or I've never done it before. But really there's two things here. Motivation, but then fear. And I think fear is a huge one. If you don't have the money, you can find the money. You just have to take action. And taking action is how we alleviate our fears, how we eliminate our fears. There's a book I'm reading right now, the Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. Great book, timeless advice from the 50s, still as relevant as it's ever been. And he breaks it down into two steps that I want to share with you guys. This week we're going to relate this back to real estate, of course, and going outside of our market. But first I want to just go over these two simple little rules for alleviating fear. First step, we have to isolate the fear. So are we scared of getting a bad return? Are we scared of working with someone we've never worked with before? Or getting into an investment that requires too much maintenance or maybe requires too much money? All of these things are little fears that if we take action, we can eliminate or alleviate. But first we have to isolate those, pin them down, determine exactly what it is that's keeping us from looking to markets where maybe the numbers make more sense. You got to think that the market that you live in is one of maybe if you're here in the US 400 MSAs, they call them metropolitan statistical areas, the cities or places where they actually have enough people to track data on. You got to think if. If you're in one of those, or maybe you're even outside of one of those, do you think that really is the best market for you to be investing in? Maybe, but maybe not likely. It's not right. We want to isolate our fears. It's maybe keeping us from exploring these other markets. That's the first step. And the second step is taking action. If we think we found a good market on the other side of the US or the other side of the country, wherever we are, we. Well, we can alleviate some of our fears investing there by doing research, by doing research on the potential returns, the population growth, the prices of properties. Now prices obviously are a huge thing, and the potential returns, and that's a whole nother segment on its own. Actually, we talked about that a lot in episode 13. So if you haven't, go back and check that out, we'll talk about rent to value ratios, which is one way to compare one property no matter where it is, to another property no matter where it is. So that's the first step. Before we go out of the market we're in. We want to find a broad market that makes sense based on fundamentals and based on the financials. But after we do that, a lot of that little fear kicks in. And believe me, it's kicked in for me, too. And it still does. Every time I buy a new property, I'm like, you know, I get those little butterflies in my stomach and I think, oh, no, you know, what if I ran this wrong? What if I ran that wrong? Idea is if we do enough due diligence and do our research, the numbers tell us what to do, and we can alleviate all those other little fears by talking and learning about the market that we're going into. So let's say you found this broad market and the numbers already make sense, and you found a property, but you're scared of the condition it's in. And again, we're trying to do this remotely right in the beginning without visiting all these different markets to start out with. First we figure out which ones make sense, and then we can find some properties in there. It's only after we run the due diligence on the financials and the inspections. We don't really need to visit that property until we know that it makes sense with financials. So let's say you're nervous about the property condition. Well, there's ways to alleviate that by taking action and talking with local real estate agents. Or brokers getting historical info on the property, capital expenditures over the last two years, you know, utility costs, most of the things that a seller will typically provide, but then also getting your inspections. So there's a company, I think it's called wego. Look, you can have them go out remotely and it's very inexpensive. They can give you a good snapshot video of it before investing a bunch of time out there and determine it's a bad property. Of course, a professional inspection if you make it that far down the road. So property condition is a big fear of mine, you know, but that's alleviated by the inspections. And then ultimately I like to go in person and see the property when they're doing the inspections. I haven't done that on every property, but I have had someone that I really trust at the property if I was unable to be there. So maintenance and the financials, both things which we can do remotely for the most part. And it's scary. I don't know if that'll ever really go away. That kind of the heebie jeebies, the butterflies you get before pulling the trigger on a new deal. But you know, if you over analyze everything, which lots and lots of people do, you know is now the right time in the market and that turns into analysis paralysis, if you've heard that. And then people never take action. So action is the real key to eliminating fears. And fear is probably one of the biggest pieces why we're not investing out of our markets that we're familiar with or comfortable with. So keep that in mind when you're looking at a new market that you have the resources at your fingertips online through brokers and websites and reports and inspections and all of these things to determine if a property's good. Now this is a short term rental riches podcast, right? So there's more to just finding a property that makes sense for a short term rental. And a big piece is evaluating those financials, what the short term rental could potentially do. We're going to talk about that next week. How we can get legitimate information and forecast the numbers for our short term rentals after we found a property in a market, whether it's in your neighborhood or in a different neighborhood, forecasting is going to help alleviate that fear too. So keep that in mind when, when you get that fear for anything. Just isolate what it is and take action and you'll alleviate it. It's only by taking action that we can continue scaling our portfolios. So until next time, hope that helped you and have a wonderful day. Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals. Well, it all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties. I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods.com that's R E S T Methods Com.
