Real Estate Investor Goals, Setting Goals as a Real Estate Investor

Any serious investor sets real estate investor goals on a regular basis... here's my take on setting these real estate goals.

Effective goals are the key to being successful in the real estate business. Without goals, it’s like you are that hamster on the wheel or a ship without a rudder. Let’s face it. If you are planning a long car trip, you wouldn’t do it without either bringing a GPS with you or plotting your trip on a map. If you don’t know where you are going, how are you going to get there? Once you know where you are going, you have got to have a plan.

I went through elementary school, high school, and some college, but they never really taught me how to set goals. They told me I needed to set them, but was never taught how to.

In my opinion, in order to lead a truly full life you should have lots of money, a wonderful relationship with God, a great family life, and you should be healthy. Though note that nobody is perfect, including me.

As far as business goals are, only you can tell yourself how to set your goals.Here is how I set up my own goals. I set my business goals in two different ways. Income, (how much money I want coming in on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis), and deals (how many deals I do). I look at my results in two different ways. I look at how many deals, and the average dollar amount per deal.

As far as personal goals, they can be relationship goals, family goals. Maybe you want to spend more time with your kids. Maybe you want to lose some weight. Whatever it might be, there are both personal and business goals to contend with.

To make a goal effective, it really needs to be written down. There was a study done at The Harvard School of business that was started some time ago. They had three groups: a group that had no real goals, a group that had goals, and a group that had goals and wrote them down. The group that had goals, made 2 to 3 times more money per year than the group that had no specific goals. The group that wrote their goals down, they made 10 or 15 times more money than the group that had no goals. So, it’s critically important that you write your goals down.

I’ve even heard of stories about people that wrote down a five-year plan, stuck it in a drawer somewhere, and never looked at it again until later, and were shocked that they had hit every goal on their list. So, write those goals down. Statistically, you are much more likely to hit your goals if you write them down.

Go ahead and search online for a goal setting template, or even make your own document up for yourself. I suggest you print it out and write it out. There is something about actually writing your goals down, that ingrains it in your subconscious.

Note that there is a difference between dreams and goals. That’s really what the difference is with writing them down. If you just have dreams in which some day you want to do this and some day you want to do that, it’s not really a goal, it’s just a dream. That is why the next step is that you need to make your goals very, very specific.

You don’t want to just say, “I want to be rich”. How rich? You don’t just want to say “I want to get a new car in the next year or so”. What kind of car? Go ahead and look at the cars right now. Put it in your mind and subconscious that that car is happening. Instead of having a goal that you will get a car in the next year, make it specific, right down to the year, make, and model. Don’t just say, “I want to make a lot of money or do a lot of deals in the next 12 months”. Make your goal specific, as in how many deals you want to do a month or how much you want to bring in a month.

Goals have to be measurable. You have to be able to measure exactly where you are in conjunction with your goals. As you are tracking your goals, you need to be able to see exactly where you are.
Goals also have to be believable. It’s one thing to say, “I want to do 10 deals a month”. If you’ve only done 2 deals in the last 12 months, saying you are going to do 10 deals a month might not be doable. You might fall behind and then not be able to believe that you will ever meet those goals.Also, remember that you can’t make your goals so easy that there is no challenge either. They have to be enough of a challenge that you have to work hard to get them, plus something that you believe. But, if they are too hard, you are going to lose faith that you can hit them and it will take the wind out of your sails. So, make sure they are believable and that you are going to stretch to reach them.

They also need to have a deadline; however you set it up, per month or per quarter. Per year, I think is too long. State a specific time line with a deadline written down. Your goals need to be measurable, believable, written down, specific, and they need to make you stretch. Every month your goals need to be a bit bigger.

And be honest with yourself. Reassess yourself as you go. I set my goals by month, but every 3 months I go and I see exactly where I am. At the end of 3 months, if I’ve hit my goals and I’m way ahead, I will adjust accordingly.

Another thing that I think is really important is that you tell others what your goals are. It’s just like writing them down. It’s going to put it into your subconscious a little more, to give you more chances, statistically, to hit your goals, by reminding yourself. You are also going to lose face. If I tell my Wife what I’m doing the next few months, and I don’t get anywhere near it, I’m going to be embarrassed. So, I feel it’s important to tell people what I’m going to do, even if they never say anything to you, or don’t care, you know that you told the world what you are going to do. You can even join a Real Estate Mastermind Group and tell them all what your goals are. Then they can hold you to it, because that’s what Mastermind Groups do for each other.

A good example of this is what happened to me the first year I joined a Mastermind Group. I went to a 3 day Mastermind Event that Summer and sat in the audience and set my goal to be a speaker at the event the next year. And not only did I set my goal to be a speaker, but I went on to the companies’ website that hosts the event and I posted that I was going to be a speaker the following year. It was actually posted on their message forum, and every other time I posted on their forum, I put under my name, “Speaker, Next Year’s Convention”. And guess what? I did speak next year at that convention.
Then what you want to do, once you have all of these processes going on, you want to do something to remind yourself of your goals. Go back once in awhile and take a look at the goals that you wrote down. Post something on the refrigerator to remind you of your goals. Several years ago, I ran a sales company and we had a goal board in my office. All of the people were paid on commission, so the better they did, the more money they made. I always encouraged them to bring in pictures of what they want. Be it a car, a vacation, a bracelet or something. I told them to bring in a picture and put it on that goal board so that every day, when you are sitting at that desk, you see that picture. I have my own goals posted at my desk. So, do something to continually remind yourself of your goals.
In conclusion, your goals need to be written down, specific, measurable, believable, set up a deadline for yourself, reassess your goals on a regular basis, be honest with yourself, and tell other people what your goals are. You will for sure be much more likely to hit those goals!

So there is how I feel real estate investor goals should be set!