Investing developing how did you start, get confident, & mistakes to avoid pls?

How did you start in property investing or renovating or developing and how did you get your confidence and skill level up.
I guess all beginnings are hard and you do need to know what you are doing or mistakes can be very costly .
I'm older around 50
And have a lower income
So have to be very careful and low risk in anything I do .
I'd love to succeed and master and be confident in buying renovating developing maybe even in commercial property .
I'd love to have security and pass skills knowledge security to my kids .
How did you learn to be handy if you werent before and when did you start feeling confident .
I know about books CDs courses and hardware stores that tell a bit of handyman skills but nit enough for me to be confident necessarily . Any books CDs courses you recommend or personal experiences of how you got your confidence and skills to invest renovate develop pls?
What mistakes can you pass onto me to avoid also .
What books also are around about mistakes to avoid pls?

Here's my story if it helps.

I'm 36 now and was basically a builders labourer for about 10 years.
Studied a little bit of residential building construction in TAFE to get my license, but dropped out.
Started with my own PPOR renovation, pretty much a 90% complete rebuild.
Then built a duplex a couple years ago.
Now building a 5 and 6 townhouse development, looking to keep all as investments.

I strongly believe it helps a lot if you have practical experience and ability to design and problem solve.
Also have desire to create and build structural things, and work with all sorts of wonderful materials.

If you're wanting to do it because you have passion for it, then you should find the drive to continue in good and bad times.

If you're doing it for the money, maybe consider other ventures you have more experience in and passion for first.
It can be done, but will take time and it's more risky, especially at your age and a lower income.

Good Luck.

I bought my first house when I was young and foolish. It was a dump, and I fixed it all up and it was lovely. And then sold it 5 seconds before the boom for $notmuch and the thing is now worth a fortune. Bah. Fixing it up wasn't so bad, just chattered with other people about what to do and went off and did it. When I bought it the bank decided I was on an income of about $18k a year - I was a student and my only income was tutoring/lecturing.

Second house was also a dump. Fixed that up too to make it nice to live in. It was supposed to just be a weekender but we ended up living in there fulltime. Didn't make any money on this one, but it was fun.

Third house I bought on the back of hearing about this forum - it looked like it could be cleaned up, subdivided and some money made from it. Figured if people on this forum can do it, we can too. And we did, although the HIA order really bit into the bottom line. Mind you we're still waiting for the buyer to get finance, the house is just under contract, not sold.

Now we're in a nice new house and I'm sick of renovating crappy old houses lol

If I was on a pension now with no kids and trying to get financially independent I'd be getting another house around the $40-50k mark, tarting it up, selling it for $110k and repeating a couple of times. But maybe not at 50, although I know a couple of people over 60 who do this kind of thing. If you're less handy and have more money to start with you could build a new place in a regional on some cheap land, do the garden up, sell and repeat. Too hard to do this kind of thing in the city on an extremely low income unless you've got a massive amount saved up and don't need to deal with banks.

motivated 5555 said:

How did you start in property investing or renovating or developing and how did you get your confidence and skill level up.
I guess all beginnings are hard and you do need to know what you are doing or mistakes can be very costly .
I'm older around 50
And have a lower income
So have to be very careful and low risk in anything I do .
I'd love to succeed and master and be confident in buying renovating developing maybe even in commercial property .
I'd love to have security and pass skills knowledge security to my kids .
How did you learn to be handy if you werent before and when did you start feeling confident .
I know about books CDs courses and hardware stores that tell a bit of handyman skills but nit enough for me to be confident necessarily . Any books CDs courses you recommend or personal experiences of how you got your confidence and skills to invest renovate develop pls?
What mistakes can you pass onto me to avoid also .
What books also are around about mistakes to avoid pls?

Click to expand...

The mistakes will be endless,but from my small experience it all comes back to a few items,mindset-from the first time you look at the block-
land value -location-plumbing-storm water layout that is one item most over look,i have read most books out there on development and some are over 250 pages,but it always come down to price size and location and your mindset,there was more money in just buying old large inner city properties and split the blocks then sell,and let the next person in line take on that stress,and worry and hope they come out the other end with 20 cents still in their back pocket,because right about now in inner Brisbane several small developers that were going gangbusters till about 12 months ago are now about to bust very quickly..imho..

From my experience stay away from development and focus on renovating/investing.

I have had plenty of clients think they can make a quick buck buying a couple of blocks of land and doing a townhouse development on it.

Don't work that way.

Those that know what they are doing, have the industry contacts and some mighty big kahoonas can succeed. Many can't.

My first property was a bust. And I learnt an important lesson. Student accomodation should never ever ever ever ever be touched.

Been more successful after that.

I use my professional skills and public information to assess the situation and see whether it has the potential for decent growth or decent rental return.

Developing is fine as long as you got a good consultants (builders, architects) working for you. Also you need to have LARGE cash buffers. You can't do a 90% lend because you will die a very quick death. Only once you are cashed up from investing in other areas like Ideo has pointed out, you might consider development.

If I was doing it on my own, I wouldn't go the route of renovating. Maybe types of properties that were really simple, like cleaning up of the yard, painting and cleaning.
I wouldn't be flipping houses either. I like either rent to owns, (because no repairs and maintenance) or cheapie properties that are CF+. If tenants want to paint, let them.
I guess you need to consider what you are expecting from investing. Do you want this to supplement your pension, or completely replace it.Do you want a home..or somewhere as a base, because you want to travel a lot.

DA..agree completely with Aaron_C
The one we did could have gone really bad. We were so naive. We believed our first carpenter. He quoted us one price, and it was almost 3x. We had access to funds luckily, but it took us to the limit. It was a very scary time. It worked out to be one of the best projects financially, but that was only because we realised very quickly in, we needed to fire our first carpenter. If we ever did it again, at least now we have experience.