Our Top 3 Successes in Real Estate Investing

Life by Design

In this episode, Jessilyn and Brian Persson discuss their top three real estate investment successes, emphasizing the importance of just getting started and staying consistent with a plan. They share their journey, beginning with their first property purchase in 2009, and explain how continuous learning and skill development have been key to their growth. Despite early mistakes, which they share in the episode, they stress that patience, education, and a steady approach are crucial for long-term success in real estate investing.

Listeners are encouraged to take action, even with limited knowledge at the start, and stick to a consistent investment plan. Jessilyn and Brian highlight the value of upgrading skills through books, podcasts, and networking events. They also share how teaching others about real estate has further enhanced their expertise. To help listeners get started, they have a free resource for couples to download from their website (see link below).

Resources discussed in this episode:

• The 3 Mistakes that Keep High Achieving Couples from Building their Wealth, Freedom & Living a Life they Love

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Contact Jessilyn and Brian Persson | Discover Life By Design:

• Website: DiscoverLifeByDesign.ca
• Instagram: DiscoverLifeByDesign
• Facebook: Discover Life By Design
• Linkedin: Discover Life By Design

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Transcript:
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to The Life by Design Podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We help couples fast track their financial growth by aligning their money mindset, developing transformative wealth strategies, and providing personalized guidance so they can confidently achieve a life of freedom and abundance together.

Brian Persson: [00:00:25] With the growing need for couples to find alignment and invest confidently in real estate, we created the 'Riches, Relationships and Real Estate' program. Our goal is to support you in achieving your financial and relationship goals together. If you want to know more about what's stopping you from building your wealth, make sure to go to discoverlifebydesign.ca/wealth and download 'The 3 Mistakes that Keep High Achieving Couples from Building their Wealth, Freedom & Living a Life they Love'.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:54] Today's topic, we're going to discuss our top three successes in real estate investing. We share openly and happily how we invest in real estate on all our podcasts, but today we wanted to share what successes we've had along the way and how real estate really just works for us.

Brian Persson: [00:01:15] When we were putting together the notes for this podcast, I was thinking about what most people think is a success in real estate. It's usually along the lines of, I have this many doors, or I have this many million dollars in property, and we actually are going to take a little bit of a different tangent on that, because we do have a few million in real estate, and we do have a bunch of doors, but that's not really the success of how we really got about to be successful in real estate. Would you agree?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:47] Absolutely. People will look at me and they were like, you own multi-millions in real estate? They just think, wow. It's like, if you only knew the 15 years and all the steps and mistakes we took to get here. Yes, it is 'wow', but it wasn't an overnight 'wow' or even a year 'wow'. So we broke it down into the smaller bites to say, what were our successes along the way? Our first takeaway was, we just got started. You hear this a lot on anything you want to do or decide to do is, the hardest part is getting started. But it was like, I want to invest in real estate, let's do it. And we just took action.

Brian Persson: [00:02:34] And that's what I'm getting at is, it's not really the number of doors or the millions of dollars you have in real estate, it's who you become, and what do you have to do to invest in real estate? Everybody knows real estate is a good deal, that's not what's at issue here. It's, who are you to become when you invest in real estate. That's what we found as our successes, and the first step of that was just doing it.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:59] Getting started, buying one door.

Brian Persson: [00:03:02] I know we've been in a lot of rooms where people are just paralyzed by the amount of information that they're getting at a real estate conference where they're, three days and they teach you all about, right from the beginning to the end, of how to invest in real estate, and these people get paralyzed by it.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:21] It's overwhelming, I don't blame them.

Brian Persson: [00:03:22] It was overwhelming for us, too.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:25] Yeah, absolutely. Exciting. Absolutely high energy exciting, and then you go home after the conference is done with all this enthusiasm like, I'm going to be a real estate investor, I'm going to have hundreds of doors, I'm going to have millions. Then you're like, I don't even know where to start right now. It's over, I'm just gonna go back to my day job.

Brian Persson: [00:03:43] Wait, I got to call my mortgage broker first? Then it all grinds to a halt. Would you say that we knew what we were doing when we first got into real estate? No, not really. We jumped and we learned on the way. That's a little bit of our personality, is to jump and build a parachute on the way down. I think, don't be reckless about it, but I think more people need to jump not knowing the parachute is fully together, that they're going to have a safe landing. Sometimes you just got to get out the door.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:16] For example, when we bought our first condo together, I knew I needed 20% down and I knew I would need a mortgage. Other than that, I knew nothing. From that little knowledge, I went, how much money do I have? What kind of a property could I afford? That's what we bought, a crappy little condo in not a great neighborhood, but that's how we learn. We just bought it there. Now, I'm not recommending everyone do that, there are definitely better routes and paths now we've learned. But that was our, just get in action.

Brian Persson: [00:04:49] Get a little bit more information than we did before you started investing. A lot of people ask me when I go to networking events, how did you do it? It's like, through the fire is usually my answer. If I was to rewind it all and do it all again, I would still start as early. You can't see the future, it's really hard to see the future in that sense, but I would hire somebody, a coach. Or have gone to many more real estate events before investing into it, and at least got my toes into what it seems like to invest in real estate.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:25] Let's let the audience know, we bought our first property together in 2009. You didn't go to your first real estate event till the end of 2016 or 2017. This is how long it took for us. We listened to podcasts and read some books, but to actually get ourselves in rooms and really get educated, that's years before we figured it out.

Brian Persson: [00:05:47] I think about those seven years fairly often and it's like, imagine if I got in those rooms and imagine if I hired a coach in 2009 rather than 2016/17 when we started getting into those rooms. That seven years, oh my god, the amount of stuff we could have...