Believe it or not, making your real estate dream team only requires three people. You need an attorney, a CPA and a deal maker. A deal maker is either a real estate agent or a wholesaler. For the attorney and the CPA, don't go cheap. A good attorney is worth their weight in gold.
You're investing thousands of dollars. Make sure the deal you're working on is going to be protected. As an attorney, that's what I do. I make sure your company structure, as well as the deal itself is going to flow.
My job is to make sure you're not going to lose your money based upon a legal technicality. Or some other event that's going to cause you a legal headache.
A CPA is also worth its weight in gold in terms of tax savings. Especially after your company gets off the ground a little bit, you're going to want to hire a CPA who's also a real estate investor. A CPA is going to know exactly how to structure the tax savings that's gonna save you the most amount of money.
Now you might think, wow, I have to pay these people a lot of money for a bunch of years and that's going to cost me a ton. Well maybe not. If you're doing a repeatable kind of business, then it's gonna be the same types of legal documents, as well as the same types of taxation that's going to occur every year. Now there's going to be some minor tweaks here and there to the legalities as well as the tax structure.
But any generic CPA at that point is going to be able to look at the model used by that attorney and by the other CPA that's a specialist and be able to tell you where you're gonna need to tweak a tax return. That will mean long term savings for you.
As far as the wholesaler or your real estate agent goes, these are really the crux of your business. Because those are the people that are going to actually be the ones making you money.
As a real estate investor myself, I pay my team well. After all, what they really want to do from their position is cultivate a few number of select clients (hopefully you) to be able to build up their business.
This benefits all parties involved because now they don't have to market their business out to hundreds of people and deal with all of the phone calls and headaches from that. And you get to make consistent profits.
If they could just have a few clients and be able to buy all of the properties it makes their life a lot easier. This also means that you're competing against much less people, in terms of who's negotiating after the fact about what that particular deal is going to be worth.
This increases your leverage in being able to make more money working with those people. Now you might not be able to have enough money to be able to keep a wholesaler exclusive to yourself. Which is fine because...
Think about the way you can JV (joint venture) with other partners in bringing in other money to investing in a particular deal. If you combine that JV strategy with a series LLC, you're able to get into more deals at no additional cost.
Remember, the series LLC structure allows you to create as many series as you want. And each one of those series is treated as its own LLC.
That means you can bring in their own JV partner. With its own EIN member, operating agreement, everything that you would do in a traditional LLC. And bringing the money there, the Series LLC doesn't require you to have any additional filing.
So you can literally create a new series on your desktop with a new operating agreement bringing in that JV money and closing the deal with that wholesaler before anyone else is gonna be able to do it.
I hope you found the above information useful. And remember, when it comes to making your real estate dream team, don't cheap! Especially on the CPA.
Scott Royal Smith is an asset protection attorney and long-time real estate investor. He's on a mission to help fellow investors free their time, protect their assets, and create lasting wealth.
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