Tune in to the newest episode of the Self-Storage Podcast, in which we’ll discuss the best investing opportunities for women. Our today’s guest is Monick Halm, a successful real estate investor (with over 1,300 rental units in her portfolio!) and an advocate for social change.
Monick Halm is on a mission to educate and help women enter a hyper-masculine world of real estate investing. She created an inspiring platform and wrote the best-selling book in an effort to help 1 million women achieve financial freedom.
Monick’s platform, Real Estate Investor Goddesses, offers the foundation of real estate education for women. There’s nothing more inspiring than a tight community of people supporting each other and pushing forward together. She also hosts a podcast (with the same name)!
Monick’s current investment focus is syndication, something we often discuss here. Monick loves bringing creative and devoted people together, and as our #PlatformForChange segment guest, she’ll be sharing her insights into the investing world to help encourage you all. In combination with self-storage investing, you won’t have trouble finding passive income streams for women anymore.
How Do I Start Investing?
The burning questions for all aspiring real estate investors revolve around beginnings. However, there isn’t one particular piece of advice on what you should do. Quite the opposite – there’s lots of advice available for both what to do and what to avoid when starting with real estate investing. You just need to learn from experienced investors so you can create a unique wealth-building strategy.
Monick Halm has almost 15 years of investing experience in residential properties, vacation rentals, ground-up development, commercial real estate, and more. She started with house hacking, just searching for a strategy to thrive in the expensive LA market. Then, she transitioned to small multi-family homes and house flipping, until she entered the world of syndication. Nowadays, she’s bringing all kinds of investors together and earning creative passive income streams in the industrial and commercial real estate segments.
What Is the Best Real Estate Investment for Beginners?
Since there isn’t one solution that fits all, let’s discuss Monick’s transition. When she started with syndication, she mostly held apartment buildings and large multi-family units. However, she didn’t want to be a buyer on the seller’s market, so she started looking for other opportunities in different investment categories. Hence, the interest in commercial real estate, especially the industrial sector.
The logic behind it: The retail sector might be slow (given the popularity of online shopping), but all these businesses still need storage units, distribution centers, etc. In addition to manufacturing facilities, there is always going to be demand for industrial properties! It’s not a feeding frenzy, like in the residential or retail sectors, and returns are around 8-10%.
You might think that industrial real estate isn’t for beginners. When speaking about commercial properties, most people think about large triple nets for offices or retail stores. But commercial real estate includes so many deals, and they are for everyone! You can become an investor with very little cash. Just scout out the ACE syndication deal.
Self-Storage Investing and Passive Income
Self-storage investments can produce passive income streams for women if the investors choose to be less involved. Syndication provides the opportunity to generate passive income with barely lifting a finger. Investors are “silent partners” who offer capital, while the syndicator does the heavy lifting with the goal of increasing profits for everyone.
By pooling their resources together, investors can acquire an entire property, turn it into a self-storage facility, and segment it into up to 700 units for lease. Even if you lose a tenant, you lose just 1/700 of the income (as opposed to 100% income in a single-family house or an industrial building with just one tenant).
Obviously, due diligence must be done when you’re deciding to get in on any kind of deal. Choosing secure steady deals in secure industries, such as self-storage, will get you similar returns with much fewer risks. Self-storage is booming even during economic downturns, and it’s going strong through the entire Covid-19 pandemic.
Real Estate Investing for Women
Passive income streams for women aren’t a different asset class, of course, but women’s approach to investing can be a bit different. We’ve been taught to avoid risks and lay low all our lives, so it takes a bit more effort to catch investment opportunities. Hence, the idea of a tight investors’ community for women comes into play. In order to increase the chance to succeed, we need to stick together, support and encourage each other, and keep educating ourselves.
Once you build an investing foundation, you can find what works best for you with ease. Taking a full-scale approach to real estate investing and putting in lots of time and effort will be more profitable in the long term than putting money in real estate investment trusts or other low-risk/low-profit options. If you conduct thorough research on every deal and smartly invest, you don’t have to be afraid of getting in on profitable deals. Risk aversion can be a great indicator when you want to avoid sketchy deals, but it can block you from finding lucrative opportunities.
Conclusion
A community (whether it’s ours for self-storage investors or Monick’s) can get behind large syndication deals that wouldn’t be accessible for typical investors. You don’t have to invest where you live! Invest where the money is at the current moment. To recognize, seek out, and capitalize on these opportunities, you need the help of experienced investors, and we couldn’t be happier to offer our assistance. Learn more about how to start in real estate investing and earn passive income!
