Do You Compare Yourself With Other Real Estate Investors?

Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

Do you feel like you're way behind other investors regarding your real estate goals? Do you look at others and sometimes feel like you haven't made much progress compared to them? Today I'm going to remind you to just focus on your journey because you don't know what others are really going through!

You can read this entire episode here: bit.ly/3v40ASh

Watch the detailed explanation about Matt Onofrio's $35M alleged fraud here: bit.ly/3hBSk99

With the year coming to an end, and a brand new one starting, I thought it would be useful to talk about being happy with our journey, not comparing ourselves with others. There's something happening right now in the real estate industry with a particular person that a lot of operators were looking up to him, he was growing incredibly quickly, in a very short time, he was hanging out with the who's who of real estate, and he was even writing a book for Bigger Pockets. He had just started investing in real estate for the very first time, three to four years ago. It turns that, as of now, everything may have been a fraud.

When I did my own startup over a decade ago, it was not only one of the most difficult things that I have done, but I also learned that it's so important for us to focus on our own things and never worry about "the competition" and the fact that all of our competitors are doing so much better than us. One of them copied everything that we were doing and raised millions of dollars. The other also raised a lot more millions of dollars. The one that copied us at the end of the day ended up going out of business. And the other one that had raised even more millions of dollars, the CEO ended up terminating his life because he had purchased a ton of inventory that he was not going to be able to sell. These people were on the news, they were on the tech startup blog posts being written about nonstop. The CEO that unalived himself was hanging out with top people in the tech industry, including the Zappos founder, and a few other people. So it was very easy to be thinking that I was so far behind them. Look at all these amazing connections that this person has, what now?

If you are worried about the competition, you are wasting precious time. And my point is not about the competition with regards to real estate, but it's more on the comparison aspect of it, how we can easily think that this other person is so much further ahead than me, what am I doing wrong? There was this nurse guy that at least two people asked me to interview him this year. In the last four years, which is exactly the same amount of time that I have been doing real estate full time, he managed to be a "real estate mogul" worth $160 million.

At the end of 2019 up until now that this person started from zero investments to being worth $160 million, to being now investigated for fraud. Before this fraud investigation came along, the thought did cross my mind, what am I doing wrong? I am far behind his numbers in the same four years. I did reach out to him twice asking him to come over the podcast and he never responded. I was really more curious on how did you go from zero to this much in just four years. This is fantastic. Fast forward to now, just two weeks ago, I get my daily real estate digest and it says that Matt Onofrio, this person that was previously a nurse and became a very successful real estate investor is now being investigated by the SEC for fraud. And I thought... nurse... that sounds so familiar. And it turned out that he was the person that everybody has been telling me about that had an amazing story. It turned out that it was not so amazing, after all. He is now facing federal bank fraud charges.

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