By now, if you’ve read my last three lessons on interns, you know all the great things interns can do to help you grow your real estate investing business.
You also know the steps to finding an intern for your business, and you’ve written your list of projects that will help you grow your business.
And I’ve even helped you whittle down that list of projects and tasks to those best suited for an intern (vs. an employee or assistant/VA) to work on.
Today, I’m going to take things one-step more in my final lesson: I’m going to show you the top 10 highest leveraged (and most profitable) activities for your interns…
The Top 10 Intern Projects for Growing Your Real Estate Investing Business
1. Implement Home Study Course Strategies
How many times have you found a new strategy, bought a new online course or manual and have yet to find the time to implement it? I know that I have a wall of courses and informational materials that I know I will never have the time to implement. Well the great thing with interns is they have been trained their entire life to review courses (they are going to school after all).
What we have our interns do is take the courses, online information/membership site information, manuals, etc. and review them and report back to us on what they have learned. We then have the intern come up with an implementation strategy based on what they have learned in the course or manual. We then sit down and review both the material summary and implementation strategy and work with the intern to implement the strategies into our business.
No longer are courses and manuals growing dust on our bookshelves, but instead getting implemented in our business to help us grow our business.
2. Build Your Team (Title, Escrow, Attorney, Realtors, etc.)
Do you ever wish you had more time to find all the members (or new members) of your real estate investing team? You know you need good Title companies that can close creative real estate deals; escrow agents and attorneys to help you migrate all the legal issues around real estate transactions and of course great Realtors and contractors. And let’s not forget all the other vendors you need to find and work with when buying and selling real estate – insurance companies, utility companies, landscaping and cleaning companies, direct mail companies, etc.
The laundry list of people, companies and organizations you have to work with and keep track of on a daily basis is daunting in itself. You may already have all these people on your team but what happens if someone goes out of business or you move into a new market that your current vendors don’t service? Or better yet, what if you feel you could be getting better service or less expensive service if you just had the time to interview new vendors or support?
Interns can help you not only build your real estate investing team but they can also help you evaluate new vendors to cut cost or time or headache due to a current vendor. Or, they can help you find an entirely new team if you are moving into a new area.
3. Manage Paperwork/Deals/Processes
Just as the amount of people you have to work with and have on your team in a real estate investing business can be daunting, as can be the paperwork and process in doing real estate transactions.
Most real estate investors would benefit from an organized review of their real estate investing acquisition and liquidation strategies, process and systems (if they even have some!). And likewise for your buy-and-hold cash flow rental properties’ management processes.
An intern with a management or business degree can help you dig into your systems and processes and find areas for improvement that can save you tons of time, headache and likely, money, over time.
4. Build Your Website/Blog (and Help with Adding New Content Regularly)
Building, and most importantly maintaining, a website and/or blog can be very time consuming. With everything involved in managing your real estate investing business it’s highly unlikely that you, as the investor, will have time to create and manage your website.
Interns are Internet savvy and, those wanting to go into the fields of marketing or IT, need to have a portfolio of online work to show prospective employers.
With some of your ideas and guidance on how you want your website or blog to look, an intern can greatly improve your online presence.
5. Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
Just like your blog and website, there’s just not enough time in the day to be on all the social media marketing platforms that you should be on in order to keep up with your competition, research your market and have a presence on the social media sites.
Interns are also great with social media. You can have them use these social media platforms to connect with potential private money lenders or to research individuals to join your team. You can also provide them training to interact and post to these sites on your behalf to create your authority presence in your area of real estate investing.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) + Property Videos on YouTube, etc.
Again, just like everything else on-line, you probably don’t have the time (or knowledge) to do it all.
With proper training, your intern can help you get better rankings of your website(s) online through search engine optimization (SEO).
Likewise, they can help you video the properties you have for sale and upload them to YouTube and other online video sites to help you market your properties and your business.
7. Marketing for New Deals
The sky is the limit for the ways an intern can help you market for new real estate investing deals. Whether it’s an old tried and true technique that has been working for you but you don’t have the time and bandwidth to work on or manage it any more; or if it’s a new method or technique you want to try out. Interns can be a lifesaver for your marketing efforts and bring new ideas and enthusiasm to your business.
8. Marketing for Cash Buyers
Like marketing for new deals, interns can help you also market and find cash buyers. Whether this is reaching out via the social media outlets, direct mail campaigns or something else, interns can help you in each stage of your cash buyer search including maintaining a list of cash buyers to market your properties to.
9. Private Money
We all know too well that the easiest way to invest in real estate is to utilize private money. Interns can help you identify and reach out to potential private money lenders. Whether it’s implementing strategies you’ve learned in courses like the “Private Money Blueprint” or helping you pull together a presentation for a group of potential investors, interns can serve invaluable in your private money search endeavors.
10. Grow Your Business (Projects that You would Like to Do but Have No Time or Resources to Undertake Personally)
As I’ve mentioned over and over the main reason you want to hire an intern is to grow your business. By now you’ve made a list of projects and picked the best ones for interns to work and should have gotten a few more ideas from my top 10 list if they weren’t on your list already.
Now it’s time to take your own list and determine which projects or tasks that are left that are really the best and most likely to help you grow your business immediately.
Already, savvy real estate investors and business owners are out recruiting and hiring interns to help them grow their businesses. Unfortunately, if you don’t take the first step and find an intern, you will be left behind. Interns have helped me grow my real estate investing business beyond my wildest dreams and I know they can help you do the same.
Now that you know the value of interns, how to find them and the best tasks for them to tackle, I want to leave you with one final gift. To find out more information on how you can hire interns (and to download our free report about “101 Ways Interns Can Help You Grow Your Real Estate Investing Business”) just visit the following website: http://www.internprofits.com/rei/. You’ll also gain access to a free video training course on how to set-up your own internship program.
Enjoy!
Consider Interns – Click here to learn all the great things interns can do to help you grow your real estate investing business.
Find Your Own Intern(s) – Click here to learn the steps to finding an intern.
Delegate – Click
here to decide which projects and tasks are best-suited for an intern (vs. an employee or assistant/VA) to work on.
Justin Lee
has been a full time real estate investor since 2003 when he flipped his first property. Since then he's gone on to do over $25 Million worth of real estate deals in his own personal portfolio. Although he invests primarily in the United States, he's closed the majority of his investing while living outside of the USA in his hometown of Vancouver, BC, or while traveling in Europe or Central America. Unlike strategies that don't work in today's market, Justin's been able to figure out what works in real estate, and has a keen understanding for what it takes to invest in more expensive markets like San Diego, CA and Washington, DC. In 2008 Justin hired his first interns to help him with his real estate and online marketing companies. Since then, he's helped thousands of entrepreneurs work less, make more, and provide mentorship to the next generation of entrepreneurs through the power of an internship. Justin currently lives in Vancouver, BC with his wife Dreama and children Stella & Sebastian and enjoys being a husband, father, snowboarder, sports fan and real estate investor. He also enjoys providing mentorship to future entreprenuers through his unique internship programs which allow him to get more done and work less than ever before.