Given we’ve been talking about our property goals, I thought it fitting to give you some ideas on how to go about setting your goals, if you are struggling with it or just haven’t got to it yet.

The start of the year is a time that many people traditionally set themselves some goals for the year to come, also known as new year’s resolutions.  How many people, however, actually take this process seriously?  Serious enough to develop a plan of action, to implement their plan of action and to track their progress against their goals?  Certainly far fewer people than those who write down their new years resolutions.  Goal setting, however, is a powerful tool and often a key trait of successful property investors.  Setting goals achieves several positive outcomes:
– Focuses your mind on the target
– Motivates you to strive to achieve
– Creates a sense of accountability by making your goals real

So how do you go about setting goals for your property investing?  I like to break my property goals down into several key areas:

Education – continuing to educate yourself about property is essential no matter where you are at with your property investment knowledge.  You can do this through the internet, books, magazines, seminars, property groups, courses and mentoring programs.

Projects – this is where I set goals related to property ‘projects’, which to me means things like purchasing a ‘buy and hold’ property investment, doing a renovation project, doing a development project.

Systems – this is where I set goals related to the management of my property portfolio and projects and instituting scalable and repeatable systems that I can use to run, build and grow my business.

Writing good goals

It’s important that we structure our goals in a way that inspires us to want to achieve them.  So write goals that are positively framed wherever possible.  Also, make your goals ‘SMART’ goals, that is, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.  The most important part of that, to me, is measurable and timely, so make sure you goal is not ‘fluffy’ and set a timeframe.  So when you are writing your goal, ask yourself, how will I know when I have achieved this goal?  This will help you to frame yourl goal in such a way that it is measurable and has a designated timeframe.  So for example, rather than saying your goal is to ‘lose weight’ you’d say your goal is to ‘lose 5kg by March 30th’.

So, lets take each of these areas and work out some goals as examples to clarify the process and to inspire you to write your own goals!

Education Goals:

• To attend a property investing seminar by March 30th.
• To read 10 book about property investing by December 30th.
• To do a property investing course by June 30th.
• To subscribe to and listen to a property investing podcast each month during the year.
• To find 3 people who invest in property and spend an hour talking to them about property investing.

Project Goals:

• To purchase a property and rent it out by June 30th.
• To save $10,000 toward a deposit by March 30th.
• To have $40,000 deposit for an investment property saved by June 30th.
• To complete a renovation project by December 30th.
• To purchase a development site by October 30th.
• To source finance for a property investment purchase and have pre-approval by March 30th.

Systems Goals:

• To setup a tracking spreadsheet for my property portfolio by January 30th.
• To purchase and implement property investing software by January 30th.
• To document my property research process and identify checklists that I can create related to property research, purchase and management.
• To create checklists for property research, purchase and management.

Now these are just some examples to get you thinking, be careful not to overwhelm yourself and really just create one or two goals in each category only.

The next step after this is to look at your goals and write down the actions you’ll need to take.  We’ll look at this stage of goal setting in part 2 of this article.