Hello, friends and welcome to another episode of Ask Marco where I answer your investing related questions.

Today's question comes from Jamie and Jamie. He or she says, hi Marco, huge fan and longtime listener of the show here. I have pondered the idea of reaching out to your counselors for a very long time now and haven't pulled the trigger yet. I have had several friends and friends of friends, et cetera, contact me over the years to let me know that they can help me get my portfolio started. Much like your counselor's offer. My question for today is how would you suggest we as investors evaluate our options of the service providers like your company out there? What are some of the factors that some can offer, offer better than others? Thanks very much for your thoughts and your continued efforts to help upcoming investors like myself enter the world.





Well, Jamie, thanks for the question and I appreciate this. Uh, it's a good question because there are options out there, several, not a lot, but there are different options to approach your real estate investing journey and building your portfolio. So I'll just kind of break this down into two general categories if you will. What are your options and then I'm going to maybe spin off a little bit and just kind of cover some of the benefits that are available to you as you get to the top of the food chain if you will. Think of these options like escalating value added services and there's essentially four layers. If as I like to look at it, you could make this very simple but this is certainly not the best option, but you can search online and you can go to one of many websites like zillow.com or realtor.com that's plugged into the different MLS, multiple listing services around the country and it just aggregates all that listing data.

Of course, all these listings, if they're listed by real estate agents or brokers, you may ultimately be connected to a real estate agent or broker, whether it's the listing agent or not. But someone is going to be involved in the transaction if it's listed on the multiple listing service, but shopping on Zillow or realtor.com or Trulia or you know, some of these other property websites is really just nothing more than searching online. It's like going to amazon.com if you're searching for a product, be it earbuds for your smartphone or a new TV, you're not going to get a lot of guidance and counseling and advice and recommendations. Sure, there's reviews online, which is helpful, but you're not going to get a whole heck of a lot more than that. The next layer up, if you want to call it that, it's really your agents and brokers.

The reality is, and this is not only my own personal experience, but just conversations with many, many people over the years in the industry, the majority, great majority of real estate agents and brokers are not well versed, if at all when it comes to real estate investing. They're great salespeople. They understand real estate laws and listing and selling property. And you know what makes a home sell to a home owner? And this is great, I used to sell real estate myself, but they often don't have a great knowledge or a lot of knowledge when it comes to investment property and how investments work and all the different ways to analyze financial performance and your rates of return and all that good stuff. And that's not a knock in any way, shape or form. In fact, a friend of mine, uh, an elderly gentlemen who has been a real estate broker for most of his life actually wrote a book and I forgot the title, but it's something about the 1% and what he's referring to and specifically geared towards real estate agents.

But it's really a book about how 1% of real estate agents understand real estate investing and actually invest in real estate. The other 99% know about it or know nothing about it at all. And I don't know where you know he gets those stats, but I've heard those stats many times over the ...