The skills needed to be a successful foreclosure investor are varied and need to be honed over time. The skills necessary depend on what level you want to be involved in the business. However, the more skills you are competent in, the more profitable your real estate business will be.

I have skills in many areas of the real estate business: construction and destruction, evaluation and negotiation, sales and marketing, mortgage and title experience, and persistence and persuasion. It takes many deals but not many years to accumulate these skills and the best way to get started is to go do deals. You may have challenges with your deals but do not give up because the rewards are wonderful.

One of the areas you are going to need to be successful in the foreclosure business is evaluating deals--looking at numbers, understanding numbers, crunching numbers and making sure a deal works out on paper. Now, is this important? Yes, its important. Do you have to be a mathematical wizard to understand this and be successful? No, there are definitely books and software on basic real estate finance that you can use.

Your experience will be your best teacher and evaluator of potential deals. You can also use a real estate calculator. There are many easy ones to use, and there are difficult ones. But real estate calculators are necessary to compute things such as amortization tables, loan to value and principal and interest payments. Get one and learn to use it. You will need to be able to estimate the costs of products, repairs, taxes, and insurance. But once again, experience is the great teacher.

One of the major skills you are going to need in the foreclosure business is persistence. Youll need it in all aspects of the real estate business, but more so in the foreclosure business. There may be times you need to go back to a house you have targeted three to six times before you actually get to talk to the homeowner. Persistence is one of the major keys to success in this business.

Another skill that you need for successful foreclosure investing is the ability to read people, the ability to understand what they are going through, to have empathy and to understand their situation. I think one of the reasons my company is as successful as it is is because I can put myself in the place of the homeowner and have a tremendous amount of empathy. Homeowners feel and appreciate that because what they want is someone to have confidence in. If you can transfer that feeling of confidence and knowledge to the homeowner you will enjoy great success.

An additional skill youll need in the foreclosure business is to have skin thick as a rhino. Youll have doors slammed in your face, youll have people yell at you, people may even throw things at you. Don't take it personally. Turn around, walk away and move on to the next one. Don't let it bother you. This business is a numbers game. These people you have approached will probably end up being tossed out of their houses, and you will continue in the business if you can adapt what I call the rhino skin.

The foreclosure business also requires understanding the legal process in regards to foreclosures at a basic level. Know the laws and procedures for the state in which the foreclosure takes place. You need to understand the particular laws and nuances of your state. Its imperative that the real estate investor understands from start to finish the foreclosure process, the bankruptcy process, and the redemption process if the state has one. Bankruptcy can be a very daunting process if you dont understand the differences between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcies.

It takes a practiced, hardened, persistent, creative, intuitive, persuasive investor to be successful in the foreclosure market. Many investors in the real estate market have some of these traits. Few have them all. The person who has all of these traits is the person who is ideal for the foreclosure market.

As you begin to buy real estate you will become exposed to evaluating property and to appraisals. A critical component to being successful in the business is understanding what you are doing in regards to putting it all together, getting ready to buy, making sure you are doing a deal that makes sense financially and making a profit. The buying and selling of distressed real estate--basically, the business of foreclosures--is a tricky and risky business, especially if you are not prepared. The spoils go to the ones that are prepared.