What makes investing in commercial real estate attractive in the United States, how to get over paralysis by analysis and how to find a great business partner? We are interviewing Reed Goossens, author of Investing in the US, the Ultimate Guide to US Real Estate.

Multifamily has different expenses than a hotel, and the hotel has different expenses than a self-storage facility. So you need to understand line by line what those expenses are. You need to understand how to read a P&L statement. Once you know how to read a profit loss statement, you want to understand how to generate revenue and reduce expenses, or maintain expenses at a reasonable rate. That’s how you learn how to increase the net operating income and thus the cash flow and thus the overall value of the asset. If you don’t know how to do that, then you need to start there.

If you do know how to do that and you’re trying to get out of your own way for analysis paralysis, you have to surround yourself with people who are doing it, because analysis paralysis just means that you are too scared. You haven’t seen or experienced enough things or people around you to order to be confident to go do it. So the analogy I like is, if you’ve ever been jumping off a diving platform at a pool and it might an intimidating diving platform, it’s fun, it’s scary, but, your friend does it first and then you’re like, oh, he did it, I can do it. It’s the same thing with analysis paralysis. If you’re not surrounding herself with people who are actually doing commercial real estate deals, then you’re not going to have the confidence to go and do it yourself. But what it does mean is if you are surrounding yourself with people who are doing commercial real estate deals, maybe you can learn from them. Maybe they can be a mentor of yours to give you credibility, to give you the confidence to go out and be an operator. The analysis paralysis can be overcome by understanding numbers, understanding how to find deals and surrounding yourself with the right people in order to be successful, in order to use their credibility or to ride on their coattails towards helping you become a successful operator. If that’s what you want to be.