First Rental Property

Networking is an art that not all people can master.

If you are involved in real estate investment for any period of time, you will have to rely upon other people. These other people will be members of your real estate investment team.

In order to be a successful and effective real estate investor, you need a team of professionals behind you. These team members can include people such as real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and real estate lawyers, just to name a few.

Chances are that if you are somewhat serious about real estate investing, you are constantly networking in order to ensure that you have the best team of professionals working for you.

There are many factors to consider when selecting someone to be a part of your real estate investment team.

Experience and knowledge of the subject matter are two very important factors to consider when selecting professionals for your team.

Meeting these people through word of mouth or through networking events are two ways that I would recommend you build your team.

I caution you here, as some networking events don’t always live up to the hype.

There is nothing more funny to me, than meeting Googly Eyed people at networking events.

What is a Googly Eyed person?

A googly eyed person is someone that you meet at a networking event, however they have one distinguishing feature. You begin talking to them, as you normally would do with anyone that you meet at these such events. The characteristic that distinguishes this person is how incredibly shifty their eyes are when you are talking to them. Their eyes are so shifty, they look like googly eyes.

In my mind, it is clear why their eyes go googly.

They are not focused on the conversation with you. They are looking around the room, to see who else they can speak to next. They do not perceive you as being an ‘important’ person. They want to stop talking to you and move on to talk to someone more ‘important’.

I was at a networking event today. I walked into the room. With the first person that I made eye contact with, I walked over and introduced myself. As we both started talking, this person’s eyes started shifting all over the place. It was getting so distracting for me, I had to pause and wait for him to make eye contact with me again, so that I could continue my sentence. It was clear to me that this guy did not perceive me as being important. He was looking around the room to see who was entering into the room.

I believe that if you notice a person having googly eyes as they talk to you, it can serve as a clear indicator towards their character.

I continued my conversation with this guy for a few minutes longer. Just as I was wrapping up my conversation, his googly eyes made eye contact with another person that he knew that was standing close by. Once she walked over, I used this as my reason to exit the conversation.  I said goodbye and walked away.

After speaking to this guy for such a short period of time, I was able to read so much into his character.

My thoughts were that:

1) He was annoyed talking to me
2) He wanted to speak to someone more important
3) He found no value in our conversation

I could tell all of this, just by watching his googly eyes shoot all over the place as I was talking to him.

Later in the event, I was seated at a table with 6 other people. I was having a conversation with one gentlemen, who was very focused on our conversation. He consistently looked me in the eye, and did not shift his attention, despite numerous conversations happening around us. I could tell this guy was focused and locked into our conversation.

So what does all this mean?

Who cares if someone is googly eyed, or not?

I care, and I will tell you why.

As a real estate investor, when I am assembling a team of professionals to work with, I often find myself in networking situations.

When I am speaking to people in these environments, I want to only talk to and focus my time with those professionals that are focused 100% on our conversation.

I don’t like it when people are shifty eyed, because this tells me that they have some sort of other agenda, and that they don’t want to be talking to me.

As a result, I only focus my time talking to those people at networking events that are focused and passionate about the topic of the conversation.

You can tell a great deal about someone if they have googly eyes!

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