Have you thought about investing in real estate but aren’t sure how to get started? While real estate isn’t necessarily easy to do, it’s a form of investing that is worth learning how to do.

If you’re ready to expand into this form of investing, then use one of these methods for getting started in a relatively safe manner.

Use Crowdfunding Sites & Invest With Groups of Investors

A great way to get started is to join forces with other investors. This spreads the risk across more people and it also opens up the ability to invest in larger deals.

These deals might be in residential or commercial areas. If you invest with others online, there are two things working in your favor:

• Lower minimum investments: It’s now possible to invest with as little as $500.

• You don’t need to attain the status of accredited investor: This old rule has been eliminated in certain kinds of real estate deals.

This is a crowdfunding method for investing in real estate and there are many online platforms that allow you to invest in this way. Here are two examples:

Fundrise, which charges zero to three percent in fees and allows you to get started with as little as $500

RealtyMogul, which offers a mixture of mixed-use, residential, retail and commercial investment opportunities.

If you’ve recently used a retirement calculator and didn’t like how your current projections look, this newer method for investing just might be what you need to improve those retirement numbers.

Flip a House

This might be your best option if you have some expertise with construction or do-it-yourself home improvement. Flipping houses can be rewarding because of the immediate profit realized upon selling.

This method involves purchasing a house that needs work and is priced under market value. The next step is to fix the house before selling it for profit. The key to success with flipping homes is to get good at finding bargain houses that don’t need as much work as the average person might think.

You do need to go into any house flipping situation with the knowledge that the house might not sell as fast as you predict.

Buy Rental Properties

Buying a home and then renting it out comes with many advantages. The first is that you pay down your mortgage with the money provided from your renters. The second is that you will most likely report a paper loss on the rental and save money on your income taxes each year.

The key to purchasing rental property is making sure that your renters pay more every month than you pay out in mortgage, home insurance and tax payments.

If you don’t want to deal with the daily headaches that might come with tenants, then consider hiring a property management company to do all that on your behalf.

Invest With Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT)

A REIT is an excellent way to get into real estate without being a hands on investor.

A REIT is a fund that gets established to invest in mortgage instruments, stocks and bonds inside the real estate industry. In this case, you are using the stock market to invest in properties.

Different types of real estate investment trusts exist:

• Mortgages

• Equity

• Hybrid

Put simply, a mortgage REIT invests in mortgages, an equity REIT invests in properties, and a hybrid REIT is a combination of those two strategies. All three of these pay you through interest dividends from other people paying down their mortgages.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different ways to invest in real estate. Some are more time intensive while others allow you to simply put money in and benefit from the expertise of others.

Don’t try to do too much at once. Decide on one of the above strategies and take the time necessary to learn everything about it. Then, take action and start investing.