**Transcripts are auto-generated.

Erwin  

Real Estate Investing has become such a craze online in the last five years and I’m so over it and recording today’s guest, Dominique Shannara, who is a real estate investor with a couple of small multifamily properties in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she lives and she happens to also practice. Be a practising certified financial planner and a Chartered Professional Accountant. Hello and welcome to the truth about real estate investing show for Canadians. My name is Erwin Szeto. In case you’re new this show this is one of the top podcasts in the space, including being recently ranked number 81 in the business category and all of iTunes across the world. Dominique is a successful real estate investor believes real estate is an effective means to build wealth. But so why is she over the craze? I don’t blame her. I’m seeing many many questionable education organisations pushing real estate investing using questionable questionable methodologies and unqualified coaches. There was one influencer attempting to hype him and his coach up as they’re driving around together in a car around Ottawa. And they made some disparaging disparaging comments about a property that they were offering on saying was a slum and they needed a whole bunch of work. Funnily enough, the owner of the building saw the video and commented on the post. They also shared that the property was not listed for sale and they had received no offer the most are backtracked privately. I’ve seen the screencaptures they apologised and admitted the video was created to build their influence create hype on social media. So how embarrassing is that, such as the truth about real estate investing, there are many fakers out there. And they continue to post on social media, picking up fakers and other private mortgage companies in receivership there is $50 million in money missing. There were promises of high returns. The accuser is being accused of spending lavishly on private jets, and supercars and owning several luxury condos, all over the world. If you Google, Greg Martel and my mortgage auction Corp, you will find the news. I’ve posted the link to the CBC in the show notes. Really bad news for investors involved in yet another reminder that how important it is to do quality due diligence. It’s always required, never going all in on one investment. Experience matters. Diversification keeps one out of trouble. Speaking of experience, for example, cheering I made a investment in the development project using some of our registered funds. And the builder has over 40 years experience over 40,000 houses and condos. They are one of the biggest builders in Ontario. So when someone has that kind of track record, I do give me a lot of confidence versus a newer MC project. Like that happens to have $15 million missing. Very popular question out there as being a landlord hard. Yes and no, I’ll just say yes, to keep it simple. And to my experience is not nearly as hard as compared to all the other options out there, including having a job building a business, there is no easy money out there. And direct ownership of real estate is the most efficient strategy to becoming wealthy. I know because my team members and myself, we’ve all done it. Over 45 of our clients have done it as in making a million dollars or more intentionally on income properties. landlording is honestly much easier if you treat it like a like a well run business. And unfortunately, the majority do not. The majority are often the source of those nightmare stories. If my team and I can help you on your investment journey. Simply just reach out to us on Iwan at infinity wealth.ca My team and I would be happy to hop on a zoom to guide you help guide you and point you in the right direction. If you’d like to like to book a call directly with me understand my availability is not the greatest I think I have like one maybe two appointment slots for all May. And it’s May 12. Monday I’m recording this but reach out. I might have more availability in June. Of course there will be some homework involved. I will continue to evolve dossier. Again think that’s I when I have you i n at infinity wealth. That’s yeah, I’m a personal sad note. A good friend of mine shared with me that his daughter has an eating disorder, which is just terrible to hear his wife, the mom had to drop down and work from full time to part time to supervise meals, which can take up to two hours to oversee that the daughter finishes all her food. I checked chat DBT and it tells me that nearly one in five teenagers may have similar symptoms of eating disorders. My friend’s daughter also competes in a sport, her passion in her sport that takes up five, six days of her week. It’s unfortunately one of those sports that where certain look in body type is that is considered ideal. When I told cherry about our friend’s daughter, I explained to her that I’ve had the same concern for years. Hence I vetoed our daughters interested in participating. That’s that same sport a couple of years ago, even though I did go against both my or my daughter, my wife and my mom. Instead, I’ve chosen it Babies that produced the greatest physical skills, strong self defence, and spend honour does CrossFit Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, gymnastics and track, she will be we’ve asked her to choose a team sport as well, because we believe there’s lots to be learned from team sports of leadership, both being a good team member and being a leader. I specifically chose CrossFit because in our gym, and understand that we’re our gyms a little bit different than most, it’s a lot more chill, especially a lot more chill than what people think is a CrossFit gym. And folks who go to our gym, and also we there are folks who are very serious, there’s quite a few varsity athletes that attend our skip are in like AAA athletes that go to the gym. But for the old folks like myself, it’s pretty chilled. And for the more serious folks that are there, they’re always eating or drinking protein shakes in the gym, including the ladies that treat food as they treat food as fuel for the engine. They’re the engine, of course, and not something that should be deprived of, in order to be skinny, including, again, Nicklin, the ladies and some of those ladies run circles around me in the gym. My point is that I make decisions today based on what I see happening, risk I see happening 510 1520 years down the road. And that is why we bought each of our kid already. investment properties. You know, before the turn the age of one, one kid has a duplex. The other tip is a student rental. We’re also adding to our whole life insurance policy to pay for our massive tax bill from when we pass. And also that’s why we make business decisions today, in our businesses that push us out of our comfort zone. You’ll hear more about it eventually this other business that we’re looking at acquiring when it’s done. Yeah, because we’re looking for a brighter future. But also we want our clientele and our businesses to align with our core values, which include helping people and on the real estate side, creating rental housing supply, creating. My point is that we all know what the future problems are coming, like eating disorders, more concerned about my dad for my daughters and my sons, and how today’s young people can’t afford houses, thanks to governments all over the world, printing money. Whatever you invest in today, whether it’s a gym or buying an investment property, it’s both are hard. But time will pass and those who put the hard work in today will get ahead in life. on to this week’s show. Our guest is tired of real estate. Tired of the real estate investing craze, at least the craze has died down significantly during the downturn. Several education companies are gone. Coaches of some countries have gone quiet. Some of them going bankrupt, such as the real estate cycle, we can get flushed. We have domination, our owner of 100 wealth, who provides managed investments, financial planning, Insurance Group benefits and accounting services. She has CFO to her rental property business, her husband serves as the CEO oh, here’s the notes on the tools. And they have a plan to stop growing their portfolio at five properties. Even though Dominique attended, attended a weekend course years ago, and hired a coach of over two years. Well, I’ll let her explain. I don’t want to spoil it. But she’ll explain why she does not follow the hype of aggressive growth and wants balance her life running her own business, a self known real estate investment stuff that she does. She’s also young think we talked about starting a family. She’s still young, of course. Plus, we chat about why she hired an accountant, even though she is one and how she’s fighting inflation both in her work in her portfolio. Please enjoy the show. Oh yeah, it’s always a treat. To me. It’s always a treat to have someone in from the financial planning world on the show. So please enjoy the show. Hey, Dominique, of keeping you busy these days, tax returns a lot of them. How much of your business is accounting?

Dominique  

I’d say it’s mostly March and April of every year like we do taxes vary seasonally. So in March and April, it takes up like maybe 80% of my workday. But the rest of the year, we do everything else. So we focus on the investments in the insurance for the rest of the year. So maybe revenue wise, like 15 20% accounting stuff.

Erwin  

You wear many hats. Yeah,

Dominique  

I like to think I wear three hats. You know, I don’t want to wear too many more hats. And that’s part of why I’m not as actively involved in our real estate holdings anymore. Because it was it was a lot of hats.

Erwin  

They probably argue you wear more hats, but Okay, for the listeners benefit. Let’s go through the hats that you wear.

Dominique  

Sure. So I own my own business Chouinard well, so that’s where I offer those three hats services I mentioned. So we manage investments. So I’m mutual fund licenced we sell insurance like life insurance, disability insurance, we manage group benefit plans for employers, and then we do tax returns or other related accounting services. So that’s in my business separately from that we have four rental properties that we own personally with me and my husband. So I’m not involved in the operations of them so much, but I think just by being married by default, we still talk about properties a lot. And I tend to be more involved when it comes time to like mortgage renewals and those kinds of things. Tax Time, obviously.

Erwin  

So yeah, it sounds like your function is very much like the CFO. Yeah,

Dominique  

I’d say. Yeah. The wife of the CEOs hash guy that does everything.

Erwin  

Very cool. Very cool. So you have sort of designations as well.

Dominique  

Yeah. So I’m a CPA. So that’s the path I originally took. I went into accounting worked at an accounting firm, and then got into financial planning that way. And I’m a certified financial planner. So that’s the commonly known financial planning designation.

Erwin  

So I think you’re only this second or third CFP, we’ve had on the show. Oh, nice. No one listens. Anyway, it’s not

Dominique  

seven listeners? Or is it 13? Now, are you up to 13? Now,

Erwin  

it depends if people share the podcast thermometer on so yeah, right.

Dominique  

Or if they play it in the background, you know, they’re doing something else.

Erwin  

So my point is that not many financial planners hold actual real estate. Yeah, like some, some will do some REITs or whatever other investment, a passive investment vehicle for real estate, but you’re rare. Are you not? Is that your experience when you talk to other CFPs?

Dominique  

Yeah, like I would say, in our profession, like holding a property, and especially doing those strategies, like, you know, refinancing, what we call a burr in the real estate world, that’s considered pretty risky. If you talk to a certified financial planner, or someone that studies that area, like that’s considered a high risk strategy. But if you talk to a real estate investor, that’s considered low risk, because it’s real estate, right? It’s like, well, buying real estate is low risk. So what I find funny in bouncing around those two different worlds is the difference in definitions of risk. Because, you know, you go to buy a duplex and or even a single family, and you can argue, we all know, there’s a limited supply of real estate, and that there’s always gonna be a need for people to live somewhere. So from that standpoint, you could argue that’s low risk, but it’s this the fact of having a lot of your wealth in one thing, you have less diversification, right? And the fact that these values are not promised, right, like when we aim for an ARV when doing a project, like that’s based on a professional opinion, but you don’t know what your contractor is going to bill, you is not necessarily what they agreed to on the estimate, what breaks that year is not promised. So there’s a lot of aspects that I think everyday people would consider risky. But when you talk to real estate investors, they’re like, No, it’s the lowest risk investment possible. And it’s interesting,

Erwin  

right? Especially coming from your world. Yeah, especially if you network a lot with a lot of financial planners.

Dominique  

Yeah. Like I consider from an objective lens, like I consider the holdings we have to be like, kind of medium high risk, like what we’ve been doing, right. And we’ve only ever done one project at a time, and also people that do multiple construction projects. And that’s crazy, right? Once we experienced that three and a half percent rate hike last year, right, we were faced with the reality like, wow, if we had more going on, if we had more projects we took on, we could have been in serious trouble. Right. And so we grew our holdings, like fairly slowly, I guess, based on the hype that was going on at the time. But we’re just I say we maybe I should just speak for myself, I’ll let Richard tell his piece. But um, I think I’m just really glad that we took it slow and kind of took our own tolerance for risk into the picture, instead of just listening to the hype and what other people were saying like, Oh, take what you’re doing and just do double that, because hashtag fast growth.

Erwin  

Where did you see that? Because I

Dominique  

was discussing for a while, like I did a, I constantly do a purge, you know, I’m just deleting people, or there’s this newest Real Estate Group now, is it? I don’t know the name. I don’t want to guess. But there’s a newer one. And they started adding me on Facebook and you know, posting like, oh, we do this, we do that and have your investments been down last year, buy real estate instead? And I’m like, oh, you know, I keep deleting people. But yeah, the Internet can be a pretty, pretty unsettling place. You know, like, it’s just really easy for people to type something and post it and not really realise the consequences of what they’re saying.

Erwin  

Yeah, it’s really difficult to fact check. It’s actually hilarious when people are called out. I remember I remember seeing on social media giveth and taketh away. I remember someone posted that took a selfie outside an apartment building and so they had a tie it up. And then the actual owner commented, like, that’s my building, I had no idea is for sale. Right. And then he shared that he shared the DNS afterwards, the original poster apologised, saying they’re just trying to hype hype themselves. Yeah, social media is not real, you know?

Dominique  

It’s not and honestly, the people that I thought were incredibly successful. And, you know, people that I thought would have had millions of equity by a certain point all of a sudden disappear, right? And then you hear that they’ve gotten insolvent or that they’ve had to liquidate and it’s like, it really puts things in perspective, right in your mind, you’re seeing them post and do all these things. And so you have a picture of how they are financially or otherwise. And then you hear like, that wasn’t at all the real Look at all this equity was fake, right? It was just this kind of, you know, based on these inflated values and it’s just shocking. I think people underestimate how many properties or overestimate how many properties you need just to be financially secure or financially comfortable in the future. Right, like, you know, and I think the reason I think I look at it differently is based on again, being a CFP and doing financial projections for a living like if I build a financial plan for somebody, right, you punch in their property, estimating it goes up in value, 2% a year looking at the pay down of the mortgage, looking at the other assets, paying off your personal mortgage, eventually selling those turning it into an income. Just a regular family, having one or two or three rental properties can be extremely well off in retirement. And not everybody needs to retire early. Because if you just have a job you love, that’s your way of contributing to society. You know, like, I think retiring early became this other internet craze that people had, like, once you reach certain goals, it’s like, what else should be your goal. So people kind of felt the need to make retiring early their goal, because it’s just like a goalpost that you can move up, you know, and it’s strange, like, he asked me when I want to retire, my dad asked me that the other day, he’s like, do you want to retire, you’re probably gonna retire at 40. And I said, I’m retiring at 65. He goes, what I’m like, Well, why would I want to retire at 40? What do you want me to do? You know, I’m just gonna sit at home and watch Netflix and go take my dog for a walk at 1pm and go for a nap at three. And

Erwin  

I think you part of it is that you understand that the return, especially the cash flow is not nearly sufficient in this market that we’re facing. Even if you wanted to, if you really difficult generate enough cash flow in a short amount of time.

Dominique  

Yeah. But I think if you liquidate your portfolio, you kind of could write like, say you’ve got five properties, and you kind of sell one at a time and live off of that income. You could, you could do a combination of that, but definitely not on cash flow from rental income. I think people learnt that the hard way. You know, as soon as the interest rates went up a couple percent are like yeah, nevermind. So we have thankfully, we have cash flowing properties even still in today’s market. But our cash flow from what we got three rentals that are fully rented out one that’s ongoing and construction, but it’s just enough to top up our income a bit and to pay the taxes that we have to pay on our rental income.

Erwin  

Can you told me a bit about your investment strategy? You have three rentals that are fully tenanted what kind of property? Are they?

Dominique  

Yeah, so our first one we bought in I think 2015. That was a duplex. So we lived upstairs, rented out the basement, kind of classic starting point for people. So we renovated the basement into a one bedroom apartment. We rented it out pretty much right away. And then we moved out of there three years later into our second property, which in what if we did the same thing? So we’d lived upstairs, rented out the basement? So that takes us to what year 2019? Yeah, is when we bought our second property. So at that point, we had 1234 units, because two of them were in our basement was actually a huge house. There’s two different units in the basement. And then after that, what did we do we refinanced our first property at some point, so that was great. Then we bought our third rental and August of 2021. I think I’m getting my timelines, right. No, in August of 2020. Thank you. That was a 20 minute building. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. It was a vacant triplex for 80,000. That’s been vacant for a very long time. What happened to so that kept Richard really busy throughout COVID. So you know, basically revamping the entire thing, creating three units. And then that one, we did a refinance. So that was a classic Burr, I guess this was on Cameron Street,

Erwin  

in Thunder Bay. Yeah, all in

Dominique  

Thunder Bay. Then we bought our primary residence in November, so three months ago, and so we moved out of our rental and then rented out that unit. So that helped to offset the cost to our new place. And then last but not least, Richard just bought a, I think three unit building, which he’s currently renovating. So he closed on that like two months ago now. So in February, and that one, I haven’t even seen the spreadsheet on it. So I’ve been very, very removed from that one. But I’m, I’m trusting him with the operations and he knows what he’s doing by now.

Erwin  

So to me, this doesn’t sound very risky.

Dominique  

So if you talk to anybody in real estate, they would say like, this is not risky, right? Especially we’re doing one at a time. We have plenty of capital reserves, like we’ve got by now. Like we’ve got lots of home equity line of credits, unsecured line of credits that we have access to, that we’re able to do to basically use our own capital for renovations, which is super nice.

Erwin  

And your husband’s in renovations, like Sorry, what is Richard Richard right.

Dominique  

Yeah, so he was a painter wasn’t is a painter. Perfect. After only for years, and so he’s like, he doesn’t necessarily do a lot of the other trades, but he’s very familiar with them. He knows how to interact with contractors, which I think is a huge part of being a real estate investor, right is knowing, knowing the basics of all the trades, and then knowing how to interact with people and how to know which parts your job which parts their job, what to reasonably expect, right? How to monitor the job site,

Erwin  

you have contacts, and as well, you may already know who was good at what the job? Correct, they probably already know, would be on budget on time.

Dominique  

Exactly. And he knows like, what’s a reasonable quote, and what isn’t right, more than most. So I always said, like, if you know, if Richard left, or if you died or something, I would not own these rental properties. And you know, I’d be it’s very much a team effort. And it’s something that I think if you don’t have experienced in the trades, you’d be very careful, right? It’s kind of like going into a mechanic and having no idea and the mechanic could easily take advantage of you.

Erwin  

There’s a reason that I show up. When I show up to see my tenants I show up in my minivan, I don’t show up in the other car. Same thing with like, your protip for listener, you know, if you invest in Thunder Bay, or any anywhere outside Toronto, you show up and you look like Toronto, when you call and you have a 416 number, automatically, they think something else that they think they have impressions of you, which aren’t usually favourable for your pricing. Exactly, exactly. So where’s the risk in this?

Dominique  

Well, the risk is the leverage, right? The risk is that are you 100% of finance, like what? Well, the risk is that your payments on your mortgage and on your debt are higher than what you’re bringing in. So you have to make up that difference elsewhere. Right. And I think we all know people that right now they’re paying more towards their properties than what they’re making. So they have to go and thankfully, a lot of these people make good money at their jobs. So they’re able to make just minor lifestyle sacrifices to make it happen. But if you find yourself at that extreme, where say, you know, you need a grand a month just to keep your properties going and you can’t find it. You got to make quick decisions, right? If you have to sell a property quickly, you know that you won’t get what you want for it. Whenever you have to sell a property quickly, you have to take a cut on that amount and pay a lot of selling fees, breaking mortgages, mortgage penalties, right. There’s a lot of costs to not having your house in order that come in. And I think that’s risky. I really do. Like if you when you run out of cash, and you don’t have cash, and we’ve seen that we’ve seen people you know, kind of put on putting their stories like hey, I need cash needed, need alone need an unsecured loan. Once you’re at that last straw, sometimes the only solution is insolvency. And being anywhere close to that would spook me a lot.

Erwin  

So I’m gonna read some lines from your Facebook post that got some attention, your 69 comments. I don’t know if you’d call it viral. But a lot of people in my community community commented on it. It’s got attention to toxic positivity while avoiding any mention of insolvencies and losses, quote unquote it’s all been about your mindset, oh boy. And constant more and more and more. It’s just getting exhausting. I can’t seem to find a way to purge it from my feed no matter how hard I try.

Dominique  

I found a way by the way since then, I found a way to leave Facebook but yeah, I just started unfollowing like constantly. I alternate between unfollow and unfriend. You know, like if I, if I can see who it is, I know them but they’re annoying then I unfollow but if I see who it is, I can’t place them from a hole in the wall. Like I don’t know who it is unfriend. And I just had to do that for like two months. And yeah, eventually my newsfeed had better things on it takes time takes a long time. It’s from yours, you know, like, I think in 2020 is when it really picked up and I started whenever I get a friend requests, and it was someone with 46 mutual friends. And their profile didn’t have any red flags. I accepted it, right. But then it became hundreds of people, you know, over time. And now I’m like, Why did I accept all these people? And they’re all just trying to pitch their real estate something or get some investors or

Erwin  

me because I can tell because I have some friends and they’ll take a course. And then their social media profile, I will put, you know, goes nuts in terms of how often they post and what they post and they change their look. They change their hair,

Dominique  

all of a sudden they’re very polished. investment savvy, you know, storytelling. Yeah, they took a storytelling copywriting course on the weekend too. And there they are telling stories about how they made it from the bottom and now they’re here, you know,

Erwin  

you have two properties. So now they’re here. They’ve arrived.

Dominique  

They can teach you for only $2,000 a month.

Erwin  

And you speak from experience. You’ve attended some of these programmes.

Dominique  

Yeah, so again, with without names you know, we’ve been to like One weekend event at some point during COVID, actually, and then we’ve been part of a coaching programme for two years I was in there in the first year, it was like a joint thing. And then Richard did a second year. But what else? I don’t think I’ve taken any other like weekend things again, I was never big on doing you know, the too much information thing I think we all know, like, once, you can only receive so much information on investing, like eventually you just gotta invest. Right? Just Just do the investing. And lately, I don’t know what’s happened lately. But there’s a lot of those weekend conferences. Have you noticed that? Like, it seems like every weekend, there’s two or three real estate conferences happening?

Erwin  

Yeah, the greed is still high, in my opinion, even though Yeah,

Dominique  

yeah. And I wonder, you know, to an extent, I think that’s one of the hidden costs of real estate investing is like, do these people count their time that they’re investing and attending these events and networking? You know, all those hours, you know, you could be building a business, no one needs to attend them all? No, but I see people like attending a lot of them. And sometimes I wonder like, are they actually investing? I don’t know, like, I think a lot of them are or sometimes people are attending them as a coach or as a mentor? That’s a little bit different.

Erwin  

For them. They’re raising capital to show up to my events as well.

Dominique  

Yeah, I don’t know. I think I think time is the real wealth. You know, it’s like having time having control over your time. And when you’re spending so many hours a week on, quote, unquote, investing, like investing is supposed to be something you do without needing your time, right? It’s something you do, and then you put your hands up, and then you collect evidence. That’s what investing is? Well, I think it’s a really unfair comparison, when people compare, you know, building a real estate business to putting money in mutual fund, like it’s complete apples and oranges. It’s not at all the same thing, right? Like, I know some people that work in a sales role, like say they’re working a commission based job, and they invest in RRSPs, or TFSA, or what have you. And if they took away their time, from making sales revenue, right making Commission’s to go and build a real estate portfolio, they would make less money, right? They make less money from their commissions, and then they’d be divvying up their attention between these two things. And that’s what I think nobody’s factoring in. I don’t know, that’s, that’s the feeling that I got, I decided for myself, I was like, well, am I going to keep splitting my attention? 5050 between real estate and my business? Or should I go all in on my business? Because you can only wear so many hats, as you mentioned, right? And, you know, we’re not even parents, yet I realised at some point in the future, I’ll have a third hat that I’ll be wearing. And that’s a lot of hats. So you kind of have to decide, like, do I want to be a generalist that I do 17 different things and make a little bit of money at each one? Or do I want to be just really good at one or two things and get some of my free time back. I remember at some point, like my Sundays, were all dedicated to bookkeeping, for our rentals and my business to planning out the week ahead, when it came to the rental properties to doing our cash flow updates to doing you know, all this tracking and doing all this planning for our construction projects that we had going on and updating, you know, where are we so far in the budget? And I was like, you know, is this going to be my Sundays for the rest of my life? Is there another way that we can do this? So now that I even decided I don’t do our accounting anymore, we brought on an external accountant, and especially because we’re both incorporated now in our businesses. So there’s kind of a lot going on. So I decided, You know what, like, I, I rather have a third party, advise us on this and be more like in the the business owner seat versus the accountant seat? And I’m learning a lot from that. Right? So

Erwin  

you you want to okay, what are you learning? What are you learning from having an external accountant, second set up,

Dominique  

I’m learning the corporate side a little bit more. So we did, we’ve always been working with self employed people a lot, right? People that are not incorporated. And now, I’m getting to apply a bit more of those, like technical concepts that I’ve learned in school, or that I’ve learned through my CPA programme, but that I haven’t seen that much in detail in real life. So I’m learning a lot from that, you know, and as we know, you know, a lot of questions people have is, should I incorporate? Should I buy properties in my corporation or not? So doing a lot of that analysis for ourselves has been very interesting. And then what you’ve decided for yourselves or university for ourselves. I mean, that’s maybe another topic, but we we decided that we’re probably going to put a stop at five properties, to be honest.

Erwin  

I mean, not buying another one or whatever. Yeah,

Dominique  

exactly. If we buy another one, we sell one and, you know, buy a different one, but we’re gonna keep five, five properties. And so with that in mind, being that they’re already purchased personally. We’re going to keep them personally. And then we just To pay ourselves an income from our businesses, to supplement whatever other income that we need, so that we were able to control the taxable, you know, the taxable income that we have,

Erwin  

why Cabify? That’s No, it’s a, you know, full time real estate investor.

Dominique  

Because we don’t want to be, you know, neither of us want to be a full time real estate investor, we’ve made that decision. Right. And that’s been kind of pondering for a while. And again, I don’t want to speak too much on Richard’s behalf. But it sounds to me like, he likes the idea of having a business, you know, being a business owner, and actually having an occupation. You know, like, I think there’s something to that, like when you can go out and earn an income and do a job, you get this kind of immediate feedback loop, you know, like, say, yeah, like, you just do a job for somebody, you invoice them, they’re happy, you get paid. Like, there’s, there’s something to that, where you feel a direct, sort of looking for satisfaction. Yeah, you just feel like a satisfaction, like you’re actually involved in a community of people, right, I think, sometimes we lose sight of that, you think back to an old fashioned village, you know, you had the baker, you had the mechanic you had, you know, everybody had their job. And they all exchange goods and services with each other. And if you can go back to even a small, like a different version of that, you just have a more fulfilling life. And I think, you know, that’s what it’s all about is having a fulfilling life, where you say,

Erwin  

it’s gonna be that tiny, where you have that you can have that kind of small community where each,

Dominique  

you know, like, I’m, I’m a financial planner. So I do financial planning for people, I go and buy my coffee beans from our local coffee roaster. You know, I come in and say, Hello. And then I go in and purchase, you know, a nice coffee from our coffee shop nearby. And I go and get my lunch from the lunch person across the street. I know the owner like I, I’m really, I’m really all about that. Yeah. And it just feels, you just feel a connection to your community, when you just interact with people like that, right? Like, I’m involved on our neighbourhood Association board. And so there’s a lot of, you know, just being in contact with small business owners that have all kinds of businesses. And yeah, I think once you disconnect yourself from that, and you’re no longer you’re just, you know, sitting at home collecting dividends or collecting rental income, like, you’ll notice a lot of people that have quote, unquote, retired early or reached some kind of financial level, they pause for a while or maybe played video games for a year and you know, started pick it up maybe a, I don’t know, drinking or drug habit or something. And then they pause and then they go, Wait, is there something more to life? And then they go on, they start a business, they all do they all start a business because they realise that starting a business, you can still have some control over your time, at least in the long run, and you have more control over what you do what you focus your attention on. And even though financially they don’t need to, we all need some kind of belonging, like some kind of role that we that we play right?

Erwin  

Japanese called iki guy. Oh, yeah, there’s, there’s actually a word for it. It’s a neat words. It’s iki guy like it’s, it’s so memorable because it’s it’s a funny sounding word. Like Tim Ferriss talks about as well. The the Japanese believe that you need to have to have something to keep you going. My dad’s doctor even tells his patients never retire completely. Because you still need the mental stimulus to keep yourself going. He’s no television where people just like, like the body shuts the brain just shuts down. When it’s no longer challenged and doesn’t have a business you know, you can have a grandkid great character, you know, people have puppies, whatever, choose whatever it is you do, but you know, I’ll probably be always be in some sort of investment something because I enjoy doing it.

Dominique  

Yeah. And again, it doesn’t have to be a paying gig, right? I think that’s usually what occupation but you could be a full time volunteer if that’s your thing. And you know, that’s still a way to get that fulfilment. It doesn’t have to pay you money.

Erwin  

I don’t know full time dividend collector sounds like a good gig. So Dominique, you’ve met many beginner investors in all worlds, both probably in your in your local community and also in like the real estate investor community, like my word eToro. Far

Dominique  

Yeah, in our local community a bit less. So I only know maybe two or three real estate people in our city, but

Erwin  

I don’t know I don’t know how else to ask this. But what kind of advice do you give the beginner real estate investor?

Dominique  

Ah, honestly, my my main piece of advice is to know why you’re doing it. And I think I think I mentioned this to you before like, you know, we’ve all heard of this seven levels of why exercise that you know, we’ve all heard it, please explain. So you ask yourself, Why am I doing this right? Why do I want to build a real estate portfolio for example? And then your immediate top of the mind answer might be to have financial freedom or something like that. And then the second layer is, why do I want financial freedom? And then you answer that and then you kind of keep going deeper and deeper. And this is supposed to give you like this amazing, blow your mind kind of answer as to why you’re doing all this. Can you share yours? Honestly, no, because I have done the actual started a couple of times, and it didn’t really compute for me. And I realised that the reason why was because I wasn’t really trying to build a real estate portfolio, like my husband was trying to build a real estate portfolio. And I was participating in that. But I never said there was stars in my eyes, and I want to build a real estate portfolio. So it didn’t really work for me. But I think that I’ve seen some people’s answers is like, I want to start a foundation and I want to change the world. And I want to bring wealth to other countries and these kinds of really crazy, amazing sounding answers. And I’m like, but is that really what you’re doing? You know, is that realistically what you’re building? Or why are you doing that? You know, I think the reason why most people start is because they want to be a little wealthier, right? You’re kind of looking at your status quo, you know, like, Okay, keep working my job and keep putting a little bit of money away. And I’m kind of stalled, you want to be a step above wealthier? That’s where most that’s what most people want at the end of the day. And what does that mean? Well, that might be being taking some time back, right. And then what they end up doing is spending double the time working to build this real estate portfolio, they would work their 40 hours a week job and then work 25 hours a week to build this thing and miss the whole time of their kids growing up. And it’s like, well, I don’t think you had your your why exercise really thought through, right? Like, do you want time with your kids? Or do you want to be worth 20 million when you die, pick one, right? And then they tend to gravitate to be worth 20 million by the time I die, and then miss a lot of that time,

Erwin  

which is why I what I preach to my clients is you know, real estate as a side hustle is very rewarding financially, it doesn’t have to be a full time gig. Like I can’t imagine people doing the career advice, like quit your job, that you make six figures for you that you trained your entire life for and that you are in your highest and best purpose, quit your job, go be a full time real estate investor, be a full time landlord.

Dominique  

Or take somebody for example, that makes I don’t know 150 grand in their job, but their job is extremely stressful. So there’s a lot of people in that boat, right? They make 150 grand, they get that that’s a good income. But their job is like, you know, their boss is terrible. The job itself is terrible, their customers are terrible. And they’re like I need to get out. And the ticket we’re told is like, you know, retire with real estate. So go from this job 150 grand to owning a bunch of real estate properties, and then start that cash flow, then you realise I can’t make remotely that amount on cashflow, and then it’s like, well then become a property manager, or then become some other service. Be a realtor. And it’s like okay, but that’s that’s not at all, being a realtor is not at all connected to owning a couple duplexes is two completely different things now. Sales Professional, which which can be great, but well, your CFP, that’s what you were told originally,

Erwin  

how safe is a realtors income?

Dominique  

I mean, it’s just similar to any commission, right? You could argue as a realtor, we’re always going to need houses, right, similar to the argument about real estate being safe, but replaced anyway. So the person making 150 grand, you know, plan a could be retired with real estate, which we argued might be, you know, not the best solution. What about option B is finding a better job that’s more fulfilling, less stressful, and that might pay you I don’t know, 120. And then you make up the difference by investing in an asset. You know, like what about, you know, like, I’ve got so many friends and people I know that change jobs during COVID for jobs that pay them less, and there’s so much happier, they have more time, they sleep better. And just by having good financial habits, they were able to maintain a similar lifestyle and just be

Erwin  

happier. So only one Lambo instead of two.

Dominique  

Right? Yeah, no more the example of going from 150 to an amount less than that, you know, and I think that nobody talks about that, because it doesn’t sound very sexy, you know, go with less paying job doesn’t have to be paying less. But what about like, open up your other options, whether they pay the same or they pay less, or hey, maybe that new job will pay more that’s that’s obviously a win win. But you don’t have to, like, leaving a job you don’t like doesn’t mean leaving having a job altogether. There’s a lot of fulfilling jobs. There’s a lot of people I know that love what they do. And if you can’t find a job you like, maybe being a business owner is your thing, right? If you’re a harshly independent person, or you’re a very, you know, you’re like a type A kind of person, you’re self driven. Being a business owner can be awesome. And that’s something that I did that I never thought it would do. If you asked me 10 years ago because I didn’t know a single business owner. No, no, my parents were teachers. I sold most of my parents friends were also teachers are some kind of administrative workers. And I didn’t really know business owners. I didn’t really know what it was. I thought it was just kind of a separate class of people that I didn’t understand. And so is never computed to be a business owner that’s not on your career map when you’re in grade 11 careers class, you know,

Erwin  

you mentioned you were a financial planner. For those who don’t know, actually, I think there’s some people I still don’t know, how does a financial planner make an income and they make their money? Before you answer. There’s one thing I find, I find the all these novice investors who have hired coaches who are like they pay like $10,000 for them. They don’t ask enough questions. Anyone that any service provider you’re hiring? No, I don’t think it’s I think it’s fair question. How do you make money this? How does a financial planner make money in this? Like, for example, Google Mail article, Rob Carrick. I liked his stuff, because he okay. Yeah, he’s all right. He shared a link to a Google document with the list of like financial planners. I’m not sure if everyone knows there’s like a wide variety of financial planners, but the for example, the one in the list, he provided they were fee based. Yeah. And I think often is started at five grand for a financial plan. Yeah, I’m lucky enough to have context from charity that I know, a lot of work. Yeah. To tell someone what to do financially. Does that be accurate? Is that your experience?

Dominique  

Yeah. So I mean, most of those, they’re called fee only fee based is actually a totally different thing. But again, it’s only something you would know internally in our world, but fee only is like a flat fee, right? Like, here’s your fee, I’m going to give you a financial plan and basically like a roadmap to follow. So that is something that usually only CFPs do certified financial planners. And that’s something that I kind of do like off the record, like I’m, I’m able to do that. But I tend to believe that from the podcast. It’s not off the record, it’s approved. I mean, it’s not on my website, like if you go on my website, it doesn’t say Dominique does straight up fee financial plans. I just kind of offer it to people as it comes up. But a lot of financial

Erwin  

planners, do you explain why you don’t advertise it? That’s a good question. So

Dominique  

one of the main ways I make money is by managing investments. So say, or when you had 500 grand, and you wanted it managed by a financial planner, so I could manage your money, and then I get paid, like a 1% per year fee, minus a bunch of fees that I paid my overhead. And so that’s the way that I get paid for that it’s an ongoing fee. And for that kind of client, I do the full financial plan, right, we do a financial plan, we monitor it, we, you know, stay connected throughout the year onwards as their life changes. So for those clients, I’m already doing a financial plan. And by putting both on my website, if it’s confused a few people, they’re like, oh, like, do I need to pay you to do financial planning? No, no, like, by having your investments with us, you get that already? Instead of having huge paragraphs on my website, explaining it, I’m keeping it simplified for now. Maybe, maybe I’ll add a few videos. And also

Erwin  

Clickbank generally follows that same model. So I find and they’re the bit of the biggest marketers. Exactly.

Dominique  

So it’s a similar model as the bank, just that we don’t only have funds from the banks, right. Like, if I was RBC, I would just sell RBC funds, like we’ve got, you know, fidelity is one of the main companies we work with, I think most people know what fidelity is. And so we’re, we’re an independent investment broker at the end of the day. But yeah, that’s, that’s the main way that I work with people. And what’s nice about it is it’s kind of like having a lawyer on retainer, right? Like you, you know, you have your financial planner, somebody’s got their money with me. I’m with them, either until they leave or until I retire. And as I mentioned, I’m not retiring till I’m 65. So I’ve been here for a while,

Erwin  

which is like, what, 45 years from now?

Dominique  

You kidding me? I’m not 20 years old. I’m 29 years old right now. So yeah, baby. I’m not I’m not counting the years, let’s just put it that way. But I think as a business owner, the end of the day, you can just kind of hold on to the the main parts of your business that you should be doing. And then why would you retire at that point?

Erwin  

How many real estate investors do you think have a financial planner?

Dominique  

I’m not that many. I’ll tell you a couple of reasons for that. What I’ve noticed and from myself, also, like I’ve had some people that are real estate investors come up to me to see you know, if we could work together. And I have to say it’s, it’s a little bit awkward on both ends, right. So a lot of times, I noticed that real estate investors have been trying to find a way to say this very nicely. They they tend to be very, I don’t know, I noticed the very cost cautious except for when it comes to hire a coach. You know, like, they’ll watch every expense very carefully and ask a lot of questions about whether they should really be spending that money. Right. But if a coach has to be rather like

Erwin  

listening, but wants to be a property manager, you should hear this.

Dominique  

Yeah. So I’ve noticed that, you know, I’ve tried to, you know, for example, making a financial plan, right, if you’re a real estate, if you’ve got some real estate holdings and other personal assets, and you’re like, I want to know if I want to retire that’s a common thing, right? I want to know if I, if I can retire, go into a financial planner, that is perfect, right? But I noticed is that there’s a bit of a disconnect between how a financial planner would calculate your ability to retire with your real estate, versus what the client or the person with the properties would think, you know, like, they might have a bit of a wrong idea of what their cash flow is. And then you kind of have to explain it to them. It’s like it gets very granular. And I’ve just noticed a bit of a bit of a disconnect. I don’t know how else to explain that.

Erwin  

Are you going on? Are we times I’ve talked to people about like, like, we were talking before we were recording, for example, you know, one way to be able to retire in real estate is actually sell something for assets when you’re ready to, you know, when you’ve stopped working, right,

Dominique  

which if you use a financial planning software, that’s one of the things that you can actually put in, right, so I could put in 2037, selling duplex B and estimating it went up by 2% a year. So you can have all that math in there, which is nice. That’s really hard to calculate manually.

Erwin  

But I have these novices, it’s like they’re trying to help, obviously, they’re trying to help. Again, they’re novices though, so they just told me want to just keep refinancing it. Tell me why don’t why not just keep refinancing?

Dominique  

Yeah, that’s assuming that it’s forever gonna go up and forever that interest rates are 1.7% a year? And, you know, happen? No,

Erwin  

and again, my financial plan, Dominique,

Dominique  

that’s another thing, right, is that we know that you can take a loan against an asset and live off of that, you know, and mathematically, yeah, you could do that, right. But in real life, what happens is people don’t actually want to live off of loans,

Erwin  

you know, especially if I’m paying 7% on it. Like, you

Dominique  

know, that the math checks out, you know, you can do that. But people behaviorally, and that’s another financial planning concept, like, they don’t want to borrow against their assets and live off of that, like, in your mind, you’d be like this, this feels wrong. I know, I’m paying interest. I don’t like the feeling of this. So people don’t actually end up doing that in real life. And that’s actually another concept that ties into, you know, that strategy with Whole Life policies. Right. Okay. I know, you’ve heard about, you know, you build up this whole life policy, and you can borrow against it. And it’s a super nice thing. Yes, but most people are reluctant at the end of the day to go and borrow against their whole life policies. And I’ve seen it, you know, we manage policies, like people that bought them 1020 years ago, you know, that put 1020 grand a year into them, like, I do hold a few of those policies. And, you know, it’s now they’re in retirement age. And, you know, we mentioned like, Hey, you have this cash value, you can borrow against if need be. And now, you know, all of a sudden, they kind of forgot that initial conversation 20 years ago, and they’re like, Wait, borrow, I gotta pay interest. It’s like, Yeah, you, you were told was not with me, but with someone else. Some other advisor that’s now long gone, and they’re hesitant, or they’re reluctant. They’re like, well, I rather not take out a loan. And I’m like, well, it’s not a loan, it’s a policy loan, you know, it’s not the same as having a loan with the bank. It’s a loan against your own assets. People, when you see the math, you see that a checks out. But when it comes to like, day to day behaviour, they’re reluctant, and people don’t like having loans they don’t like to. So it’s a very advanced concept, at the end of the day that only, like an advanced investor would be super comfortable doing.

Erwin  

Because the alternative is a sell. And I have a massive tax bill,

Dominique  

right? Or the alternatives to live off your other assets and consider that policy to be what you leave behind at the end of day, right, which actually, a lot of people do, I think we’ve got a lot of people that have Whole Life policies for 234 100 grand, and they’re never going to need the cash value from it realistically, right? They’re doing well, they’ve got businesses, they’ve got other assets, unless they live to like 110, they’re never gonna have to dip into it. The

Erwin  

whole financial education, everything, especially I always see people ranting about on Facebook, they don’t teach this in school. I really liked the way that I think it was. Actually, you mentioned the psychology money, like the 401k, for example, is not that old, because previously people didn’t have money to save. You didn’t need a savings plan,

Dominique  

or everybody had unions, and they had like pension plans through their work that were completely sufficient to take care of their needs.

Erwin  

And then, for example, I had two gentlemen that are starting to read. And they were telling me how these market dealer is. It’s only like 15 years old, because chains have never been this rich. That’s probably like when you’re telling you’re talking about this mindset that people have like they have trouble borrowing borrowing against their whole life policy, even though it checks out. Like that’s just Yeah, because they’re doing it for the first time.

Dominique  

Yeah. And again, I think they don’t have to either right like a lot of people should take if you’re an adult, you know, you’re in your 30s 40s whatever. And you still have room in your TFSA for investing. You still have room in your RRSPs if it makes sense for you to use them. Just maxing out both of those can put you in a really good Financial Position, right? If you’ve maxed out your TFSA, and your RSP, and you’ve got a rental or two, and you otherwise have a good income and like a reliable job that your skill set is always going to be needed. We already in the 1%, right? And I think people don’t realise that, like how well off you are, once you take some of those boxes, and I think I’m in a unique position, because I see people’s finances all the time, right? Like, that’s my job. So I, when someone comes to me and goes, like, Am I doing okay, and they’ve got, you know, only, quote, unquote, three rental properties and a really good job and a half paid down house. And I’m like, Yeah, you’re actually doing great. And sometimes they don’t get to hear it, because they only see themselves, they only compare themselves today, to where they would like to be where to they would like to have three more million dollars and a Lamborghini, and they don’t. And that grounding that you can get by talking to a professional, I think goes a long way. And that’s what I get, you know, I don’t have a financial planner of my own. But I have an accountant. That’s part of what I wanted is I wanted to have other professionals, right, that could be like a third party, but grow along and see how you know how I’m growing in my business and be able to advise, like, sometimes you just want to ask someone like, Do you think I’m doing all right? Do you have any things you think I should do slightly differently? There’s value in that and yeah, like, you know, you mentioned people hiring coaches, but rarely financial planners. If you just had a financial planners perspective, even I know, like, you mentioned a financial planner, full engagement, sometimes like five grand a lot of financial planners do smaller engagements, you know, where it might be 500 bucks for like a detailed consultation or 1000 bucks for like a simpler one page sheet of recommendations. There’s other probably

Erwin  

simpler as well, versus like someone like myself with I don’t know what someone would charge me. Because there are just so complicated.

Dominique  

Yeah, you and I probably have similar, you know, in terms of complexity, yes. Probably a bit more complicated

Erwin  

for corporations. Yeah, like businesses, we only have

Dominique  

two corporations and for rental properties, but I consider that to be compared to what I see that’s fairly complex. Yeah, right. Yeah. And if I went to a financial planner there myself that can you build us a financial plan, I wouldn’t get a lot for 500 bucks. 500 bucks would be like, a consultation, where we go through a few of my top of mind questions and where I might not get complete answers, right. But even then, like, I’ve paid a few one time consultations for professionals in the past, and I got a lot of value from that, like paying a CPA for an hour, like, let me drill your brain with stuff that, you know, I want to get a second perspective on, I think there’s a lot of value in that, like, I think we shouldn’t limit ourselves to hiring like a business coach only, and then slashing all the other professionals, although I don’t want to put all CFPs in one bucket, right personality fit is important. So if you walk into, I don’t know, some random financial planners office, and the financial planner doesn’t really get what you’re doing with your real estate, like they’ve never seen it before. They don’t really get it, maybe that’s not the right person. Right. But there’s not many like you that they want. If they don’t know what a burr is like that might not be the right person for you, if you own multiple properties, because they might not really get what you’re doing, right?

Erwin  

There’s not many that I can imagine ones when you

Dominique  

charge a flat fee, right, you’re not gonna get a flat fee person at the banks, that’s only independent firms. At the bank, they’re only going to do a financial plan for you if you have at least 250 grand in mutual funds with them. Right, which most real estate investors don’t. If you happen to have that, then maybe, maybe they’ll do a financial plan for you. But I kind of doubt that they’re going to incorporate all your rental properties into the mix. It might be a little above and beyond

Erwin  

what is your opinion on on like mutual funds and ETFs?

Dominique  

I think, again, like as I mentioned before, I don’t think it should be compared to real estate at all, because it’s not at all the same thing. But I think honestly, it’s a safe, steady investment that isn’t leveraged. If you have it in a TFSA all the money you make is tax free, that counts for something. And I think people should work closely like if you took your real estate holdings and you know, did an actual rate of return calculation and compared it to a good mutual fund over a 510 year period. You know, it’s not completely off base. I think if you look at your mom or your grandmother’s mutual funds in a conservative portfolio, yeah, the returns might be a little underwhelming, but she’s not going for high returns. So you can’t compare your your grandma’s mutual fund to this really high risk strategy that you’re taking on. What makes real estate higher and returns when it’s done correctly and an upwards market is the leverage part. Right and that’s also it makes it risky if we just bought properties in cash, and then just held on to them in a 50 year period if the market wasn’t this crazy, in Toronto, for example, you know, we would make moderate returns, and then you back out all the fees from selling and you know, it’d be kind of like buying gold. If it wasn’t for the leverage, you would just be buying it and holding it and eventually selling it.

Erwin  

You said the word word does? Well, not all financial planners like real estate, that’s like a gold.

Dominique  

Well, and again, the financial planners depends on they get paid, right? Like if their fee only they charge a flat rate, they might not hate real estate, like if you just own an apartment building, and you tell them I own this apartment building, they might be like, Cool, good for you. That’s a pretty safe asset class. But if you’re flipping and you’re like, aggressively doing these hardcore renovations, they might have an aversion to it because it feels risky, right? And planners tend to be a bit more risk averse, and they just, they’re not enthused, they’re not excited for you that you’re taking on a lot of risk in a shaky market, like they’re not going to be excited with you. In the same way. So sometimes I think real estate investors look at that, and they get kind of bummed out, they’re kind of like, oh, this person is super lame. You know, it’s like, when you have a lawyer that all they have all the time to say to you is like, well, I don’t know. Well, I don’t think so I don’t think you should do that. You can find a lawyer that’s not like that. There are some that are a bit more balanced, where like, you know, they’ll kind of level off with you, but they’re not always going to be giving you bet news. Same for a financial planner.

Erwin  

What’s your thoughts on gold and silver and Bitcoin?

Dominique  

Well, I don’t I’m not going to speak on Bitcoin because again, speculation, but like gold, silver, I mean, you know, if I had many millions of equity, and I was like, looking to diversify in another way, maybe I get a bit of gold? I don’t know, it is so well, preservation strategy, right. And I think people hype it up as being this anti government thing nowadays, you know, like, don’t trust the government don’t trust the stock stock market buy gold and, okay. But again, it’s it’s not, it’s not going to be a wealth builder is just a wealth preservation strategy. It could be like, your safe thing that you keep aside that if something crazy happened, you could always trade it in for your money, I guess. I don’t think much of it. I just think it’s, it’s too hyped up as being this, you know, anti government alternative nowadays? And

Erwin  

how do you advise your clients on on handling inflation?

Dominique  

I think I mostly advise people honestly, on just making sure they’re, they have a skill to offer the marketplace. If you’re a business owner, just focus on growing your business as much as you can, so that your, you know, your revenue keeps up with inflation. If you’re a sales professional, get better at sales. If you are, you know, otherwise climbing up the corporate ladder, just make sure you know your value and that you’re negotiating your salary. I think that’s the biggest thing people can do. And so you kind of have to know, like, look at yourself, look at your family situation and go okay, what’s the best use of our time? Is it to increase our income? Or is it to cut our expenses? And for some people cutting the expenses is the best place they can allocate energy. But for most people, it’s increasing income, or for some people, it’s both right. So you take take an example of a stay at home mom, right? Like, she’s home, she’s not earning an income. The thought of starting a side business while caring for a three month old is maybe not super great, right? So this person might be best served by watching their expenses and just cutting things like takeout, right, you can, you can save a lot by just cutting those extras that we’ve gotten used to write all those quick, convenient services.

Erwin  

Disney plus. Shirky, Christian Freeland

Dominique  

Yeah, never, never mind that but just cutting like a skip the dishes. Purchase once a month is way more, you know,

Erwin  

I’ve been opposed to never bought a Starbucks.

Dominique  

So I think even just looking at your family unit, you know, also in us is like me and Richard, right? We look at okay, as a family, right? As a family always look at your family as a business. I know sounds kind of, I don’t know. That’s how I look at everything. So you list out like, what are skills? Right? What are our income sources? What are our core expenses? What can we do about them? So for us, like one of our largest expenses is our mortgage on our new house. And because we have a lovely variable 6% mortgage. Fantastic. So one thing we can do about that is to use some of our rental income to offset our customer mortgage, which is great, but otherwise, we’re just focused on having better businesses, right, like getting better at getting leads and getting better at sales and doing valuable work work that people find valuable, so that they’re happy to pay for it. You know, I think if more people focused in those areas, even people with a job right like if you have if you’re employed somewhere you have a regular T for job, and you want to make more money instead of just waiting every year to see if you’re gonna get To raise maybe it’d be more proactive about it right? Like, try and put yourself in your boss’s shoes, like what would be more valuable that I could be doing. And it doesn’t have to be working overtime, it could just be like doing different things in your job doing things a little deeper. Or just asking your boss like, what would be more helpful to you that it could be doing to go up in my career? Right? I think those are things that people have just kind of been comfortably just doing their job for a while. And maybe it’s time to be a bit more assertive.

Erwin  

And for the full time real estate investor get better at raising capital.

Dominique  

Yeah, I think we could have a whole other conversation around, you know, the security around lending out money or using lent money. Oh, yeah.

Erwin  

You even mentioned, your properties are all just your your own. Like even though you went to those like those, like the group that you’re a part of that you tend to, like they were all about? Oh, PM.

Dominique  

Yeah. And we just never like we’ve thought about like, Should we have a joint venture, you know, but for us, it would have just been like, there wasn’t a huge advantage, because we had some of our own capital, whether it was cash, or like very low interest, secured line of credits, like we have capital, we have the skill set, we’re in the location. So there wasn’t like a missing gap. Like we didn’t need someone’s capital that badly, we were able to qualify for mortgages. So I think if there was like, a big gap in something, whether we couldn’t qualify for mortgages, or we had no money, maybe that could have been something that would have made sense, but I’m kind of glad we didn’t do it, you know, because then when you don’t have a business partner, you don’t have to go and like crawl back to them, when things aren’t going well, or when the interest rates went up, you know, I feel like having to present like a quarterly report of your financials to your JV partners like that, that makes it a business. And that’s not passive by any means, you know, and it just adds more weight. Like, if I’m going to lose money, I rather just me lose the money and not have to crawl back to somebody else to say that they lost money to

Erwin  

even the quarterly reporting was pretty easy for you to do what I call like investor relations, like keeping your

Dominique  

capital. So either it would take up more of my time, or I would be paying my accountant more to actually have a quarterly report ready for us. So I think that’s another phantom costs, right, and other costs that

Erwin  

don’t pay your accountant as a real cost. Yeah, and not

Dominique  

just to do your tax return, but to maintain your books throughout the year. And if you’re gonna have to do reporting for JV partners, you need quarterly, like completely done up financials. And there’s a cost to that. You know, like, we happily pay several 1000 for bookkeeping and accounting every year, and I’m glad to do it. But I think a lot of people don’t realise the cost that goes with that like, but my business is super complicated, you know, like, we get income from all kinds of broker, all kinds of insurance and investment companies, right. And it all has to be reconciled. And, yeah, there’s a lot to that. And we got payroll, and you know, business loans, that kind of stuff.

Erwin  

Really difficult question. Asset allocation convention, many different categories of investments, mutual funds, gold, silver, whole life, owning real estate outright. We haven’t even talked about passive real estate, like either private equity, or like REITs. How should one split it up?

Dominique  

I think I think for most people, it’s easy to kind of look at it as a pie chart, you know, you look at a big circle, I

Erwin  

literally have a picture in my head,

Dominique  

you could draw it out on a piece of paper. And then for you know, anybody listening to this, I guess, just draw it out and then drawing the circle, like, what do your assets look like right now, right, for most people, is probably equity in their rentals. And then a separate part of the pie chart is like equity in your home, like your principal residence. And another part of the pie chart, if you’re a business owner, like myself is like the actual value on paper of your business, what it would sell for. And then another part of that would be whether you’ve got a pension through your work, you know, looking at the actual value of that pension, I think is important.

Erwin  

Do many people even know how to value a pension? I’ve googled the manufacturers

Dominique  

statement, you don’t have to do a crazy formula, like it says on your pension statement somewhere down there. Like, if you were to transfer this out, it would be 542,000. Like there’s depends on the pension or like it depends. But that would be part of your part of your asset allocation. Right? Or if you’ve got RRSPs would be part of that too. So I think for most people, just knowing where they’re at right now is helpful. And then you have to ask yourself, you know, maybe involving a financial planner be good idea too, but just looking at yourself, like, are you comfortable with this allocation like does that does it make you uncomfortable? That 80% of your wealth is in real estate? Some people might say that makes me comfortable? Because real estate safe Okay, fair enough. As long as there’s many different types of real estate or maybe your spread in different sectors, like if all my my real estate for example was any various Small town with no economy, or that was relying on one economy, I’d be pretty spooked. Right? It’d be like, well, all it takes is for that one industry to leave or to close down. And then my properties actually go down in value tremendously, because nobody wants to live there. So that would be something to be concerned about is the different types of real estate, the location, you know, the concentration, are you buying all these properties on the same street? What if that street ends up being the crappy part of town eventually, right. And then looking at those other asset categories is like, if you have RRSPs, and they’re in mutual funds, for example, and you’re not super impressed by them, maybe actually make an effort to see if there’s better mutual funds out there. I think people just assume they’re all the same, or that they’re all bad. And then sometimes people bring me their mutual funds. And I’m like, You’re in some conservative portfolio, like, of course, you’re not impressed by its growth. And I could tell that you’re more comfortable with risk than someone in a conservative that would normally be an in conservative folio. So let’s change that. And that can be a huge shift. But for me, like right now, the our main wealth is in real estate, because we agreed to start with that right away, because you can take advantage of the leverage. But I’m planning like, as soon as we sell our first property, I think we’re planning on selling one of our properties in three years. And when it renews what, what our 1.7%, mortgage renews, I told Richard, like, what I want to do is I want to sell and take all the proceeds, and put them in our TFSA is and mess them out. That’s my goal, like I want to start having that more like genuinely passive source, I want to use up that TFSA room because it’s going to be over 100 grand each by then. And, you know, then you have 200,000, that is earning money completely tax free, like all the money you make is tax free. So if you make, say, 8% a year on average, that’s what 16 grand a year tax free. So you can either take it out and use it or you can let it grow. And isn’t that amazing? Like, that’s no work. And if you have a property that cash flows, 16 grand, like you have to do a lot of work for that.

Erwin  

Okay, you know, 8% cash on cash return? Yes, please wear?

Dominique  

Yeah, I mean, we kind of have that here to be honest. But you know, it’s a lot of work. And there’s a lot of risk. And as soon as a tenant leaves, you’re spending a month working to fill that vacancy, like, that’s work, I’ve seen Richard work to fill a vacancy, like, he’s on the phone, like for weeks, and then he drives there to meet with somebody, and then it’s, it’s a dud, or they don’t show up, or they were looking for something different than he drives back, you know, you forget how much time you’re spending. So I’m looking forward to changing our asset allocation a little bit, to having that truly passive piece as a part of our overall portfolio. Like, we’re still always going to have those active properties. But I don’t want to have 25 of them. You know, like, I don’t aspire to that at all. I don’t see the appeal. And thankfully, I looks like Richards on the same page as me. So I think that’s a big part of it is agreeing with your spouse on your on your investment strategy, or the CFO,

Erwin  

you cut them off from financing, there’s just cut off. Yeah. Well, would you be putting your 100k TFSA into place today?

Dominique  

I would be Well, honestly, I’ve been it’s been three years, I haven’t fully drawn that out. But honestly, probably just some kind of growth funds, like I’d have it spread between a couple of different funds, like usually we build like four or five fund portfolios that are complementing each other. And then that way, when you if you need money from it, and you’re in a market downturn, not all five funds are going to react at the same time, right, some will be up, some will be down. So for example, like a Canadian value fund would have been up during all of COVID, like weirdly, keeps going up versus a growth that global growth fund was doing the opposite, during that same time period. So if you’re invested in a couple different funds, they’re all you know, kind of hovering at different rates. And so you can access capital without taking a loss.

Erwin  

So you would find the fun though, you’ve never tried to try to own individual stocks that would mimic

Dominique  

I don’t have interest in that because I honestly like part part of what I do I’m so big picture and everything that I just I don’t have an interest in individual securities like I don’t. And that’s why I stick at the mutual fund level because I like the idea that there’s these portfolio managers that like all day, all they do is trade stocks, right? They research the stocks, they buy them to sell them and I just don’t have an interest in that. Like I opened up a self directed TFSA for myself at some point I bought a couple of stocks but I realised like I’m really uninterested in it. And I don’t want the human emotion aspect to kick in when it’s my money. I almost want to be removed from that and have someone just making rational decisions in the background. fascinated me.

Erwin  

That’s pretty cool. I really liked the idea that you’re doing five different funds. This made it so they they move differently. That way you’re never caught in any market.

Dominique  

That’s not Never Never say never right. But yeah, you would think but they’re not all down at the same time. Yeah, normally trying to

Erwin  

think of a scenario where that happens, basically a meteorite hit ever hit Earth.

Dominique  

I mean, last year was a really weird year for like more conservative investments, you know, because the interest rates went up so sharply that the bonds got all devalued. So people that were invested very conservatively last year, were like, totally let down by the returns were like people that thought they were in the safest investments in the world might have been down like five or 8%. And they were like, holy man, like it was the first time it happened in 100 years. That was very, very interesting. But going forward, they’ll say, for investments to do really well, because again, like, the interest rates are up, right. So the interest rates that you make on a bond are higher. And that’s great.

Erwin  

Fabulous, Dominique, this has been very enlightening for me. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people follow along your journey?

Dominique  

So I’m mostly on Facebook. So I’ve got my personal profile that people want to connect personally. But please, if you post a lot about coaching and stuff, yeah, I might unfollow you don’t take offence to that. And then I’ve got my business page as well on Facebook or my website. And then I post on Instagram too. So just under my name, domination are

Erwin  

fabulous. And live for listeners benefit. I’ll have it all posted in the show notes.

Dominique  

Oh, and on LinkedIn, I post a lot of like business stuff on LinkedIn. So for the entrepreneur types, or real estate people,

Erwin  

any final words for the listener, especially someone who’s newer, or someone who’s in a tough spot, but Dominique, just listening to you like, two different people. But Dominique just said, his observation because you’ve been like, I can even observe your own journey. Like you’ve been like the rah rah rah buttons. Right? And here you are now. It’s very different. And it’s totally cool. I think every restaurant is going to journey wild about that experience in themselves. There’s no right or wrong for anyone. I do think is wrong to lose money, though. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Any final words you want to share?

Dominique  

Honestly, like I think, what are you publishing this episode? Just based on timing? Is it after before the tax deadline? Deadline after the tax deadline, okay? Well, if you if your accounting stuff was a mess last year, and you know that you should do better just bite the bullet, get an accountant. And if their fees are higher than you thought, that’s probably a good thing, it means they’re actually going to take time with you. So I think people should go invest with an accountant. If you know if your great aunt does your bookkeeping, that’s, that’s great. But you also need an accountant to bring it all together. So I think if more people invested in working with an accountant, the world would be a better place. And it’s not really a shameless plug at all. Like I, I don’t really work with real estate investors that much like if they have one or two properties, sure. But as soon as it gets to like corporate stuff, or having multiple holdings, I recommend going to an actual accounting firm.

Erwin  

I might know of one.

Dominique  

You might know of one, I hear that your wife does accounting stuff. So yeah. And then on the investment side, that’s my final word honestly, is just the investment side. Raised professionals, not not just coaches.

Erwin  

Fabulous, Dominique, thanks so much for doing this. All right, nice being on this podcast.

Erwin  

Before you go if you’re interested in learning more about an alternative means of cash flowing like hundreds of other real estate investors have already then sign up for my newsletter. Sign up for yourself but so many real estate investors are doing to diversify and increase our cash flow. And if you can’t tell I love teaching and sharing this stuff.

To Listen:

**Transcripts are auto-generated.

Erwin  

Welcome to the truth about real estate investing show for Canadians. I am Canadian born and raised, proud hockey fan. This may offend some but proud maple leaf and who probably screamed a little bit too loud for just winning one playoff round. My name is Herman Seto and I’m a full time real estate investor and been in full time real estate since 2010. When I left my seven year career at Tech, epic blue, to apply my analytical and operating skills to operational skills to something that would actually build me intergenerational wealth, horsemen, something I was interested in getting ahead in life. I’ve been investing in real estate since 2005. I’ve owned over 40 properties that we renovated almost all of them with budgets in the six figures for almost all of them, well over 80% of those properties, call it burn investing, total value investing, call it whatever you’d like. I call it logical, practical and scalable. scalable, because I push for density that gets me higher rents to the bank keeps lending me money as an investor focus real to hear it. I’m in real estate, we’ve helped clients acquire around hundreds 100 Student rentals and convert around 100 properties into duplexes. We are every NIMBYs nightmare. As we continue to expand or our repertoire, we’re already executing on some garden and garage conversions. In my experience, these are the ideal investments for most Canadians most of the time, and our track record includes over 4545 clients who’ve made a million dollars or more investing in real estate properties, income properties specifically that we help them acquire. What I don’t think is ideal is pre construction. For most people, most of the time of the 40 Plus properties I’ve had my portfolio only wants to buy brand new, those were five bedrooms did rentals in Branford that I paid 275,000 for the cash flow, the numbers justified the purchase. And if you new downtown Branford, the properties there are generally quite rough and very old. So by new service law time, able to finance everything it would have worked out quite well compare that to investors in distress who call me middle class folks with middle class incomes who are negative 500 to $1,500 per property. I have no financial advisor, but I don’t think most Canadians can handle that kind of cash outflow and negative cash outflow goes against basic economic theory of what to do during inflationary times. As we’ve been we’ve been inflationary times forever. And you know, one of the first rules to funding inflation is to increase one’s income not to reduce one’s income. One investor I spoke to bought a three bedroom and pre construction condo for just under $1.4 million projected rent $4,000. To which I said, Wow, that’s great. Then they shared with me that their occupancy cost is $6,800. So how many months can one afford to be vacant to carry the cost which is $1,600, occupancy costs, and then even when monster rented, the cashflow is negative $2,800. Again, that’s why I say for most people, most of the time, this is not the right investment. If you were in me, I tried to sell but rates are still kind of high and a lot of smart buyers out there. They’re looking for a deal, as mortgage appraisals are coming in for less than what investors paid. Per the article in The Globe and Mail titled looking for blood condos nearing completion with mortgage appraisals, less than investors paid. So go ahead read that yourself. I like to read news. Anyways, what novice investors don’t realise is a tonne of builders and slash developers. They pay Realtors very well. Why do you think realtors are motivated to line up around street corners and whatnot to in order to acquire sign properties for their clients. The emails that I received from condo builders, they have 4% commissions in the subject line and in big bold letters, tall letters in the email body to promote to garner interest among realtors to sell their properties. FYI, that’s nearly double the rate that a cooperating agent would get on a resale condo. And aside from the short lived down markets we’ve had resale condos are generally been a seller’s market for as long as I can remember. So that means small seller’s market means you know, multiple offers. So buying agents are having to do lots of showings, that takes a lot of time and effort. They’re losing offers because only one person can win. Versus preconstruction pays nearly double, there’s always a good amount of supply. So a good agent may not get as many preconstruction properties. Each time they line up each time they steal transaction, each time they work with a builder, they might not get as many properties as they want, but they usually get a sum, they usually get a couple of them. And again for a business from a business perspective, from a business owners perspective, that sure beats losing and multiple offers. So again, from a business perspective, that means more money for less effort to like live tour golfers, for those who follow the PGA versus live but the preconstruction property again, my experience, it’s not the right investment for most Canadians most of the time. Note, note that I know many people who may have lost money for your construction. We’ve had past guests in the show, I’ve had family who’ve made lots of money in Bridge destruction, but their timing and the locations they chose were near impeccable. Right also the had deep deep pockets. And again, that’s not most Canadians. What have I noticed in my 20 year career as an investor is that those who’ve been around longer generally have fared better. Investors in BC and Ontario generally have feared have made the most money. Apartment Building investments work best when one does not overpay and renovating when tenants turn over to achieve higher returns. Another commonality I see regularly is no one’s cash flowing anything significant, no one’s taking money out of the portfolio in terms of operating cash flow, and after paying their debt after paying mortgages, our portfolio is no different. Nor did we ever plan to take out cash flow. And we’re on a regular basis just being conservative investors or ourselves. I graduated business school with $30,000 in debt and now a cherry we own a real estate, an eight figure real estate portfolio. And that didn’t happen without taking on a lot of debt, to be honest, no darkness distance from family. And it was only made possible by investing in high density, meaning most of our portfolio is duplexes, and student rentals. Without great rents. The banks won’t keep loaning lending us money, and along with our day job incomes to help us qualify. Thankfully, we did not over leverage and our loan to value is quite reasonable. Now, for anyone that follows the news. There’s several economic fundamentals in our favour. Terry and I are well set up for the poor storm approaching post or, for example, CMHC predicts that home building could drop by 32% this year, and a developer called State view and Ontario is having all sorts of financial trouble putting their 1000 preconstruction houses at risk. And I feel terrible for the buyers who put deposits on those pre construction houses, as they may get the deposits back. But they will miss out on all the gains, if they were in for any certain point in time. For example, if they had bought the property before the pandemic, there was a lot of opportunity costs there that they’re gonna lose out on. Again, I personally don’t mind pre construction, because I can’t stomach the negative cash flow. But I do invest in housing developments. And I only do so because I only do so at builders who are household names, I have a little risk tolerance. And I’d never give my money to a builder, such a state view, as they only have their experience is only 200 units. So I literally went to Staples website and counted up all the units of the completed projects. So across like five or seven properties, projects, 200 units, you know, I’m more interested in working with someone who’s done like 10s of 1000s of units. And sadly, speculators will pay a hefty price. And then recent news just this past weekend, another US regional bank, first republic bank is failing. The original headlines were that done, but the government would have to take them over. But that actually what happened was the so for right now as of right now, they’re required for pennies on the dollar. The stock was $115 $150 in March earlier this year. Now this morning, it was $2.30 down from 115 to $2.30. And the new owner is JP Morgan, how many more banks in the US fail, nobody knows. But investors do remember, bank turmoil equals cheaper interest rates. To get into details, the markets have a flight to risk. They sell off their equities generally, to trade them in for they want to buy bonds instead of which we consider safer, and that makes bonds more expensive. That makes the bond rate and bond yields lower, and then bond yields translate into our mortgage fixed rates. And if the yields are lower than our rates are lower, so with cheaper fixed interest rates, that just means more fuel for the fire for our real estate market. That’s over a year ago I share with you on the show just over a year ago back in January, February, I was sharing that the short term timing to sell was right. Fortunately, I was correct. And many of your listeners and clients now that peak, now the pendulum has swung, it’s time to buy. And if you want to learn how to I can’t recommend that you sign up for my email newsletter. Sign up today and receive timely updates on when this new podcast episodes are available and to be the first to know about upcoming events. And some of our events do sell out like the island free training events which are delivered via webinar these days in our island mastermind tours, which are in person on site inside property on inside actual income properties. So those do sell out. And so you do not want to miss it. We’ve already actually just announced our next tour during third east of the GTA because again, these events sell out the last two sold out within five days. So you do not want to miss this and our newsletter is the perfect way to stay connected with us and stay informed about all the exciting news that we have in store. Don’t miss out Sign up now and join our community of engaged and informed 17 listeners where to find it WWW dot truth about real estate investing.ca That’s also where I post my show notes. When I say like the listener don’t worry about running down all this information. I put show notes on website, www dot truth about real estate investing.ca. As always, we’ll tell you how it is we’re going to take keep telling you the truth about real estate investing and how to be a successful investor in Canada. The real estate investing community is a big one and it’s gotten a lot bigger. I’ve had a lot of requests A lot of folks who belong to who are clients of other coaches out there. And then when reached out to me, so I was speaking to a newer investor, who took a course and was instructed to use his personal to budget for his for two, six figure renovations, probably in the tune of each reservation should be around 750,000. That’s my experience. This young gentleman has two innovation budgets, plus down payments, renovations of budgets and loan should need to be in the six figures. Part of the course this gentleman took, he was instructed to use to budget for the use of his personal line of credit for the renovation, I share with him that’s not something my clients or I wouldn’t ever do, especially when the investor is a first time investor and bought two properties back to back over a short period of time, this investor has two vacant properties at this time, they have no money coming in. So in that personal line of credit now costs 9% interest. To me, that’s a lot of risk. Why not at least just do one property. Again, this is their first investment income property, their first burr project wanted to do one, you can protect your risk and more by more than half by just doing that. You asked me a follow on question was how does the avoid shiny object syndrome and those objects are different investment strategies. So I’ll share with you my 17 listeners when I told this young investor, I told him to turn off social media, as it’s mostly lies. He was smart and asked me if my own social media is lies. And I said Yes, probably. So I changed my shirt and style my hair before I’m well caffeinated before I turn the camera on. And honestly, I’d rather not share my investment journey as I’m an introvert, a private person. And generally, people do not share their investment journey. But I have to because I am here working and working on right now. It’d be terrible marketing and terrible social proof. If I did not share with my listeners and my clientele that we do have, for example, 350 successful investor clients, and they generally fit the mould of The Millionaire Next Door. If you haven’t read the book yet, please do. So anyone who posts on social media, as I generally say, they have something to sell somebody gonna post a lot. Again, I’m one of them. But how else would I explain that me and my team and I’m in real estate, we’ve transacted over $100 million in real estate, almost the vast majority of it was small, multifamily, and student rentals since 2010. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how investors have done since 2010. They’ve done extremely well, not everyone selling stuff out there is bad. But there sure are a number there. There are a number of good investments. But it’s buyer beware, there are way more bad ones and good ones. Otherwise, everyone would be rich, and you wouldn’t need the show. And you wouldn’t need to be me exposing people who have gone to share with our audience, people who have lost it. All. Right. That brings me to Alex Olga. So just as an update on the Alex Jones episode, Alex has gone bankrupt. He’s lost everything. The show will not be aired, as Alex asked that it not be aired. And also because I believe that through our conversation, it would likely be used against him in a court of law if that ever happened. So I’m not interested in being part of someone’s prosecution. So at least know that I know the truth about real estate investing and how he lost it all. And who was the party to that? So something that I’ve learned in my journey investor journey, is that form wants to build wealth, build real wealth, direct ownership of physical real estate is the way is by far the easiest and most reliable path to building intergenerational wealth. In my experience, it’s worked for me, it’s worked for many people, many friends and family in my life. And anyone who’s not owning at least one property in Canada is gonna get left behind. While those with multiple properties get ahead in life, they really get ahead in life. 

Erwin  

Speaking of multiple properties, today’s guest is Michael Ponte, and he’s an old friend of mine. We’re old guys, we have way more grey hair than when we when we first met back in late 2010 ish 2009. And, again, people who’ve been buying properties through the years, and especially the US old ranking members from over 10 years ago, we’ve known each other and we’ve all run we all run the same circles, and it feels like forever, and funny enough forever is probably the perfect time horizon to own real estate in terms of maximising money returns. Michael owns with partners apartment buildings across the country in British Columbia, Alberta, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, probably Saskatchewan to it probably said it but I missed it. Michael is a savvy investor and that’s this social media handle across pretty much every platform Instagram YouTube, Facebook savvy investor, and that’s also the name of his private investor group with over 5200 Members, Michael being old school he’s investing successfully in multifamily apartment in the multifamily apartment building space. And he has no trouble raising capital is a bit of a proactive now. He educates others on how to do so. While he lives out in BC. Yep, that’s a special thing. Like my uncle doesn’t invest locally, mostly lives in BC, near Vancouver but most of his portfolio as well out of province. Listen to the show. Michael shares how he’s navigating today’s interest rates multifamily is fast money. I’m kidding. It’s not Michael’s words, not mine. Yeah, hear him tell you the truth about real estate investing. There’s not a tonne of cash flow in multifamily investing, even though there’s tonnes of rent money coming in, to access to the numbers of a couple of apartment buildings, including how he finds the deal, the different phases in costs during the due diligence process, seller financing screening, joint venture partners, what the biggest mistake an investor to make when buying an apartment building. And if you wait to the very end, but Michael shares how he thinks the new investor can get started. If you’re interested in investing in apartment buildings you definitely want to do this episode to listen to. And I’m sure as many of you out there, as I know, Seth’s multifamily conference and ticket sales have been massive. I know I’ll be there. I have a booth in case you wanna come by. I’m not sure Michael is coming by. But there’s a whole lot of people from all over the country that are gonna be there as well. So if you are, if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, it’s www dot multifamily. conference.ca. My discount for you my 17 listeners is I win. That’s for letters IW. I n for 10% off. I’ll see you there. And please enjoy the show. Hi, Michael, what’s keeping you busy these days other than flying across country to be here just for this show. I am here for you in our 17 listeners are and the 17 listeners will probably last because they see me coming. Crap. Why did you warn your brother you’re coming on the show? Did I gave her a heads up? Come and check it out. Mom, please. Before you leave, I’m gonna leave me a list of eight people you’re gonna send this to done that we can make that happen. I sure get it back to 17. Let’s get it back. Yeah, man, what’s keeping you busy? 

Michael  

Oh, that’s keeping me busy. Well, it’s tax season. Obviously. That’s one thing, right? That’s always one of the fun parts. Not really. But it’s so nice to meet, you know, connect with your wife here as well. And I’m like, I feel so sorry for you know, tax season keeping me pretty busy. But I think there’s lots of things that are keeping me busy is exactly what everybody’s kind of dealing with right now interest rates are going up? And how do we kind of pivot and adjust and manage through all these things. It’s just a day in the life as a real estate investor, to be honest with you, it’s just you know, interest rates go up. So how are you going to manage that, and you know, been there done this, we’ve kind of gone through cycles as well, in our real estate world. So you know, we’re looking at raising rents, making sure tenants are paying their rents are looking at, you know, what are the banks going to be able to do to accommodate this, you know, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but you know, banks are making some concessions in regards to maybe extending amortisations on some of our mortgages. So we got to sell the story here and try to try to maintain some of the things, you know, we’re in a fortunate position, at the end of the day, you know, we’ve always had, you know, investing in cash flowing properties, and they were sustaining it, but at the end of it, it’s, we got to protect ourselves. Interest rates are impacting obviously cash flow across the board and across the country. And, and so we want to maintain that. And so we got to look at our business just like anything else with cost of inflation going up, how are we going to mitigate that? So we’re having discussions with tenants, we’re talking with our property managers, building strategies, you know, sometimes there’s vacancies that are part of that. So renovations are being done raising rents. So that’s all that kind of wonderful stuff. But yeah, it’s it’s busy. It’s really busy with lots of different things. So to continue to overwhelm our 17 listeners, how many units are you talking about here that you deal with? We’ve got over 225 units across the country, right? And you can name all the tenants, right? No, I ended up in fact, I can’t even name one of them to be honest with that’s not my job, you know, their birthdays? I do. I know, I don’t barely remember my own 20 to 25 units across how many properties?

Erwin  

Oh, 225. So we have got over 75 properties across properties. I compressed it at him.

Michael  

And then I’m just teasing. I had another question. That’s a lot rent, I want to ask you how much it’s worth about anyway, it’s been kind of, you know, that’s current current portfolio. And we’ve had, you know, buy and sell, we’ve sold a bunch of properties, too. And we bought and over the last, you know, 2022 years of doing this a long time 22. And then for listeners benefit. Can you explain how the mortgage? Because you’re talking to interest rates? What did you do in the past where you do a mixed portfolio variable and fixed or the majority of the portfolio is variable. But in the last year, year and a half, we were trying to catch some of that stuff a little bit early. So some of our residential stuff, we stayed variable just as long as making sense. And then we’ve also fixed them. To be honest, you know, Bank of Canada came in pretty heavy with a lot of the rates, so we didn’t anticipate it to some of that level. And so, for me, I’m trying to always, as an investor, you want to always kind of take a look two steps ahead. So I call it the mike Ponte crystal ball. And sometimes it’s very foggy, and you’re trying to just make the best assessments that you possibly can. So my anticipation is that, you know, in the next two years not and I am playing kind of worst case scenario rates will come back down, I don’t believe they will get back coming back down to the levels they once were before. Now, those are emergency rates, emergency rates were never so we can’t anticipate for that to kind of happen, right? But let’s just say it sits at four and a quarter, four and a half percent. And that’s kind of what we’re budgeting into our other variable as the variable rate at some point in time, right. So you know, we’re

Erwin  

Looking out two years out, I’m like, do we want to fix these rates right now at 6.3 6.4 or 6.2? Right now? Or do we just stay the variable rate, try to find ways to mitigate some of the challenges, raise some of the rents and see what we can do. And then it’s at some point in time, you know, we’ll revisit the mortgage in the next year to two years at that point. So you know, if we are fixing them, we’re fixing it for a one to two year term. In some cases, where you are sitting on a variable rate, all of most of our commercial properties that we own, all our apartment buildings are on fixed rates, and I’ve been knock on wood very, very fortunate, all of our mortgages got renewed prior to, or just around the COVID time. So we had some great rates, you know, I’ve got one mortgage right now that’s like 1.89%, for another three more years fixed. So you know, we’re just making tonnes of cash flow out of this property right now.

Michael  

So I’ve been very, very fortunate. But again, so we, our job right now is just raising rents as much as possible, because we know when we start to renew those, and three years from now, we’re dealing with a different situation where the rates aren’t going to be up at that point in time. So yeah, so we got a kind of a mixed bag of both variable and fixed rates. So with bond rates coming down now, are you looking to do any any trying to grab any fixed rates? Now? While we were just looking at some rates? Actually, before I got here, we’re still kind of at that 6.2 6.3? So the answer is no, if the plan is that we are going to renew, you know, for looking at the mortgage rates may be coming down in a year or two, we just got to take into consideration what the plan is for our strategy, right. So part of it and then then I got this is my two cents, so don’t quote it, my gut feel is we’ve got probably one or two more increases coming in for this coming year. That’s my feel. And then we got another quarter point coming up very, very soon. And again, gut feel that there’s probably one more coming in in probably August. So we are kind of planning and preparing that that’s going to come to fruition. And so we’re still very closely aligned with us. And so whatever they’re doing this, there’s going to be some implications to this thing. And there’s still some control on inflation, even though inflation starting to kind of come back down. But I still think there’s there’s some pressure that needs to be managed, they’re not just not seeing some of the inflationary pressures, even though inflation rates gone down. There’s a lot of factors that haven’t gone down, like just to get your groceries, I’ve got a 20 year old daughter, and 18 year old son has four adults, it’s not cheap for anybody, it’s really expensive. So with that being said, I’m kind of planning some of that stuff out. But at some point in time, those pressures going to have to get relieved at some stage. And so that’s why we’re saying, you know, when the next two years where again, it could be even earlier, but even if it’s a year, we see right rates start to kind of come down, we can start to assess maybe some renewals or early renewals on some of those mortgages, if we see the banks reversing their strategy at that point. So if they’re still around, if

Erwin  

it’s kind of crazy.

Michael  

It is crazy out there. And just just to add to that, you know, with all this banking trouble last was kind of what triggered the bond yields to come down. Like nobody knows that there’s not more issues out there. We don’t know. Nobody knows me knows, I can guess I said, this is the mike Ponte crystal ball. I just kind of look at what the numbers that are available to me. You know, I know economists probably don’t and nobody really kind of, you know, know, compared to when the Ukrainian war ends. I think a lot of people were really wrong about whenever the war would end lately, right? I don’t know if anyone saw these banks having troubles like the way they are. It’s a big shock, like, in some cases, very, really, really big shock. So totally Credit Suisse is gone. I

Erwin  

would have thought you would think that that would have ended back in 2018. Z here. Yeah, reset. You survived bad vibe that yeah, you survived the ultimate stress test. So crazy. So crazy. Some people fail to learn from history. That’s actually a good segue into I don’t know what next?

Michael  

You have a you have a what do you call your group? Is it an educational group networking group, a mastermind group? Ah, that’s a good question. Well, it kind of started off from COVID As we started it as kind of a simple group. And so our groups called savvy investor for those that know me or don’t know me, we’ve got a pretty large Facebook community, we’ve got a run over 5200 members across the country that are active investors, and it’s just our Facebook group. And it’s a community where people can kind of come together and talk about real estate investing, share their stories, celebrate their successes, if you’re looking for support and ask questions, kind of an open place, the one thing you’re not going to find is up, you know, deals investment deals, or any that’s it’s a place to kind of support each other and that’s what our community is to begin with, and then it’s 999 a month for the deals one, right? No, there is no deal ones no deal ones. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s not that type of programme. You know, it was kind of really designed for a place to kind of have have those meet. Like we had a meet up in Vancouver back in the day and and COVID hit and that kind of disappeared. I’m like, oh, let’s throw this on as a Facebook group and see what happens and it just kind of exploded actually for a while. And then. So that was our Facebook community called savvy investor. And then a lot of people were asking about education and training and stuff like that. And it’s something I’ve always done. I’ve done it for years, but it was done as a live setting and we’ve always had like 1015 people

Erwin  

Well in a classroom setting and all that, so we did it virtually. And that that is called that’s called the elevat Academy. And our courses are called elevate masterclass, which kind of runs three different programmes fundamentals to residential real estate investing. So kind of foundational stuff for people that are just getting started raising capital through joint venture partnerships. And then for everybody’s favourite topic, I’m sure as multifamily investing. So we do that as well. And then we have a separate group called elevate mastermind, and that’s not people learning how to invest, they already know how to do it, it’s more kind of business based business focus. So for those that are wanting to kind of scale their business, but it just don’t know how to run a business. And so you know, comes to marketing and systemization, we had your lovely wife, join us duck off talk about accounting systems to put into your business and how to systemize that a lot better. We bring in guest speakers literally from all over North America, we got amazing lineup of guest speakers from bigger pockets joining us this coming year, been really wanting to bring in a lot of American speakers or just kind of sounds weird, but they just do everything bigger like this. Everything’s everything that they do is big. And so we wanted big thinkers to kind of change kind of our mindset a little bit and expand this kind of funnel process of some of the things that they’re doing. It’s quite interesting to watch some of those guys. So yeah, it’s a fun community. It’s a great, great place for resources, great place for learning. And like I said, at the end of the day, it’s just really trying to support our members to help them learn how to invest, but more importantly, support them to kind of deal with the challenges that real estate investing does have. It’s not all Lamborghinis and pimped up boats and all that stuff that you tend to see out there. There’s good days, and there are bad days. And do you have that support group and support to help you kind of mitigate and manage through some of that stuff. So who you surround yourself cannot be more important than ever. For example, I mentioned before recording, really happy to have yourself here and I appreciate being here as a palate cleanser.

Michael  

Parker solo, he’s honestly our last guest, that episode may or may never see public, whenever it doesn’t matter. I certainly believe he surrounded himself with the wrong people fortunate, like his coaches are doing really poorly. Other people he attended courses with are also facing the same challenges. He is as in the bank, the bank has questions. JV partners are handling many issues. It’s bad out there. So like, like you said, this. He said, It’s not a Lambos and all that it’s not all chaos to like, like I’ve had some guests on. For sure. Right. Like there’s opportunities, there’s lots of good stuff out there. You know, unfortunately, the bad stuff is the stuff that kind of sticks sometimes right, and so well as it stuck for a while because you didn’t have to, it was pretty easy to make money. Yeah, that’s the thing. But you’ve seen you’ve seen the ups and downs, the new this for 20 years. And that’s the thing, you know, for a lot of people and I’m from Vancouver, so I can appreciate some of the challenges that are happening, even Ontario. For those that are listening to us from Ontario, it’s like, there hasn’t been a downturn in this market. And in Vancouver in roughly 20 years, it’s been kind of up, up, up, up up, you buy something prices go up, and you put a smile on your face. Everybody’s an amazing investor. Everybody’s an amazing investor coach, now, I bought two properties. I’m going to coach you about real estate investing, right? That’s all sunshine and roses. But times like this, and I’ve shared this before his times like this actually make you a really good investor. Nobody wants to hear this because people are challenged right now I get it. And I’m not discounting any of the challenges because I have been there myself, period. Okay. You’re an investor. And I’ve been through this before several times, and I’m sure this will not be the last, okay, it’s just part of what it is. But I’ll be honest, I sleep really well at night. I do. I don’t know for a lot of people that they don’t because they’ve not gone through this kind of stuff before. So with that experience and knowledge, you just kind of go back to your experiences and look back at some of the things that you did and repurpose some of that stuff back again. Is it challenging? Sure. It is. It’s always challenging. But it does make you a better investor and you’re writing a cycle. So with that, it’s just like, yeah, it can, it can be really, really negative. And you can be surrounded by this. And I’ve talked to a lot of investors out there that have reached out to me and said, Mike, I’m in trouble. And this I’m sure you’ve probably been connecting with people too. It’s you know, it’s a lot of people reaching out to myself that had a lot of experience. And or, you know, I’ve known Erwin for years, too. He’s been in this business for a long time. So he’s been mostly sunshine and rainbows.

Erwin  

To be honest, but saying that it’s just like you go through these these types of experiences. And you ask that ask advice and stuff. And I hate seeing people kind of going through those challenging times you really do and you try to support them to the best of your give some suggestions to the best of your ability. But to go back to exactly what you said is it is so important to surround yourself with those types of individuals engage and talk and be open because in this game called real estate investing, you know, you post something like this on social media and Facebook, you don’t want to share some of that bad negative stuff. And then it gets to be a little bit of a lonely place. Right. And so with that being said, you need to talk these things out. You got to talk

Michael  

talk to people about your challenges because somebody else is dealing with the same thing. And they may have found a solution or they’re, you know, ask the question, how are you kind of managing through some of those things to help support you kind of to get through it right? Or else again, you can feel like you’re in this small, little tiny island. And I say that because I’ve been there too, you know, you just don’t like I don’t want to disclose that. Oh, my God, I’m in trouble with this property. This property is not doing well, I don’t want to talk about that’s gonna make me look like a stupid investor. No, you need to share this stuff like that it actually by sharing, you’re actually helping teach other people mistakes that you’ve learned, those are the best lessons from my perspective is shared the bad. The more you share, the more you can talk these things out, the more you’re also supporting other people as well to learn from those mistakes, too. You mentioned earlier, you’re having to raise rents. How are you doing that is partly a function of the markets that you’re in that do not have rent control, because I’m sure you’re in some markets that do not allow it and all the markets that I’m in with the exception of a few properties in BC they are there’s no rent controls. So very fortunate position. honest with you, Halifax is the only one as well as in my small my properties in Fort St. John. So with that being said, I’m sorry, worse for St. John, St. John BC, northern BC.

Erwin  

Things just get Saskatchewan. So I’m glad I’m glad to ask. It’s all snowy. They’re a part of Canada

Michael  

as part of BC, so we got some properties up that way as well. So you know, so with the exception of those few rents, we’re raising 18 to 20%. Somewhere in those vicinities. Now, does that BC sorry, isn’t an Alberta right now? Yeah. So Calgary and Edmonton, we’re seeing rents going up like crazy. Vacancy rates are actually quite low. We have very, very low vacancy rate in that in both of those markets right now. And rents are actually going up. And like Calgary, as you probably well aware, you know, it’s it’s appreciating it’s an appreciating market and this this environment because of affordability rate. So it hasn’t been on this for years years, I think it’s only been recent, like I said, it was kind of it was starting to hit kind of last year, just around the late summer, it started to kind of hit that lady.

Erwin  

Sorry, I’m ignorant. That’s okay. You know, in Vancouver, BC, they weren’t things skyrocketing during the pandemic, just like it was here totally, like in Calgary wasn’t and Edmonton wasn’t they weren’t doing that. But then all of a sudden, with interest rates going up, as you’re probably well aware, there’s not enough money in people’s pockets right now, people’s debt loads are just skyrocketing right now. And so when you know, some of the concerns that we’re seeing in Vancouver is similar that we’re seeing here, mortgages are going up through the roof, people are over leveraged. What I’m finding right now is people are paying debt with debt. So they’re using lines of credit just to get by they’re using credit cards just to get by but as you know, that can only be sustained for so long, high interest rates to get you you know, so with that being said, people are needing to make some serious decisions right now. And that one of the biggest decisions is, I can’t live where I live today, because this is eating us what are we going to do, and so are sharing this on another another interview I was doing, it’s just like people are moving like they’re migrating outwards from wherever major city is to be more affordable and very fortunate as we just talked earlier as people can work from home, and maybe travelling a little bit further to go to work for that one or two days that they have to go to the office. So we’re seeing people’s commutes go a little bit longer. Some are taking even bigger, drastic measures where they’re moving to different provinces altogether. The migration we just saw some of the recent stats just I think was just a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago. The migration trends as people were moving to Alberta, the biggest was population train changes from Ontario and BC going to Alberta and the biggest part of that was going to Calgary to begin with right so even idea to split that went to Calgary. I don’t know the split between Calgary and Edmonton. I could Calabrese took these and I remember and Edmonton so I can’t comment on that. But Calgary is quite nice. Yeah, Calgary is pretty. And again, just my context, if I drive three hours north, whether it’s very different is that the distance three hours between the two between the two, it’s about two and a half hours. Okay, but that yeah, agenda whether it’s different interests. NBCU drive two and a half hours north was different Edmonton is gonna be colder than you would see in Calgary. But in Calgary, you’ll get snow in the middle of June, which you get these little show notes that tend to happen. So you’ll see kind of those slight variations that are there. But Calgary is pretty sounds gorgeous, beautiful. You know, you gotta kind of ask is you gotta back it kind of feels a little Vancouver ish, to be honest with you. It’s quite nice out that way. Right. So like I said, you know, you’re looking at, you know, if you could buy a house, you know, if you go to Edmonton, for example, like you can, that’s gonna be maybe surprising for a lot of people. What’s the cost of a townhouse here? And we’re an over in Oakville. What do you think? Three bedroom two bath 1.2? Adam 1.2 All right. 1.2 Yeah, but Right. Okay. 1.2. So in Edmonton, you can get a townhouse there for under 200,000.

Michael  

Oh, how old is it? It’s old. It’s older. But you know, don’t fool yourself. You’d be surprised and that’s actually quite renovated. So it’s like, it might be an older unit, but it’s renovated. And you know, even if you want to go to the higher end or 250 to 300 That’s what we’re talking about here. And so when you start kind of you know, you go back to the old 10% Rule

Erwin  

ratio or the ratio rule or whatever, you know, there’s that ability to accommodate that. So there is cash flow that can be generated over things and you’re investing in. But more importantly, is if people want to live in Edmonton, for example, they can take a lot of their equity they’ve earned here and moved there and their mortgage is now kind of maybe gone for something like that. Right. So it depends on really where, you know, the biggest issue that we see is affordability. It’s just debt loads are just too high and people are needing to make some drastic decisions and drastic changes, but as affects us as investors as well. 100% I’m gonna guess your foreign jokes for St. John properties are expensive for St. John is not expensive, not compared, but it’s more expensive than your Edmonton market. I would say it’s closer to your Calgary. And so then so the nice thing that happened to you is because you you have kind of a national view of relisting. So where are you looking to buy next? So our our focus, so we got actually just a couple days ago, we got a 22 unit apartment building under contract in Calgary just outside of Calgary, actually. So we just locked that up. I shouldn’t say we locked it up, we’d got it under the first stage ended the due diligence. So we’re just going through that process right now just reviewing all the numbers and the assessment, and then we’ll see what comes out of that right now. What’s part of their due diligence phase? Like first of all, how long is it to do due diligence? Yeah, so there’s interesting, yeah, well, I normally try to push a week I tried to do while if it’s five business days or seven business days, but there’s one one little clause that I always like to put in our contract. So for those that are listening, pay attention, I always like to reference, the clock doesn’t officially start until I receive all the documentation. So what happens is there’s a list there’s a big laundry lists that they need to provide two years where the financials, rent rolls, the last two years lease agreements, all sorts of so all sorts of information. So that needs to land in my desk. So once I check off all of those boxes, then the clock starts, okay. Because what happens is people are a little bit what’s the right word lazy. So with that laziness, as you might get piecemeal of this and this, but your clocks already started and ready for this. It’s not a drop box somewhere that you would think, right? And then some of the investors, they’re not, they’re not. And then you got handwritten financials. And it’s just like,

Michael  

Oh, you’d be shocked to see what you deal with if they give you a paper ledger. No, I wish they gave us a paper ledger. It was it’s pretty bad. It’s really bad. Some in some cases, some people are very organised and buttoned down. But I hate to say this, some of the best deals are actually people that are bringing you in the paper Ledger’s To be honest, I guess, because their mom and pop, they don’t really kind of know what they’re doing. And a lot of ways, and, you know, seconds or mon pop is because if that’s probably an indication for larger management style, it’s not completely efficient. They haven’t extracted the most of the value out of everything they haven’t. And when I say Mom and Pop, I actually kind of still do say mom and pop like these guys are just they bought into this property, they maybe owned it for 20 years, or 30 years. In some cases, some of my best deals are actually second or even third generation owned, this inherited these buildings, literally have no mortgage on them. Susie has been renting the property for 30 years, okay, and she’s right getting rent for a two bedroom, two bedroom unit for $625 a month, including utilities. And that rent should be $1,100 a month, not including utilities. So here’s where you can capex on a lot of this stuff without doing a lot of work. But for the existing owner, they’re just like, I’m getting cash flow, I don’t really care. I want to keep Suzy in there, she pays rent on time, and we’re good, but they’ve not done themselves a service because they’re not increased the valuation of this stuff. So so like I said, they can be Mom and Pop, they can be more sophisticated. So due diligence process to go back to your question. On the number side, it takes about a good week, five, seven days, as long as you got the information ready to go. And then once the due diligence has been completed and accepted. Now we kind of go to the phase two of the due diligence, which is you know, going through your financing, get it appraised environmental study engineering report. You need all those things in 2018 it Oh, yeah, you’ll need all that stuff. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the bank’s going to be requesting it and they’re going to be asking for it. So and part of it is you should be doing your own due diligence on all those things just to be safe. So it’s one of those things, it’s extremely, extremely important. So especially an environmental study, like in a lot of cases, they’re going to come clean. It’s funny, I was coaching one of my students, and he had a property under contract. The issue was he had a guest there was a previous gas station right beside his building. And so what happens is that automatically flagged that there was a gas station, and there was concerns that there may be some potential oil going into his property, there was a phase is it the lender less concerned or he should be the lender would have been concerned with this, right? So that study could cost quite a bit of money. And if there’s any, you know, contamination, the cleaning process is quite significant. So, here, he had to go back to the seller and say, Listen, this has got flagged and this is now going to need to go through a phase two study. I want you to pay for that study and to mitigate the risk if it goes through and everything passes, I’ll pay for the study. But if there’s any contamination that I have the ability to walk it well.

Erwin  

Walk away, and you pay for this study, you know, so these things kind of, we’re helping him kind of figure these things out, because this is all new. And so just got to be careful with all those pieces, what you’re trying to determine. And you can appreciate this is when you buy like an apartment building, you’re not buying a property at all, you’re actually buying a business. And so it’s based on valuation. And so you’re trying to determine is the business performing at kind of what market standards are for what this business actually is, you know, apartment building has more correlation to like a coffee shop or, or I’m trying to think of some other clothing store or something like that, where it’s all based on sales and sales here is rental income, and offsetting expenses, and all that stuff like that. So they wanted to determine is your current market cap base, you know, its current market cap, similar to what this property’s value is? And so they’re trying to understand what valuation is on this particular property. Right. So yeah, so those are just a few things in it. But yeah, I can take, you know, for those that are looking to get into this space, two to three months, four months, five months is not uncommon to go from the beginning of getting the offer accepted to closing, it just depends on on all the things that you’ve agreed to. But there’s a lot it’s quite a process for due diligence. So anyone ever resistant you inspecting suites, besides tenants? Sellers, the seller is not necessarily just trying to hide anything, though.

Michael  

Actually, that’s not true. That is that they did they did actually, it’s just a policy there. I think you mentioned the previous guests we had on the show, and I want to use but I find if you’re novice, like see your within four or five years, I can generally find you don’t know how many sharks are out there. For in what space as a seller is what you’re saying, in general. I’m sure you’ve run into sharks and sellers, they will eat your lunch tonnes. So your feet I don’t know. I don’t know what percent that percent, but they’ll take everything they can from you. 100%. Right. Yeah. So that’s my point is like, caution, always caution. Totally 100%. Like, you know, I imagine you’ve been handed fake numbers before, or like cooked number 100%. In fact, it’s true that real estate, but listeners, that is the truth. Okay, so I joke around, but I’m not joking. This is the real and I tell my students the same thing, when you get a copy of a pro forma and I love our Realtors just so you guys know I love you guys all love you guys all property, your performance comes to you. Okay, and you are basing your offer based on what the performer is stating? Yeah, of course, because we’re buying a business, you’re buying a business, or buying a stream of cash flows. Exactly. And so you anticipate that those numbers are being accurate. So you present your offer accordingly. And I tell my students, the same thing is 90% of the time that those numbers are not accurate. 90. And in fact, I think the number is even higher, okay. And for our Realtors to defend our Realtors, okay to defend them, you’re only as good as the information that you’ve provided been provided by yourself by the seller. So I respect that. So that’s been come to conclusion. So know what you are buying that pro forma, you gotta go in knowing that those numbers aren’t going to be accurate. And so here’s my kind of rule of thumb, and you reference sharks. And so I kind of reverse engineer it, to be honest with you. So when I look at a deal on pro forma comes my way. And I’m about to go to the process of due diligence. I go in it with the mentality is, how are these guys screwing me? And then work my way backwards? That’s me, too. Yeah. It’s like, how are they screwing me? And then by the time I come to the conclusion, there’s always a little bit of kind of screwing that tends to happen. But am I comfortable with that percentage? Or is there any concerns? And can I negotiate that aspect of it, but trust me by you going with that approach, mentally, and you’re like working that way backwards? It makes you scrub the numbers really, really well? And determine, determine what’s kind of going on? Because that’s what it is. And it does, it pops up in the numbers and you start to measure these things. And then more importantly, can it help you become more sophisticated when you’re going back to re negotiating with the sellers when you need to, right, so or any any other any common areas that that numbers are not as refined or accurate as it could be? Like for example, I’ll throw one out there. Like for example, some owners manage themselves. So they factor in nothing for manage that’s exactly that’s even because they’re they’re doing it themselves 100% Maintenance property managers number one and number two, right. And so you should always budget Property Management unless you truly want to be a property manager, which I don’t know what anybody wants to do this, that’s going to be a limiting factor for you if you want to scale your business and you don’t budget property management, but you need to do that, like you need to remove that expense, just to make the numbers work. You can fool the numbers, but at the end of the day, you’re only fooling yourself because you know if you’ve got plans that you want to own like 100 units or whatever the case may be, you know, you can’t man you’re not going to manage this. So you’re gonna have to budget those numbers in advance. So plug those numbers in the banks are going to put those numbers in anyway, they’re going to put that four or 5% 6% in there. They are going to put a repair and maintenance level based on you know, five or 6% Looking at the

Erwin  

To the building are also going to be budgeting a vacancy allowance. So those things need to be captured in those pro formas, they are immediately removed to make the numbers look better. But now you have to go back to the seller and say, Hey, thanks, don’t look at it this way, you got to kind of adjust some of these things. But some of the biggest ones I tend to find is a lot of the maintenance expenses that aren’t maybe budgeted aren’t being references as they should sometimes as utility costs. It’s very uncommon. Rents are not being disclosed accurately. But I’ve seen situations where they’ve provided me with kind of a fake lease agreement from fake tenants and owners were paying for it. So they’re just trying to show that the building was full when it actually wasn’t full. And so they’re just trying to throw that into the numbers right now. So that technically, the owner was kind of technically paying the rent, which is fraught, exactly. And so and then all sudden, the property becomes vacant, and all of a sudden, right, just as you’re about to disclose, right. But again, these are the things that you need to do is when you’re going out to go take a look at the property, you need to check out every single unit when you see the unit is empty, and it’s showing rent your questions. So you got to it’s checking balance, right? So then you look at what the Proform is saying, what are the actual numbers kind of showing? And is there a match, which are really there is not, then you can renegotiate, and you can say, Mr. Seller, I thought it was buying a property that was a 5% cap rate, but based on what the numbers that you’ve presented me, it’s a 4% cap rate. These are what you told me and I thought it was buying that but you’re not. So to make it a 5% cap rate, or based on what I thought I was gonna buy. This is your new price that I’m going to be renegotiated with and then we start to kind of go through that process. So fun. Am I another favourite of mine is projected rent, assuming full vacancy and civic full vacancy. Sorry, as I mean, fully occupied, fully occupied, zero vacancy. Yeah. And projected rent, so they actually sell the property based on future rent increases. So they’re trying to sell after you’ve renovated the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. So it’s just like, wait a minute, I’ve seen so much of that. It’s just ridiculous. But to your point, you know, this is really good. Actually, we’re talking about this, because Irwin said this earlier, it’s like the sharks that are out there. And for those that are looking to get into multifamily spaces we’re kind of talking about this earlier is, you know, how do you kind of get into this. And I think part of this is, you know, make sure you understand this business, because you know, for those that are just in the residential space, right now, you may have learned how to invest in single family properties, okay, so your education level is kind of is here and you can do this real estate at a residential level. But when you are looking at buying like a multifamily, you are not dealing with average Mom and Pop owner, you are dealing with another, hopefully, maybe a more sophisticated investor. And if you don’t, if you’re not talking the lingo or the language and you are trying to buy multifamily, with this type of knowledge, you’re gonna get eaten alive, right? Okay, so you need to get yourself I don’t care if it’s YouTube videos, you’re talking with Irwin, or understand the game no different than what you learned in the residential side. So you can at least talk at that same level, and you can understand this or else you’re buying based on emotion versus kind of using your nog into to understand how, how valuations actually being calculated, and does this property fit what your your investment goals are or not. So it’s very different. For example, I was talking to an investor earlier this morning, and he kept on referring to his house as being land lot value, because that’s isn’t where he lives, houses aren’t worth much. People only pay based on the lot.

Michael  

But that’s only true and how is this? All right, where in certain cases, it can be where a lot of the value is, it’s not the same at all with an apartment building totally 100% It’s not at all like it, like you said, you’re buying a business at the end of the day, you’re gonna have to 10 unit buildings side by side values, it could be completely different, even though they’re built by the same builder, same size, same everything. Well, one just managed better than the other, you will get two different variations with the price for sure. Absolutely. Okay. Is there a phase three? Do we need cover phase three? Oh, let’s see. Okay, so we got phase two, phase three. So okay, so first of all, we’ve got clients for phase two. So there’s no phase two. So yeah, I think, you know, the big part is, you know, you go through the information of phase one would be really just, you know, getting the offer accepted reviewing the, your pro forma, making sure it’s accurate, then you kind of go to the phase two, study, phase two part, which is due diligence, checking your number. And then I would actually say phase three is actually the aspect of environmental engineering reports, all those things, right. Once you’ve checked off all those boxes, and again, I think the important part is double check, triple check, quadruple check, talk to other people talk to other multifamily investors get a second set of eyes share with and I think the biggest one is when you’re looking at a multifamily. What’s the strategy? What are you doing this for? Okay, what’s the plan for this? It’s just like a business. Okay. Am I just buying it and then I’m going to just rent it, or is there opportunity to increase value

Erwin  

And so when I say that, that means you’re trying to increase the net operating income. And so for every dollar of increased net operating income, increase the value of the building between 15 to $20, depending on the area. And so just so for people are listening, net operating income is your gross income, because that’s all your income would be laundry income, rental income, whatever that is. minus all your expenses, not including your mortgage. So income minus your expenses. Okay. All your operating business, yes. Anything that caused me to talk to you guys before debt? Totally, you got it. And so with that being said, you’re trying to increase that dollar for dollar, you’re trying to find opportunities to raise that, by increasing the net operating income, you increase your property value, okay, your your business value. And so that’s the game. That’s the goal. And so is there opportunity, Is there things you can be more efficient? And is there expenses, you can reduce? Maybe you can get the tenants to pay the utility bills, which is one huge, huge aspect you can do? Is there ways you can raise the rents? So what’s your plan? Are you planning on renovating you suite by suite? What can you get increased rent for? So I think before you start kind of getting into multifamily is understand you are buying a business, but what are you trying to do? Like how are you going to increase the value isn’t like residential, where you know, you’re based on the market. There’s some factors to this, but there’s lots of ways you can create forced appreciation and in multifamily properties. So yeah, I’d add to one of the phases out reference check the salary as well. Oh, gosh, yeah, for sure. And want some information about them? 100%? For sure. I was like knowing who I’m dealing with, at a minimum, I check their LinkedIn at a minimum, at the minimum. Yeah, like at the minimum, like I think in this day and age with social media that we were talking about before, there’s so easy to kind of go on social media and just gotta get a sense of the individuals that you’re dealing with for sure. The more information you get, the better it is for you, right. So a friend of mine, he was here, he had conditionally sold an eight Plex. And just in passing and so who was buying it, he goes, Oh, this person like, Okay, I will put my Facebook searches name find them. We’re already friends.

Michael  

Just like three swipes, scroll down, like, Oh, I know who his coaches are. Yeah. So then I haven’t gotten a good idea who his friends are, as given the heads up, like a lot of these folks in this community are not doing well. Yeah. So. So then once you have that information, then, you know, in your negotiations and so he did it, I think it influences negotiations. Like for example, like, I believe you need an extension. Yeah. So that, you know, I’m pretty sure he asked for more money. non refundable. Yeah, you know, I mean, to see if this guy’s for real, yeah, don’t waste someone’s time. Yeah. But yeah, it worked out, worked out. I followed up and worked out. It’s fantastic. That’s good. That’s great. But again, he appreciate the heads up, because I kept like, you know, him and I were friends on Facebook, like, so I just, I just type in the guy’s name isn’t that hard? Yeah, for sure. And I think you’ll find the same people over and over again, because when you work with when somebody is investing in multifamily, or you see a property that’s for sale, like say, for example, is one of my properties. I don’t own just one property, I own lots of multiple, lots of properties. And you’ll see the same thing, same trend kind of happening with others. And so don’t ever be afraid to ask the question, Are you selling any other properties? And if it’s a good if this the process of transaction went, Well, yeah, maybe we can explore maybe selling more or buying more. I tried to do that to the best of my ability, because most of these people are multiple multifamily owners. And the same thing is with the reputation, you know, we talked about real estate investing as a small community. And it’s true. The guys in the multifamily space is even smaller, like really, really, really tight. Really, really small. All your the amount of realtors out there and property managers that manage this space, the investors that are in this space, it’s not a very big industry, right. So you don’t want to ruin your reputation by any means, especially in a small city like Edmonton or Calgary compared to like in Toronto. 100 versus two GTA like, what is the population of Calgary? I couldn’t even tell you to be honest with you later. I don’t think it’s massive, though. I have to google that one. Wikipedia, they have a hockey team, they must be decent size. Yeah, well, they’re doing better than Vancouver. Sorry, guys, Vancouver.

Erwin  

There is their face for now. That’s pretty much it. So at the end of the day, once you once you’ve kind of gone through the process of due diligence, you’ve double checked all your numbers and reviewed it, you kind of sign off no different than would you do in the single family space and you know, then you’ve got you normally it’s about 30 days before you actually come to completion and close back quickly a bounce 30 days to close, usually it’s around 30 days to close, right? So you’ve got so you’ve gone through the process of due diligence, that process can take between 45 to 60 days is an average rule of thumb, depending on the financing, if you’re getting CMHC, it’s way longer. And then after those 45 to 60 days, then tackle another 30 days to actually close there might be preparation of documentation, maybe you’re setting up a court, if you’re bringing in partners adds more complexity to it. So you’ll need to kind of budget for those things. But it does take about 30 days, usually on a general rule. And I think for those that are getting in this space, the best advice I can give you is it sounds like the purchase process is long compared to residential like you know, residential, you can probably get most of this stuff done in about a month. And you can do it even faster.

Michael  

than that, but in multifamily time goes by very, very quick, you know, to do an environmental study takes about three weeks to do and inspect, you don’t have a lot of time. So the more you integrate your team at the very beginning, almost at the time of offer acceptance, then you’ve got everybody aligned to making sure it hits your timelines, these deposits that you’re putting down, they’re big dollars, right. And, and sometimes banks will say, you know, just to give me given you kind of a rough conditional approval, they still can walk away from from the financing, if they feel that there’s too much risk, and it’s happened, I’ve seen people really, you know, literally, they’re about to close that day and say, we’re not no longer interested and pull away, and so puts people in really awkward positions. So you know, get people involved, right, as quickly as you possibly can, you know, 45 minute, 45 days or 60 days to do your due diligence and condition removal does sounds like a long time, it really isn’t long time very, very fast. It goes really quick. So especially if it’s like your first second or third time, oh, god, yeah, like, especially your first time, you just don’t expect it. And so, you know, for those that are getting into the space, just understand time goes by really, really quick, don’t use every single minute, every single hour to kind of make sure that you’re pushing everything forward constantly. So So what do you do for your clients? In what way?

Erwin  

Because I imagine, because we’ve said a lot, for example, yeah, sure, buying a business is not for everyone. Heck no. Right? Most people did not go to business school. First off, most people who are buying these things that I know, have never run a business before. Most most investors I know are generally employees. You know, we’re talking about buying a business. It’s a whole different, you know, people spend many, many years studying, going to business school, whatnot. Yeah, becoming an accountant, all those sorts of things.

Michael  

I imagine some things are handheld. Yeah. Do you hold hands up for my partners and my money partners? Is that what you’re saying? Or for anybody? Coaches? Yeah, for students all the time, constantly. It’s a constant process. Like, you know, for me, you know, when somebody hires me as their as their coach, or they’re wanting to be, you know, even just students of mine that are like so for example, I, you know, we do more of a group setting training. And I also do individuals that really need hand holding, especially during a live deal, especially live deal. And so I tell my students, and this is not any extra, this is just part of the process. This is just service that we try to provide, like, you know, if I taught somebody how to invest in multifamily, and I tell them, my students, this, I am expecting you to call me on your first deal, like I want to filter but the comment that I always share to my students is, you are going to tell me why it’s a good deal, it’s not the other way around, I will obviously vet it and review it and pick holes to it no different than I do with my own deals. But absolutely, so I want to make sure that they have clarity, and they understand exactly what’s going on. So same thing, even with my partners is the first multifamily deal like they’ve, they’ve entrusted me to just do the work and just manage it on their behalf. That’s why they have hired me in the first place is they just don’t want to do it respectively. So they just wanna make a good return on their investment. It’s great, happy to work with them. But I think it’s still important to understand the business they’re there they are my partner and so you know, for me, I you know, do quarterly reviews with them, we go through the financials go through bank statements, updates on the on the property, are we to budget every single year, we have a five year projection, no different than, like a five year projection of what where we’re going to be at those particular stages, we do annual reviews. And so it’s important to kind of make sure that you’re communicating with your money partners on a regular basis, how you are managing your properties, and things are working well. And then the same thing also goes with your you know, even some of my students is we do hold their hand through the whole process. This is like, okay, these are the steps what, you know, how did you negotiate the setting, setting the tone, making sure the offers written well for them, so they’re not put in an awkward position where they run out of time. So we’ve got all these little tips and tricks that we kind of use in our purchase offer to protect our to protect the buyer, and, and then obviously, going through the process of due diligence, you know, they put the numbers together, and they just reassess it helped them with negotiations and all those stuff. That’s the easy part is kind of the acquisition side. The second part to that whole process is the strategy, what are we going to do, and increasing valuation and executing what the plan is, and so that requires a little bit more hand holding, just to make sure they are launching it well. So from day one, once they’ve got the keys, they are going like they’re moving forward, because a lot of ways for multifamily people are trying to refinance it after a year or maybe two years. And so it’s kind of like, you know, all guns blazing at the very beginning to make that happen. So yes, I have a lot of questions. You just mentioned that the refi is usually one or two years. Why does it take so long? What’s happening during the first two years great question to you really great question. So you know when you got up because we were joking, I have actually have a bullet point to say this is fast and furious money making right Fast and Furious a year.

Erwin  

This is fast money right? So fast. Get Rich, or get rich overnight. rich overnight. Exactly. That’s all it is Lamborghinis.

Michael  

Oh, it’s all that stuff all that fancy stuff. That’s what we you will ever need any collection right one for every building one for it’s right beside yours that you have downstairs.

Erwin  

You have so many five Lamborghinis one for every building.

Michael  

But yeah, what what is the one to your process look like? Because I want I want people to people to have the expectation of like, what is what is the fee? Like? Sure What’s What’s the cash, inflow, outflow, whatever? I’m sure you could do this for your students like, what do you set the expectation? What is the expectation, I think part of it, it’s like, there’s always this expectation that, you know, you’re going to do this really, really quickly. But as everybody’s well aware, cash is always tight, it’s even more tender than now than ever. So you kind of Systemising this as well. So you’re looking at, when you got a building, like, let’s just keep it simple. It’s a 1010 unit apartment building, okay? You may see an opportunity here, where the current rent for the property is like $800 a month, and you have the ability to raise that to up to $1,100. But you may have to improve the overall look of the building for the units first to get it to that level. So maybe some new flooring, some painting, maybe some kitchens, or whatever the case may be, you’re not going to vacate the entire building to do that, because why would you do that, and because sometimes it’s just not, it’s just not going to happen, you know, it’s just not going to work. So you may work floor right below,

Erwin  

right? Because we’re gonna go over, okay, think about that, at $800 a month, $800 a month times 10 units, you know, that’s $1,000 a month that if the whole property vacant, and you’re losing $8,000 a month, like that is an income, right? So you don’t want to necessarily do this, you want to kind of stage this out a little bit. So the initial steps are, you know, you look at the lease agreements, lease terms and stuff like that. And when they’re going to come up to renewal, most of the time, when you have units that are maybe month to month, or they’re month to month, or they’re coming up to the end of the term, those are the ones that tend to kind of move the soonest, right, so then all of a sudden, you know, many of you may not be renewing it, then you go in and start taking it over and start renovating those one or two units. And then you start kind of planning out your lease based on these terms is when you know, hopefully can get these two units rented. And the best part about this is you can start communicating to some of these other tenants that maybe like the area like the building and say, hey, just so you know, we will not be renewing your lease for this particular unit. So we’re just giving you a notification now based on whatever government policies are, we are going to be renovating it. And I know what this I know what I’m saying maybe doesn’t work in every single province. But I’m just sharing what what we’re doing in the provinces that have the ability to do that. But with that being said, we give them the first opportunity to maybe rent the other units, the brand new units at the higher level. And then once we start to maybe make those transitions, and it’s actually quite high, believe it or not, they’re like, Yeah, I like the area, I got a brand spanking new unit, or maybe a newer unit that I want to move, move into that right. And then you start kind of working your way down. And then obviously, you will have some vacancies that you will have to address. And you might have to eat one or two months worth of rent. But that’s part of the planning process at the very beginning. You know, and I think that’s, you know, another big lesson for everybody is make sure you have good reserves. That’s my lesson that I learned years and years ago is reserve funds, right? But even more so when you’re doing something like this over budget, really over budget. And so both time and money, time and money for everything and go aggressive like I tell my partners all the time, I’m like, in my analysis, you’ll see the numbers be the highest compared to everybody else, like you can work with other real estate experts, mine will be the highest 100%. And the reason for that is because I don’t just budget for the one or two years, I actually budget for a five year timeframe in regards to owning this building. What can come from that is within one or two years, I got too much cash. So all I’m going to do is give the money that money back to the partners at that end. But what this is doing is it’s not me constantly asking partners for money, which has this negative content, I’m gonna either be honest with them and open and ask for that front. So with that being said, You’re capitalised well, to kind of go through the process to do the renovation, but it is a step by step process. So you’re dealing with lease agreements. And so that’s why I say a year or two, because you might have some challenges with tenants that don’t want to leave you might renovations might take longer than not, you might come up to some surprises that you didn’t want to hear. Right and so you’re gonna fire general contractor, you just never Yeah, all things come out, you know, all these things. It just happens. So you kind of plan for that scenario to kind of come to fruition and so you always plan worst case scenario. And over a pandemic. Yeah, exactly. Right. So it’s all those things, right. And so it’s all those aspects that you try to plan for. So again, you’re dealing with lease agreements, you’re dealing with renovations, repairs, all those kind of things and also raising rents, God forbid there’s a higher vacancy rate or something like that, but that that is kind of the stepping stone process once the building gets completely full at the higher rent levels. At that stage. Now you can go to the process to the bank, because you can show lease agreements you can show rental income coming in, even though the months previous have not been good because you’ve been doing this but they can see what you’ve done to stabilise us they will look at that new valuation based on the new rental income side of things. So that’s kind of the steps

Michael  

Yeah, hopefully the listeners happy with that answer because I want to move on. Yeah, please go. And when asked about partners, for example, when should someone had their partners lined up in the middle of phase four? Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Erwin  

No. How about phase? Minus four? How’s that? Before you even know, you’ve got to build a house.

Michael  

Before building before?

Erwin  

I feel sorry for this lady, but she’s got firm offers on property and doesn’t have a money partner, like, doesn’t have the money to close? No, that’s wrong. You’re saying? Well, you made the biggest mistake that I see from investments, one of the biggest ones is actually a lot of mistakes I see. But this one’s a big one. Because I’ve seen people lose out on really some amazing deals, really lost some amazing deals. And so with that being said, the time to have your money lined up is way, way before you’re even looking at the building that you’re about to buy. Okay. And that may sound really weird. And you’ve probably you’ve heard this or winning your longtime investor, but and I can’t speak to all those speakers that you’ve spoken to. But you know, at the end of the day, people are not investing in a deal. They’re not investing in you as an individual and trust and credibility. And so once a money partner says, I trust you, okay, like I when I say that 100% Trust, like I trust you, or when, with my $100,000. And you’re not going to zeros, yeah, and maybe some zeros, and you’re not going to Costa Rica with that money. Once they say I have confidence in you, the deal is completely irrelevant, because they trust you 100%. And so if I went to my property, so if I talk to my partners right now and say, Hey, I got a property in tuk tuk tuk. And this is not a knock and talk tactic I’m just using as an example. It’s real place, it’s a real.

Michael  

If I brought it to them, I would have partners for that, because they trust me, right. And they trust me wholeheartedly. And so that’s what they’ve hired me to do. So you know, what you’re selling. And what you’re doing to raise capital is never selling the deal is selling yourself. And so how people can be confident and trust you don’t get me wrong, you still need to present your partners the deal. But you should have most of that lined up probably 90 to 95% of the way by them. And so with that, now you’re just presenting the deal and see if they want in or not. And but that should be coming to conclusion in like a day really quick. So you shouldn’t be spending your precious quality time we talked about how the Time goes fast and the due diligence, shouldn’t spend that quality time raising money. That time is for due diligence. And so if you don’t have money to buy a property, a multifamily property, you’re spending your time doing the wrong thing you need spend your time raising money not be looking at a deal period. So damn someone DM me on the weekend.

Erwin  

There’s these five great properties in XYZ city. You can pass them to me if you want to take them

Michael  

introduce to someone with money.

Erwin  

But then how does someone secure the partnership? Because Because for example, I’ve heard, you know, I’m sure you’ve probably seen it to where money partners are not serious, think of the newer investor right now have been locked out of the secure that relationship with the money partner? Oh, that’s almost an episode in itself. That’s a long, long process. And so I think part of it is, it’s a screening process. And so and when I say a screening process, your money partner is going to screen you for sure. Right? They’re going to ask you lots of questions, because they want to see, hey, is Erwin going to Costa Rica with my money, which I know Irwin would not just so everybody knows he’s a good guy. But I think it’s even more important for the real estate expert to screen the other side. It’s an interview process on that end. And so you want to make sure that they’ve got some form of commitment and understanding and more importantly, and the best example that I can give you is two things. Number one, you are going to be married with this person for as an average roles probably five years. Can you be with this person for five years? Like truly like don’t don’t forget that forget the dollars can you deal with this person for five years is Is there some compatibility? Do they have common goals to what you have? And can you work with with this individual? Secondly, obviously want to determine they’ve got the capital to do so and that they are wanting to take action? Or are they just wasting your time and that and again, that’s part of kind of an interview process that you need to feel comfortable with? Because you’re asking uncomfortable questions like you’re sure Michael showing you of money. Absolutely. 100% want to put the money in this account in Switzerland. Exactly. You know, and so for us, it’s just like, You know what, we want proof that you are going to follow it through right. And so I actually don’t ask for deposits can sound kind of strange, right? Because I I’ve been doing this a long time I can bet my people quite well just know where my flaky people are and my not and so I still do

Michael  

get people to sign a document. It’s a very generic simple kind of letter of a commitment and three letter letter of understanding letter of understanding, right. And it’s just kind of follows our structure, right? And so I get them to sign it. And you will always have people have hesitation with signing. And if they have hesitation of signing, that is the biggest red flag if you’ve got a problem with, yeah, don’t get married, you already know you got an issue there. And you got a bigger issue. If you got somebody that you pass it over, and they sign immediately and you feel comfortable. That’s pretty good commitment, like saying, like, don’t get married to my church and like.

Erwin  

Yeah, so I think part of what you have to do too, is this is you will always have a small percentage of people that will probably not follow through and commit. But that’s why you need to raise. So if you needed to raise like a million bucks, you should actually be raising like $2 million, or $1.5 million. So then, when you have those individuals that maybe they have cold feet, and it’s okay to have a little bit of cold feet, or they’re nervous or something comes to fruition that they weren’t surprised, but they lost their job. You’ve always got backup, right? So in this game called real estate investing, you never I still I never stopped raising money ever, right? You just this constant engagement and connections that you should always be making. So you always have capital ready? Like this does not sound like a four hour work week to me. I think we should have shut this off for now.

Michael  

This sounds like work. Work is called work. This is a job.

Erwin  

All right. So the markets changed a lot. Like cap rates. Give me context, when was cap rates when you first started looking? Good Old Days? Probably something that half a percent cap somewhere in that vicinity? What year were market? Oh, boy, probably looking at 2002 1020 10 2011. somewhere in that vicinity. We were seeing stuff like that back in just prior to not know maybe probably around 2000 to 2003 2004. So those are the good old days. The Good Old Days anymore. These are your cat you’ve calculated caps. These aren’t the ones that are being sold to you know.

Michael  

Those are actually sold to me, believe it or not. Okay, what were the real caps. So real caps. I mean, after we’ve increased valuation and stuff like that, after you’ve done your due diligence, made the adjustments, I’d probably say just maybe another Oh, after we’ve done did the dude after we’ve acquired the property just released after the diligence period after you’ve had you’ve worked with the real numbers are actually well, you know, here’s here’s the thing is I’ve always pushed back on the sellers to get it to what I’m what they’ve presented back on, okay. Always like they like I say, if they’re presenting a some bang, a seven cap, and it comes in at like a six cap. I’m pushing back, you’ve gone through the numbers on through it. I’m like, yeah, it’s just like, I know where your numbers came from. But you sold me a basket of goods. This is what your number, these are your actuals. So I was under the impression that you’re selling me this that’s not so to make it match this, then this is where it is right. And so the price is adjusted that price has to get adjusted. Is it going to get into seven? No. But you know, for me, it’s just like, it’s maybe halfway in between to try to come to some some reasonable Association. Yeah, and, and that’s just the acquisition side, I am worried about what I’m paying, because I want to be sure that there’s opportunity in the deal, but I want to see really truly what the actual future opportunity is. So that’s, that’s really, really important. You know, I was dealing with a student just recently, he was so concerned about this 40 $50,000 variance and this because they’re going back and forth. And he started with 40 $50,000 in negotiations. And at the price point, and he’s like, I don’t want to give it to him. I don’t want to do this, I think, you know, I just really feeling uncomfortable with this. And I joke around, I’m like, I’m a very cheap, Portuguese boy. So it’s just my nature and just the way I am so I can understand getting a good deal. But don’t lose sight to what the opportunity is. His upside was probably close to almost a half a million dollars in a very short window. So are you going to really risk that opportunity for 40 to 50 grand, I go, of course negotiate this, but you’re not going to

Erwin  

walk away from this deal and piss the guy off. And then he’s not going to do you any favours to try to help you come to a close, because there’s still he’s still in the process of due diligence, and there’s lots of things the sellers can do and not being accommodating to support that close. Don’t risk it’s not worth it for half a minute for $50,000. Like this is bigger money. Like it’s so much bigger than what the seller realised what the opportunity was.

Michael  

So don’t lose sight. Right? It’s important to kind of understand that too. And so it’s kind of go back. Yeah, like I said, you know, those are the good old days in the cradle cap rates, you know, today, if I’m looking at Edmonton right now, you know, you’re probably pushing it like 5% cap somewhere in that or five points. 5.25 If you’re lucky in Calgary, you know, you’re probably pushing around the four four and a core somewhere in that vicinity. So we’re kind of getting to those types of markets. Monkton you’re probably pushing it around

Erwin  

aren’t just maybe around five and a half 6% cap somewhere there six, if you’re lucky, Halifax again, you’re probably pushing in those kind of like, low fives early five, somewhere in that vicinity there. Yeah. So the demand for multi has gone up for sure. And so part of the problem that we find is there’s a lot of investors getting into the and unfortunately don’t know what they’re doing either. And so they’ve overpaid some of these properties overpaid. I’m not saying that’s truly what the problem is, but it’s not helping the cause. And so now you’ve got comparables at these extremely low caps, extremely low caps. And that’s where you’re competing with unfortunately, like even myself, I sold some property my properties in Moncton, I sold them all before they implemented their their caps, rent caps. When the yeah rent control, rent controlled, right, so I was buying it just under a 7%. Cap, we increased valuation. And I was a little concerned, I was just trying to be a little bit forward looking. And I was taking a little bit of a gasp, but they announced it in Halifax. And I’m like, I don’t know, I’ve got this gut feeling that they’re going to be announcing it in New Brunswick. So I had to do everything, I just raised all the rents, there was no renovations done, I just raised all the rents, and really quick and we sold it in six months. So we bought it, bought it for 950.

Michael  

Raise all the rents six months later sold it for $1.515 million. And we didn’t do any rentals, nothing. You know, it’s Oh, it’s just, and about a month later after that rent control came in. Now that has been removed, we might open the door again.

Erwin  

And you sold it to the open market. So like you were like preying on your students or something? Oh, gosh, no, no, no, not at all. I think part of it is like, you know, here, this, there was somebody that said one of these courses

Michael  

and courses in and out.

Erwin  

So

Michael  

buyers are a man.

Erwin  

Yeah, like that’s something like for me, I want to get my best value, I’m not going to sell that ethically to my students, because part of that is I’m actually not doing my investors a favour or on the flip side, I’m not doing potentially my students have favour to I teach them try to look for opportunities, you probably won’t find those opportunities in my deal, because I’m trying to get the highest valuation. So I can’t ethically just do it and do that, let alone with rent control.

Michael  

Can’t do that. I just I just but yeah, so at the valuation, you sold it you don’t think made sense? No. It didn’t, then. So that’s the thing, you know, they sell it. I’m like, I don’t know why somebody’s buying it at this price. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s their prerogative at the end of the day. And end with the sales process looks like, like, for example, you know, I’m friends with, we have mutual friends. And one of them explained to me how their objective is to be when when an agent has a property that’s going to be called for sale. Their objective is to be really high on that list for when they when they call so they are high on that list because they have a record of closing. Is that true? This is 100%. Right? So then this is what I want. I actually told the beginner just yesterday. That’s that’s the reality of things. So I said to him, like, you know, between you and I, where do you think we show up on the list?

Erwin  

Yeah, see that assumed list is 150 names and then numbers. Where do you think you and I show up? Yeah, right at the bottom. Right. So it gets through all of us. Yeah. Probably gets an email list as well. Yeah. Right, I guess shopped around the mortgage brokerage? 100%. And then it makes it on realtor.ca. Totally out of present. Yeah, it’s one of those things, you know, you’ve seen it well, before Oh, my goodness, like, you know what, I didn’t call you can call it Oh, yeah, I’ll get calls. I get deals that don’t, there’s never ever been ever pop up at all I got. But those are really where the opportunities are. But I’ve been doing this for a long time. And so for those that are seeking a reputation, yeah, people know you, for sure. But that shouldn’t discourage people to be really honest with you, you’re just at the bottom of the list right now. Right? And so you just need to build those relationships with those people to move up the rank. And that’s all it is. So you know, do your do your part to work with your team members build those types of relationships with them. And it may sound kind of like, you know, it just may sound kind of little bit unjust, I guess. But it’s just take your realtor out for lunch, build relationships with your property managers build relationships with your photographer, like, it’s funny, I had a photographer, he takes pictures of our rentals, okay, but he takes pictures for realtors as well like for showing properties and stuff like that. He was taking a picture of an apartment building that was about to go out to the market. And he called me from there and say, Hey, Mike, FYI, this property’s coming out on the market in advance. Here’s the seller would you want to talk to him? Right? That’s where my photographer giving me leads. And so it’s communicating what you’re looking for what you’re trying to and build those relationships. Property managers are managing these properties. If I am looking to sell one of my properties, guess who my first call is going to be? It’s actually my property manager to give them a heads up

Michael  

First Call Number one, okay? And so with that being said, Here, or she may not want to sell that property. And they may want sorry, he or she may not want to lose that property. And he can talk to the owner and say, Hey, I got somebody else, another owner that I’m dealing with or somebody else that might be interested, would you want to maybe do this as kind of a private sale, kick the property manager a few bucks, just to say thanks for the lead and call it a day. But those are the types of relationships and discussions your lawyer like there’s all these inside discussions that tend to happen. It happens in business too, all the time. It’s so you just need to get out there and connect with those people. And you may not have that really tight connection right now. But that’s what you got to strive for build for right now. Are you doing that in Vancouver?

Erwin  

Because I’m leaving you with it? My question. My leading question is really like, you know, you mentioned like Moncton, New Brunswick or Halifax? Have you value Foster’s relationships? Like it’s almost the other side of the country? That’s a long flight. Yeah. How long is the flight Vancouver to Halifax? Halifax? That is a seven hour Yeah, so seven hours. Yeah. So you’re not getting? Are you getting on a flight to Bali? Are people buying these people lunch? Well, you know, there’s lots of things that I can do here do from that. So for example, you know, I was just in your office, I saw lunch being served here, right and wonderful to touch it because I didn’t touch it. I want to respect it. It looked amazing, by the way. But their body is a temple nobody’s temple. If you don’t believe me look of Michael’s picture.

Michael  

The old pictures all pictures right.

Erwin  

Michael a little bit bodybuilder

Michael  

ABS everywhere, on his forehead, forehead.

Erwin  

Everywhere.

Michael  

No, I you know, there’s lots of things you can do virtually. And I think that’s the little bit of a change. But you know, there’s a lot of stuff you can do like even sending lunch in by surprise, you know, these small little gestures, small little venture gift cards go a long way as well. But it is building and fostering those relationships. But obviously, when you are there, take them out for lunch, take them out for dinner. And you know, and you know, talk about everything. But real estate investing is about connections and just building those relationships so they can feel comfortable with you. Because most people don’t do this. I know it’s changed so much. They just like, hey, I talked to this person. But I haven’t seen any leads. You know what, you just haven’t made it up that list yet. So work really, really hard with to connect with those people. So you get first access, right? You’re adding to my four hour work week here. Oh, sorry. Because to be honest, everything he was talking about here is like you have to have a lot of skills, you should have basic accounting skills, somebody else’s skills, sales skills, relationship building skills, operational skills, yeah, probably some landscaping skills, planning on doing some of that stuff. A lot of cases, these relationships and things, these are things all the stuff that I’m talking about is what you really have to do at its very infancy is like you, you got to work really hard, just like any business. The hardest time in a business is the first 234 years you got to work and work and relationships, that at some point in time, you start to kind of delegating, like, for example, bookkeeping, I don’t do any of that stuff. Right. But you know, for me, it’s it is more so customer relationships, they still invested it with myself. And so I still want to make those connections, you know, you spent a lot of time raising money, right? And so you got to constantly be raising money, I don’t really need to raise work too hard for that anymore. Because you know what the money that I currently have with my existing partners. It’s rinse and repeat now, and now that we’ve got such a track record, they’re just providing me with referrals. So I’m not necessarily needing to go out hunting too much anymore for that kind of stuff, right. But for those that are wanting to scale, you can’t just expect that you’re going to have a very successful business without working you have to work really, really hard to have a successful business. I’ve graduated weekend course I got this.

Erwin  

Talk about for context, Michael, what amounts are your money partners putting into a project? And how long have you known them along.

Michael  

So just an idea, in some cases, I’ve been working with them for probably around 17 1617 years. And so as an average rule, I kind of first started, the magic number is between 50 to $65,000. As an average run rule of thumb, that number is definitely bumped up to be somewhere in the closer to around 85 to $125,000. We do it in share increments. So we have specific shares, but you know, my partners now so say for example, we have a project that may have 10 equal shares in the corporation that owns the property. Each one of those shares will equate to say about $100,000 Just just a general number, right? And so we keep our shares very minimal, because we just look for quality money. And so with that being said, you know, we have individuals that are buying 234 All shares it doesn’t you know, we have people who just say you got 10 shares at 100 grand, here’s a check for a million bucks. Thank you very much. And you just call it a day. And again, this is the relationships we built. And and more importantly, that we’ve been working with them really closely for years right and so but it’s taken some time to do

Erwin  

All right, so the How does someone get started for assuming still is still a good idea to invest in multifamily? Oh god. Yeah, for sure. How does someone get started? Um, question? Yeah, we had a fan whose name happened to be Adam? Rodin? Yeah. Real popular guy. Yeah, yeah. No, I it’s one of those things, I think if you’re gonna get started in multifamily, which I think is a question correct. So if you’re looking to get started multifamily, take the time to take to learn a little bit, you know, understand what you’re buying. Don’t pretend that hey, you know what, I’ve got 20 single family homes. I’m a sophisticated big headed investor know what I’m doing. It’s a different game, completely different game, go back to go back to day one and start your learning no different than what you did when you first started learning single family home. And if you go in with that type of mentality, you’ll have a lot more success because you are buying something different. You’re buying a property, yes, your customer is a tenant, which is similar to single family. Yes, the business is very different. So take some time to learn, like what is it exactly you’re buying? How are you managing this kind of stuff, you know, you’re going to be dealing with different people, like your single family realtor is not going to be your multifamily realtor, your single family property manager most likely will not be your multifamily property manager, your single family, the man your hand, everything, everything changes, everything changes, right. So you know, and more importantly, it’s like, when you’re buying this, you got to also think strategy here. So this is what it is. It’s like it’s not just buy a property and hold it is what’s the plan? What’s the strategy, so learn those things of when you’re about to buy it, that you have a very clear plan of what you’re going to do with it after. And so that’s what investors need to know. And it’s not to scare people, it really shouldn’t be, it’s actually a great investment strategy. But it’s just taking some time to kind of educate yourself first. And like I said, I’m not here to pitch courses or anything. I’m not Not one bit. But read YouTube videos, there’s lots of great free information that’s out there, you know, if you really want to push yourself and scale and do it, yeah, to maybe take a course or two. And again, it could be anybody’s well, not anybody’s chorus, do your research on, on who the person that you’re learning from? And then, you know, do your research on the course itself. And you know, do your research on what the students got out of it? And do they feel that there was value connect with these students? Like if they’ve got testimonials, connect with them, ask them? What did you find value of this this help of what did you buy multifamily after you’ve done this, so start to kind of get yourself educated to learn this business. So you can kind of go in again, like I shared, you want to talk the same language. And that’s what I want is, you know, just, and even more importantly, hopefully, your education doesn’t just kind of keep you at this particular level with your other investor. I’m hoping that your whatever education you’ve got, or whatever knowledge you got, is going to help us make you even more sophisticated as well, right. And that’s kind of really the strategy. And then from there, my other small bit of advice, you’re dealing with bigger numbers, you’re dealing with a different strategy, dip your toe in the water. Okay, so don’t buy your 100 don’t buy your first property as 100 unit building, okay. Buy yourself something maybe a little bit smaller. And, you know, I was talking to some, some amazing guy named Adam or something like that. And I think, you know, he was referencing a four Plex, a four Plex is still falling under a single family, which is still it’s still a good segment, it’s still really, really good, but anything six and over, but I still kind of want to push people to kind of really consider like, seven 810 units somewhere there dip your toe in the water. Yeah, you know what you’re probably and people will challenge me, especially other investors, and they’ll say, why would you do that you’re not gonna get the best economy has scale and all that stuff. And that’s true, it really is. But making these really big, costly mistakes can be very, very costly. So take the time just to dip your toe in the water. And the reason why I share that is I did the same thing too. And trust me, saved my bacon multiple times. It’s just that I’ve just kind of go in dip, and then figure things out make sure everything’s working out now we’ll start to work on some bigger aspects of this. So it’s gonna be like a start off learning. Is it looking at the coop in turn model for example, could someone just be a passive investor and like, come along for the ride and totally learn everything from somebody? Yeah, absolutely. Like I think even for partners that I’ve worked with too in fact, I’ve got one that is here that I’m meeting up tonight actually, he’s one of my partners. And that’s exactly what he’s doing is he became one of my partners as a joint venture partner and he was very open and disclose this 100% It was my I just want to invest with you on this deal. But would you do me a favour Can I go on the ride with you? Absolutely. Come like let’s go. So they got a chance to go part of the the inspection process and learn and and so as a student to or the Eastern nations, they are just an investor or investor Oh, just investor not a student. So he just wanted to be part of the process and so you’re gonna have like 10 requests for First off, she really don’t mind to be honest with you. I really, truly don’t mind because like I said, the more they see the amount of work and they see the amount of

Michael  

work that comes along with this, then more importantly, it comes to the conclusion do they really want to do this or not. And so for some people, they just say I want to be a multifamily investor. And then when they see the amount of energy and effort and energy that are energy and effort that comes along with this, they’re just like, You know what, Mike, I don’t really want to do this, you know, so here’s just my Mani, and off you go. But I’m not pushing them to do that as like, this is what it takes to do this. These are the reasons why I’ve done it the way I’m doing it. So you can think about to get to where it is to get it where it is. So when you go by your deal, just remember this stuff. And I’m not pushing them to come reinvest with me, because they’ve been open with me at the very beginning. So I want to respect that. And I do want them to be successful in whatever acquisition that they have in the future on their own. And I hope the experience that they had here with me was positive, and they’ve been able to relate that back to their future deals. And I want no credit on that. It’s really them. They’re the ones that are taking the action, they just needed a little bit of hand holding to support that. That’s great, awesome, watching in a fair amount of effort. Totally 100% I’ll be honest, when people kind of go through the hand holding process and acquisition like that, there’s a high percentage that people just say, I don’t want to do any of that stuff. I just, you know, I want my kids spend time with my kids. I want to do this and so they’re just like, here you go, right. And because I have a lot of money partners that say that they just don’t want to do it. So I know you can answer this but isn’t that a better use of your time than taking a weekend course? I don’t actually believe in weekend courses. So that might be a surprise. Oh, boy, I might be opening up a can of worms but that’s just my two cents. I might cell phone number for your.

Erwin  

Anyway, I’m not gonna ask sorry, guys. I just don’t I just not the way to see your social media. So Michaels, DMS are open for hate.

Michael  

accordingly.

Erwin  

I’m okay with that. That’s okay. Yeah, I think we covered Oh, yeah, cuz because the point the point I was trying to make with, with someone investing alongside you, because we talked about before we were recording about the right deal, because I think that’s where I think investors can get you can get it wrong in many places. If you’re investing in the wrong deal. You’re doomed. 100%. Right, you have not given yourself a chance. totally right. I think that’s a part of it is, and you know, if there’s a bit of advice I can share with people here, and hopefully, they’re hopefully I’m sharing advice with people. But I think the important part is do not invest based on emotion at all. Ego is huge, right? It’s a big one, especially in this space, I got 100 unit building. Exactly. It’s all that and I just bought my 20 unit building, I can’t wait to post this on Facebook, you know, and they’re just like, under contract, I just bought it not real and they’re making themselves look so good, until you get to the meat and potatoes. And it’s just an absolute dog. And it’s funny because there’s deals that I’ve gone in taking a look at it has been presented to me. And I look at it, I’m like, I’m not touching this thing with a 10 foot pole being posted on social media, you know, three weeks later by somebody else really excited and hyping themselves up and just like I don’t know what they paid for it. But it’s it was a bad deal. From what I looked at it right. So the ego has got to stop and it’s gonna have to stop you just do not let your ego and emotions get in the way of what is important in this game, which is the numbers it is multifamily truly is 100% all about the numbers it is when you look at it, you understand it, it is as clear as crystal clear can be, you know, can there be some minimal variations? Yes. But if you understand those numbers really well, you can have a lot of success. From my perspective, it’s actually one of the more safer investments out there. Because you’re not so dependent on what’s going on with the market. There’s so many things you can do with it, and pivot around to make you successful. And this one is done. Right? If done. Right. Right. And to add more to it is when I say done, right, it’s also right for you based on what your why is I know people I know people say why, why why but it’s the truth. What you know, we all get into this game for a specific reason, in a lot of cases is I want freedom on my time, or I want to be a full time real estate and it doesn’t matter what it is. But as this project getting you closer to what your objectives are to begin with, or not, it’s a simple answer. And that’s the right answer. And by looking at the numbers properly and finding the right deal to get you closer to there,

Michael  

you’ll be in a good spot. And having a quality pair of eyes vet your deal for you’re sure. And it doesn’t have to be a coach or a mentor. It’s just maybe having another investor that knows what the heck they’re doing or whatever it is. But don’t be afraid to have a second set of eyes. You know, you’ve myself I have people that look at my deals from time to time, just, hey, I’ll present it and you say just need a second set of eyes. What do you think? And let’s talk about it and have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? It’s just checking balances making sure they do the same thing in return sorry, but you’re looking at you’re talking to an investor with over a decade of experience you’re not going to talk to someone with five years experience.

Erwin  

No offence to the people that are doing it. It’s not to say there’s no great investors for five years. But again, just like anything just in general just in general rule like you know what you want people that have gone through cycles, honestly, that’s the truth of it, especially for especially for people

Michael  

Out of, you know, looking for coaching or advice or any of those things like, get them through a cycle before, I’ve had times in my buildings where, you know, we’re dealing with 20 30% vacancy. It’s not it’s not pretty, it’s not pretty at all. And so how do you be creative in those types of approaches? So ask those questions from people, you know, have you been through this? Oh, no, I’ve just been writing the last 10 years, it’s been amazing. And prices are going up rents going up making lots of money. Okay, that’s everybody can make money when things are great. And everybody can look like a sophisticated investor when everything is going great. The real good investors has been what have they been able to do to overcome the downturn? And still survive that those are the ones that I want to talk to you? So this is the ultimate stress test right now. Yeah. Michael, thanks so much. Any any final words? No, I just want to wish everybody success. And like I said, I know this is can be a challenging time for everybody. And, and I know a lot of people are because I’ve got a lot of people reach out to me as well. And I think the important message I want to relay with everybody is you guys aren’t alone, everybody, you know, and it’s real estate still is right investment strategy, when done very right and very well. And you got to remember that the challenges that we’re facing today, a year or two years from now, you probably will look at this and say, Man, those are some really good lessons. It’s just hard to visualise that at this very, very moment. So surround yourself with people talk to people. Try not to keep it all in I think the more you engage with individuals and share some of your challenges, I know it might be really challenging to do that. It’ll give you the support that you need to help you overcome some of the challenges you’re facing and the answers that you need to learn from other people in regards to helping you support them and I wish everybody success in their restaurant and their investing journey to really do so in the savvy Facebook group. Anyone can join it. Yeah, absolutely. Come on on. So savvy investor you can actually even go to our website called the savvy investor.ca The savvy investor.ca You can get links to our Instagram YouTube channel, we got lots of free education that’s there. No cost to that we even have some interesting guest speaker that comes join me today that’s on there. Mr. Irwin’s also done a presentation there as well for me in the past church and as well and and yeah, definitely gotta sign up for our Facebook group under savvy investor and connect, engage, you know, talk share, you know, that’s what it’s all about. There’s no selling that’s in there. It’s just all about communication and supporting each other as as a community. So thanks so much for doing this Michael. Appreciate it, buddy. It’s great to have you and nice to see so.

Erwin  

Before you go if you’re interested in learning more about an alternative means of cash flowing by hundreds of other real estate investors have already then sign up for my newsletter. Find out for yourself but so many real estate investors are doing to diversify and increase our cash flow. And if you can’t tell I love teaching and sharing this stuff.

To Listen:

**Transcripts are auto-generated.

Erwin  

Welcome to the truth about real estate investing show for Canadians. My name is Erwin Szeto a full time real estate professional since 2010. And I split time between being an investor specific realtor and bigger portfolio real estate investor. More important than this has anyone’s portfolio. It’s all about financial peace in my wife and I have it. And that’s what I want for all of our investor clients and our listeners of the show. My strategy is value investing through renovation and maximising rents through densification. You know, often that means basement suites, I have student rentals as well. And that’s one of the strategies we teach our clients that is called Student rentals. And I know a lot of people have their ideas when a student rental is I like to write my rent my investments like a business. So what surprised me view that we sold a townhouse in third Ontario again, that’s the world Ontario we sold a townhouse for $804,000 Just last weekend $804,000 for for a townhouse. Where’s Thorold Ontario, you ask? It’s actually very close to Brock University and Brock University’s love living in newer construction homes, which is what my clients property was in, in that area. What makes these houses special is that they’re they’re less they’re only eight years young. I have worked directly with the builder on the design of these units so that the builder delivered to my client, a six or seven bedrooms student rental house. What made us two rental houses that we had noise cancelling and fire retardant insulation in any of the shared walls and ceilings. The basement was finished with two bedrooms featuring in each bedroom featured an egress window, which means it’s a fire code compliant window for a person to climb out of in case of a fire. We admitted closet doors which save our clients money. And it’s also one less thing to break in. In my experience. A lot of students don’t like closet doors, they ended up being used as coffee tables. So that’s not something I want to be paying 457 $100 per coffee table. Since the builder was delivering to our clients a finished product, our clients were able to finance everything, pretty much everything so there’s almost no renovation to come in out of pocket for our clients were paying around 315,000 for these purpose built student rental townhouses which rented out for at the time 2700 A month again 2700 Rent a month for a $315,000 personal instrumental townhouse fast for today, market rent is closer to 4900 per month as we’re in the middle of a housing crisis. It’s even worse for students. And as mentioned, we listed and sold the house for so it’s sold for over asking it sold for 804,000 firm for what was about 1500 square foot townhouse. The return on appreciation alone because it’s easy math again bought for 315,000 Assume a 25% downpayment. So for 804,000 return is $490,000 as a return on investment that’s over 620% over eight years, via a very simple, boring buy and hold real estate strategy. Never forget that making money is the objective. And also before I continue on, in my experience, university students do not end up in the landlord tenant board. So in my opinion, depending on where you operate, but a lot of student rentals, a lot of students as tenants are lower risk than regular tenants. Because again, in my experience, my clients don’t end up in in the landlord tenant board battling their tenant for like non payment of rent or anything like that. So again, never forget that the objective is making money. Now how many doors do you have or what the current fad is, whatever it is right now, or how many Instagram followers one has, it’s all about making money in here my client did so successfully. So congratulations to them and many others who and I have many other clients who continue to hold these properties. They’re hoping that we get back to peak which is the over 900,000 So again, it’s a nice boring, no renovation property in a massive demand area for both buyers and tenants. Again, we’re in the housing crisis. So tenants are scrambling still that’s why the rents are so high they’re scrambling to find property and in turn parents are looking for property to buy because I would do the same thing I wouldn’t pay these pay these are tortures rents. So I prefer my preference would be to buy and there’s many parents out there looking to buy again in my experience this is a winning investment. I think everyone would agree this is a winning investment Good luck making these returns in any other fat investment out there. So this means your investment criteria please let us know and reach out or email or social media DM me we’re everything basically gets back to us. So but it is not all sunshine and rainbows this week. I personally prepared an end for it and eighth for my tenant who missed April’s rent and is persistently late. So those are the those are the forms that one has to fill out respectively and it foreign aid both are related to non payment of rent. I’m getting involved as I’m operating with whoever personal assistant right now who’s no longer is no longer with us. She’s okay she’s not here at the company anymore. But I do also think that’s important for managers to get into the details from time to time. And honestly it gives me something to talk about. Talk about and it refreshes my Maria on how to do these things. The tenant is very apologetic. I’m not too worried about not getting rent, as I have her mother as a guarantor who has a great job and pays rent on time. I know because the mom is also my tenant. The mom is also my tenant. And also I’ve noticed since I got involved with the tenants tone is in her communication with me is very different than how she communicated with her assistant. My tenants memories tend to be very different. Her recollection of her payment history and history of being on time is very different than, yeah, her tone is different with me. It is not fun having to threaten tenants with eviction, because that’s essentially what these forms are for. That’s what they do. Like, you know, this is a notice for eviction for not paying rent. All right, but if tenants are not held accountable to the terms of the lease, just no different than if I’m not held accountable to the terms of my lease, you know, we run a really tight business, I handy people are basically on call to all my tenants, should they ever need anything? Yeah, if they’re not held accountable, and they don’t pay rent on time, then this is what happens. Also my tenants rent is about for this specific tenant that’s late. It’s her rent is about 30% under market. So she really should not be putting her cheap rent at risk either. I know some of us, some of you out there listening are asking why don’t we automate what we used to. But when money wasn’t in our account, is there was a lot of NSF charges going on. So yeah, honestly, we’re being a little too nice. But she has a single mom, so we’re tolerating it for now, though, it had been a few years. This has also happened to me at my daughter’s house. For those who don’t know, I bought property smoke chair and I’ve already bought properties. We’ve earmarked properties as our RSP for each kid retirement our real estate savings plan. So one day it will it will be my daughter’s job will become the landlord and one day so she’ll have to take over this and take it off my plate. Speaking of my daughter, she recently came third place in her competitive speaking class. My son unfortunately didn’t win anything. Again, unfortunately, he’s inherited my habit of mumbling. But yay, daughter. Cheering myself and our families are all shy people, especially growing up are all introverted. I think we’re all pretty much all introverted as well. And I think everyone knows that public speaking and public presentation skills, verbal communication skills are all important. Hence, our kids are three years into public speaking classes. Only last year, they got into competitive and the results have been awesome. I’ll see my kids holding conversations with adults and with adults at social events, either family or work related events and they’re not shy like sharing our at our at our age, our experiences has been a good one. So if your kids are feeling shy, I’d recommend public speaking as well. Speaking of public speaking, my team and I have presentations to give at the upcoming iWin meeting online only meeting will be given the same awesome economic and market updates investors need to know both east and west the GTA and we’re just about to confirm our guest speaker. It will either be a multifamily investor speak expert who has retired thanks to their portfolio, they have somewhere north of 300 doors I believe. So this is someone who is extremely legit. And also when Brian does zero work, as in he is truly retired. It’s not like some of these invest these some of these folks out there who are saying they’re retired but they have a full time job. Or it’s either gonna be Brian who is the agenda has hundreds of doors very successful makes lots of money, or we have a senior living slash retirement home investor with over 20 years experience and they have a fund as well. So it’s gonna be either senior care investing, someone who also has a fund or a someone who has a REIT, sorry, in the apartment building space, whomever we have, it will be excellent. As these folks are serious veterans of the industry. They’re a lot older than I am as well.

Erwin  

So they’ve got lots of time and experience in the market. And as always, this will be an excellent I win real estate meeting. And as that is always the standard here. As I mentioned, this will be an online event only the meeting will take place at 730 on Tuesday, April 18. Via zoom, hopefully everyone knows how to use Zoom. If live and in person networking is more your thing. Saturday morning, April 22 will be we will be hosting the island mastermind tour. Again, that’s called the island mastermind tour, which consists of we’re going to meet it for coffee, we’re going to meet this one’s in Hamilton. So we’ll be meeting at Hamilton’s number one ranked coffee shop by the way the croissants are to die for. Once we’re all gathered, we’ll head out for a tour, both inside and outside and an income property or to sell sometimes it’ll be owned by my clients. So these are actually real investment properties, followed by a mastermind lunch. Our last our mastermind tour sold out the one we did in Oshawa just a few weeks ago. It’s sold out in four days. So do not delay. The education and networking is excellent. If you haven’t been on one of these tours before. Again, we’re meeting for coffee we’re gonna be inside doing tours inside and outside of income property and mastermind lunch. So there’s lots of opportunities to network with like minded people that costs only $20 plus taxes and fees, all profits go to charity. So if you’re not on my email list, then you and I don’t know why there’s already over 10,000 Hardworking Canadians on our email newsletter. And all you need to go do is go to this, this podcasts website, www dot truth about real estate investing.ca and put your name and email in on the right side and then you’ll start getting our email newsletters. You’ll get informed when these new episodes come out. When we host events costs are, again are nominal for almost all our events, our island meeting this online is free. So we’re giving away a whole tonne of quality education that actually makes people money. So yeah, so get on my email newsletter. If you’re already getting our emails, then you’re just gonna check it out. You’ll be informed when your first chance to register. So yeah, so do not delay for the island mastermind tour because again, the last one sold out in four days. So and there was a lot of disappointment afterwards. So please do not delay onto this week’s show. This week we have Matthew Varga who together with his wife, Nicole have a several six figures ventures so several six figure businesses in different categories. They have a YouTube channel called it’s called Health Net nutrition Inc. And it almost has a million subscribers from which they generate ad revenue or from YouTube. They also have show sponsors and because they have an engaged audience and they have a brand, they able to market their followers, their e commerce Store. So they have they make money. So there’s multiple revenue streams stemming from this successful YouTube channel. They have a growing portfolio of real estate investment properties. Some are buy and hold and some are buying holds the Airbnb in Matthews doing what’s called Airbnb arbitrage, which means that he that he is the long term tenant so he’s renting from other landlords and then he furnishes that property and operates an Airbnb business instead of rental property to make money to pay both pay the rent, and then Matthew just keep any remaining profits. Airbnb arbitrage can be a great way for newer investors to break into the market, but it’s not without risk. Well, if you don’t make enough, then you’re on the hook for the rent. Right? Right. But Matthew was kind enough to detail his wish list for features in order to command and rent the great rental rates before he would consider taking on any or Airbnb arbitrage opportunity. Matthew also recently returned from Florida as he now spends winters there in Florida to both avoid our cold winters and go looking for real estate opportunities. He also shares how he’s able to do so like logistically with visas and investments and whatnot. So Adam, our product, Podcast Producer, you know, he’s off camera, he’s Off mic. But he said that this is one of the best interviews we’ve ever done. It’s really interesting. It’s an interesting interview because a lot of people talked about doing YouTube and ecommerce stores and therapy Bill arbitrage is Matthew actually does it does. It’s quite successful. So for me, I have no idea what I’m doing here. You’re stuck at 17 listeners, but Matthew is legitimately young and successful. So I can’t recommend enough that you have a listen and take notes. Please enjoy the show. Is it Matthew? Man

Matthew  

Now like most of us say Matthew, I don’t have a preference people I know for a long time call me Matt. Newer people usually say Matthew, I usually introduce myself as Matthew, but it doesn’t matter. Someone calls me Matt or Matthew. Okay,

Erwin  

my mistake leads us both. Yeah. What’s keeping you busy these days?

Matthew  

Yeah, so what’s keeping us busy these days is probably like our biggest newest project is like our Airbnb arbitrage business. So that’s something that we started up just over a year ago. And we’ve built that up to about 15 properties. Now. That’s a mixture of mostly Airbnb arbitrage. But there are some of our own units that were long term that we’ve converted into Airbnb s. And then we also manage some people’s Airbnb s for them. So we’ve had people reaching out and asking me to manage their properties for them, because they’ve just been underperforming. But yeah, so we’ve been doing that for just over a year now 15 properties, I think our gross revenue over the last year on that is about 350k. And probably by next year, we’ll have that up to about a million I think as we add more properties and more more investors. So that’s sort of what we’re, we’re looking to do. And like I said, that’s like the Airbnb arbitrage model. So we can sort of talk about what that is, and break that down. And then on top of that, we also run our YouTube channel, as we were just talking about a little bit earlier. So we have our main YouTube channel that’s more focused on health, wellness, family stuff, since we had our, our daughter two and a half years ago. So our content shifted a little bit to more family content, and that we’re just gonna hit a million subscribers this year. So that’s a big milestone for us. We’ve been running that for a while. Now. We have our ecommerce store that we’ve that we’ve been running for the last couple of years, we’ve been making some shifts there on on what we’re offering to people. We have our natural skincare line that we we started a few years ago, but it’s sort of dropped off a little bit but we’re looking to like really build that up this year and really put a lot more effort into into that line of business. That sounds like a lot already, doesn’t it? But yeah, we have all that going on. And then we have our long term rentals that we manage We’ve been testing out some different businesses that I’ve that I’ve been interested in so like Turo, renting out cars on Turo, I think that can be very complementary to like the Airbnb business. Yeah. And then recently this year I got seasons tickets for the Toronto Raptors. So I’ve been, I’ve been sort of using just trying that out too. And that’s been actually like a pretty good a good thing when it comes to like, I think I made about roughly like profit on the season’s tickets this year, which is a whole other thing we can go into, but like roughly like 5k for the year in profit on like, selling like tickets with like a bit of markup to people. And I didn’t know you could do. Yeah, so that’s like, just something I got into this year. And I see you’re wearing a Toronto Raptors shirt. I have to go to a game right to take you to a game and so

Erwin  

you know, funny thing about me is like, I just like to see the Raptors win. So we can go see Detroit Pistons. Magic, the ones that nobody wants. Yeah, exactly. Nothing bums me over. They suck on the Raptors lose.

Matthew  

Ya know, it’s a very different vibe when you’re there and like, you know, they’re winning, compared to when they’re losing. So I think like, I think this year, they’re their team’s not the best. He started out really well. But he sort of dropped off this year. But like, I think because we have the only team in Canada, like the demand for tickets is still really strong. And you can do a pretty healthy profit margin. Yeah, yeah. No idea gets very interesting. All right.

Erwin  

I thought introducing myself was difficult. This is pretty bad. There’s a lot the size of the boat full. Okay, let’s start with our Airbnb arbitrage. What does that mean? So Sam, I’m a grade five. Explain to me what’s Airbnb arbitrage. Okay,

Matthew  

so Airbnb arbitrage is where you rent a home from a traditional investor landlord, someone like yourself, or any of the clients that you work with. And basically, you rent the home, you’re paying normal market rents to them, and you’re turning around furnishing that property. And then you put it up on Airbnb. And the profit that you make is the difference between what you’re paying in your expenses to that landlord, utilities and other costs and what you’re making on Airbnb. So this is something that we just started doing, like I said, just over a year ago, and I think it’s just probably one of the best business models that I’ve seen, especially for like new investors, or anyone who’s just looking for something that has a really good cash on cash return and high cash flow margins. So we typically tend to work with real estate investors who own multiple properties. And they’re looking for someone that they can rent their property to have less headaches and long term tenants. So that’s how we actually got into in the first place, because we had some friends of ours who were into Airbnb arbitrage that introduced us to the model. And because we own long term properties ourselves, we have long term tenants we understand like the frustrations can kind of come with it when you get people who don’t pay rent on time, don’t pay rent at all. As we know in Ontario, it can be difficult to evict people or recoup funds that you lose. So when we sort of heard about this business model, it made sense for us as like landlords to be like, Oh, I can see why we want to want to rent to someone who’s doing this model, because you have it professionally cleaned multiple times a month they take care of so we take care of any maintenance issues on site, you know, so it was a great win win to be able to offer this to investors and other landlords. And the profit margin that you can make well, putting it up on Airbnb is actually like really good. If you want to give you an example of like our most recent project, our most recent project, we’re renting a triplex from an investor in Windsor. It’s three units, it’s got two one bedroom units, and then a three bedroom unit. So we rent this whole property from the investor. And we’re paying him 4000 A month, which is you know, good market rent. So he’s happy because he’s making what he would have gotten if it was a long term tenant, three different long term tenants renting all those properties. So he’s making his cash flow that he’s happy with. And then we furnish the property, I think our total cost of service

Erwin  

who pays for furnishing, we pay for furnishing? Oh, boy, yeah. So well, it’s actually you

Matthew  

know, so to furnish this and we tend to go more on the higher end, not higher end, but just like better quality furniture because I just found a lot of other people who do this business or who set up Airbnb, they try to do the cheapest route they can and I’ve just found like, yeah, you kind of you attract certain clientele. You can’t really charge premium rates. So we tend to go for a higher quality furniture, higher quality decorations and other things. So for us to furnish that property we spent about $30,000.30 to 35,000 bucks for the whole triplex that’s five bedrooms, two different living rooms, so couches, rugs, you know, all this stuff for the kitchen. So yeah, we spend about 30 35,000 To furnish the whole place. And with that landlord, we were able to negotiate two months free rent because he had a few things that he was working on. And in those two months we were actually able to generate on Airbnb $11,000 of revenue, which went right into our pocket. it. So right off the bat, we made 11,000 profit in those first two months, which basically pays for almost half the furniture, a third of the furniture. And now that we’re paying over, like we’re paying our normal rent, so we’re paying him $4,000 A month, our total cost to run the property with utilities and internet is about 4300, give or take. And for this month, March, we brought in 6800 in revenue on Airbnb, so we made a profit of about 2500 for this month, and it’s one of the slower months. So I’m fairly confident that we’re already starting to get bookings for May, June, July, I feel like we’re probably going to bring in closer to like 9000 in revenue in those summer months when people really start travelling more. Yeah, so we’ll probably make about five to six grand profit off that one property. So you know, kind of do the math, you start to do a couple of these. And you can really like one or two of these a person could leave their nine to five job if they wanted to. Which is a big motivator for a lot of people these days.

Erwin  

This sounds fantastic. Now, I think you know what, I think we all know I personally like really like Airbnb, but doesn’t work on every property. What are you looking for in a property that you would take on because remember you actually met you DM me asking me your fact checking someone who pitched you said that the rents for this I’m like no they’re not Yeah.

Matthew  

Yeah duplex in Hamilton. Yeah, so normally what we look for in a property is we look for a property renovated looks nice, you know nearly done white kitchen you know, granite countertops, we tend only want to deal with like a higher end property that we can get good clientele on there. People are willing to spend more than just sort of the average nightly rate on Airbnb. We look for cities that have regulations that are favourable to us. Hamilton used to be pretty favourable, but it’s from what I was pretty terrible now it’s yeah, it’s really changed. It’s very anti air b&b. I mean, it’s good if you’re if you own the property and you’re just renting out your basement on Airbnb, I feel like you can still do that there no problem,

Erwin  

but you’re probably killing the new bylaws.

Matthew  

Because it’s probably taken a lot of the corporate people who were doing it out of the picture made them had to adjust more mid term rentals. But we look for like newer properties, nicer properties, duplexes are great because we can rent out the basement and the upstairs. Now we kind of focus more on Kitchener, Waterloo, Barry, St. Catharines Windsor, so you know any investors who have properties in those areas, if they’re looking to, you know, talk more about this sort of model and see if it’s a good fit, like feel free to reach out to me and we can talk about that, really, we’re looking for awesome properties that have usually like like a nice backyard space that we can do up because I find the high season for air b&b in Canada is obviously summer the summer months. So we’d like to be able to offer like a nice outdoor setting. I usually like a little firepits and Muskoka chairs barbecue. I feel like that just helps us bring in more bookings in our competition. Really, any property that’s in a city that has like good rules and regulations, it’s up to date looks good, has like a backyard that we can utilise and do something with it has the potential to do well on Airbnb,

Erwin  

what about amenities? What amenities are important when you’re looking for an air b&b that will perform?

Matthew  

Like I said, I think just like a nice backyard space and like upgraded interior open about like, what I

Erwin  

mean, like like walkability. Does it be close to hospital? Employment? Restaurants?

Matthew  

Yeah, I mean, for some cities, it is good. It depends on like, who you’re looking to target. So I find like those amenities make more sense if you’re doing the midterm rental sort of anything over like the 28 days, because then you might be targeting more like students who want to who are like so for example, in the Windsor property, some of the people we have booking with us, their students go into the University of Windsor, they’re international. So then proximity is a useful thing. But I find that if you’re like so for example, we have some Airbnbs. And Barry, like people aren’t really concerned about the proximity to hospitals or grocery stores or anything like that. And the wintertime, people are asking, like how close we are to the ski hills because we’re getting a lot more like, you know, people who are booking for, you know, ski vacations right now and Horseshoe Valley and Blue Mountains and that so that I find is but as long as you’re within like 15 to 20 minutes of that it hasn’t really impacted our ability to get bookings. But yeah, I would just say unless you’re looking to target more midterm rentals in a lot of the cities of Barry, I find like some of those amenities aren’t as important because most people who are staying with us are driving up anyway. So they have the ability to, you know, drive to like grocery stores or anything that they need.

Erwin  

Right. So see me parking then as well, I guess. Yeah, definitely need

Matthew  

parking, unless you’re doing it more in like, the core of the city. But in general, yeah. If you have parking, I found that to be really important because most people are driving up to stay with us. Yeah, that’s definitely something and then also usually for rules and regulations. They tend to have certain requirements for a number of parking spots and things like that. I

Erwin  

remember Adam and I were staying in an Airbnb in a duplex in Ottawa. That said they had to parking for two but they didn’t want street parking. And there was street parking was only for three hours. Oh, yeah. So we weren’t happy campers. But it’s funny because Airbnb can be a bit of it’s not consistent, right? Because every operator is different. That was probably one of my most favourite experiences. But you know, I still like staying in Airbnb is because there’s always a common area. Yeah, which don’t get no hotels.

Matthew  

And I think like for us, like we have a young daughter and like staying in a hotel with with kids in my mind is just so you get there a bit younger and they maybe they still take naps or they go to bed early. Once you put them down here, you’re stuck in the room. Right? So I find like Airbnb is a really good for families and people travelling and like you said, having an outdoor space. You’re right, like, sometimes the consistency of bookings isn’t there. But you know, we’ve recently converted, we’ve been converting a lot of our long term rentals into like Airbnb is as people move out. And even with lower occupancy during the winter months, at some of our barre properties, I found that I’m still bringing in more than I would with a long term tenant. And I have someone who in like, it’s filled half the month. So there’s less wear and tear and less this and I’m still able to bring in the same or more as I would if I had rented it long term. So like the benefits kind of outweigh the cost, right? I find for us in a lot of those properties.

Erwin  

How are you managing though, because Airbnb is much more transactional than a long term long term relationship with long term tenants. You know, I’ve one property yet on here for the tenant. I hear for the tenant, maybe twice a year, maybe? Yeah, right? Oh, sure to hear from you get way more than that for for an Airbnb customer. Yeah,

Matthew  

I sound like so a lot of things on Airbnb can be automated. So all your messaging can be automated, you can have everything sort of set up where you have your sequence of messages that gets sent out to guests, when they’re checking in. So like they get there, after they book, they sort of get their welcome, thank you for booking with us message, then they get their check in message like an hour before their check in time to kind of list everything that they need to know about the property, their door code Wi Fi information. And then we usually have sort of a day after they, they check in just sort of touch point being like, okay, you know, like everything going good, you need anything, and then we have our night before checkout, just sort of letting them know hope like you’re checking out tomorrow, don’t forget, you have to check out by this time, here’s sort of, you know, what we’d like to see if you could make sure your dishes are clean, and this and that sort of what we expect for our checkout. And then after they check out, we just have like a follow up, it just says thank you for staying with us. If you have any feedback, let us know, trying to get them to give us you know, like five star rating or good rating. So a lot of the stuff with Airbnb that you would think would be time consuming can really be automated now. And I found to be honest, like even over the summertime, when we have guests after guests, after guests and in our properties, like the amount of communication from people, as long as everything’s really laid out and clear for them. I hardly hear from people. Because you think to yourself when you go booking Airbnb, unless there’s something that you can’t find, or you like something that’s missing that you were expecting, like you don’t reach out to the guests, you just want to go there, enjoy your vacation. And I have no interest in reaching out to people like the hosts on Airbnb to talk to them, right. It’s like, as long as everything’s there and setup for me and I understand like, how to use everything. And then I don’t hear from anybody

Erwin  

just want to have a lot of Airbnb use experience we just got back from one in Huntsville and their labels everywhere. And I loved it. Yeah,

Matthew  

I think like you can really, you can really take a lot of the work out of Airbnb, you can have your electronic electronic locks can have electronic locks that sync up to like your Airbnb platform. So it’ll change the codes and send those to to the guest. There’s really like, I would say probably like 80, or 90% of the work can be done up front and automated. So you don’t have to worry about it ever again. Like there’s a lot of work to like, get everything set up and like understand the platform and how it works. And if there’s any damage or anything like that, like having your systems in place and make sure that you get reimbursed for that and that you don’t get sort of left covering the cost of that.

Erwin  

Has that ever happened? How many claims have you had made?

Matthew  

Not that many? Not that many, but yeah, we have had some damage, even just the other day, I had a guest who’s staying at one of our properties and like they broke the couch leg, you know, so it’s like, oh, they’re just like, oh, the leg broke. And I’m like, It’s a brand new couch like two months old. So I don’t know if they were flopping around on it or who knows what they were doing. You know, but in the end, it’s like okay, well we have we have our our process and our procedures that we follow. We have our photos that our cleaners take after they clean a property to show that everything’s in good condition that way you can’t have a guest try to say oh, it was like that when I got here because we have our photo evidence that shows everything’s clean and everything’s intact and in shape. And then you know, as long as we have that evidence and then when the guest checks out, we take our our follow up photos after they check out that just shows and documents anything so for that couch will be able to, you know, basically, if we can’t get a part to repair it like we’ll get it fully covered Airbnb will pay for that couch for us to buy brand new one. Oh, yeah, sir experience has

Erwin  

been pretty good.

Matthew  

So far. Yeah, as long as I think people that I’ve talked to have had bad experience or been unable to get reimbursed is because they didn’t understand the system, they didn’t have a process in place. I was talking to a guy the other day who didn’t get reimbursed for stuff, but he didn’t have any photos. Like, from his cleaner, like before the guests checked in afterwards clean. So they were sending in photos up from their listing, you know, an Airbnb is like, well, these are like listing photos could have been taken months ago. Right? So as long as you sort of understand what Airbnb is looking for, and you follow that to a tee, there’s really not much they can say, because like they offer that insurance, and they offer to cover it for you. And if the guest isn’t willing to pay for which a lot of times they they won’t, then Airbnb has to cover it.

Erwin  

So house insurance work, like you imagine you have your own insurance. What insurance of the the investor have oh, like the owner of the home? Yeah, the the real estate investor who is in sorry, in an IRB minute arbitrage opportunity. Basically, you’re the property manager, just that your intention with the strategy is a short term rental on Airbnb platform. So what kind of insurance would the owner of the property have?

Matthew  

Usually the owner of the property would just have their standard house insurance that they would have? We have a we have you know, Airbnb has its $2 million air cover policy that protects us some landlords like us to have our own, like 10 insurance that we are happy to get so that we have that coverage. And then we also have our own, you know, corporate business insurance that covers us under the Airbnb platform for our Airbnb business. So, you know, you have really four different touch points of insurance. So it kind of provides ample coverage, that people really don’t need to worry about anything, right?

Erwin  

Do some investors insist on having like to do they will get their air b&b insurance.

Matthew  

I’ve never met anyone that has like that has asked to get that or has that. I mean, because really, they’re renting.

Erwin  

That wasn’t cheap, as well over 200 a month.

Matthew  

Yeah, I mean, because most of the time, like when a when a landlord is renting to us or renting to us. It’s just like a regular long term tenant, like we’re signing the lease under our company name, you know, and then we just have an addendum that allows us to do you know, Airbnb arbitrage to sublease it. So from what I’ve seen, no one’s ever had to get any extra insurance because they’re renting to us as a long term tenant. And we’re the ones running the business. So we provide the insurance on our end to protect the property and damage and everything else. So

Erwin  

in my case, I was the I was still the owner, and I had a hired property manager. Okay, so it wasn’t an arbitrage. I wasn’t renting to them there. There were a service provider to me. But yeah,

Matthew  

you own that you were you just had a property manager, running it for you, right,

Erwin  

running an Airbnb business. Yeah, like, so I was paying like 20%, my rents of the Airbnb Ryan. And he was dealing with an all basically nice house experience. So I’ve shared it before, my location was not the right location. And also it wasn’t a duplex, it was a single family home just didn’t make enough. It didn’t work for us. Because again, for my clients, like for example, I wasn’t doing nearly as well as my clients were. Right. So for example, my clients are are in like much more walkable areas closer to like restaurants and like the convention centre and stuff like that, they got much more walking traffic. So I was hoping for more performance like that. I didn’t get it. So you know, I just sold and bought another house instead. Yeah,

Matthew  

makes sense. Do I mean, I find like, even for a lot of investors now I think like if you like said, if you’re in a city that allows Airbnb to be done, like, I think it’s a really viable option for you know, investors to try to look at that if it makes sense for them to do that, instead of a long term tenant. Like I said, we’ve converted and been converting our long term rentals into like Airbnb, just because the numbers I find the numbers are so difficult on a long term tenants to like, really, and these are properties that we bought five years ago, you know, and even then you’re still like, oh, it just the numbers aren’t that strong. So I mean, I don’t know you’re more involved in in like that side of things now, but like, I just when I’m seeing like properties going for, like 850,000 for a duplex, and I’m looking at like the rents of, you know, say, I don’t know 2800 upstairs or whatever. And 1500 1700 downstairs. I don’t know how people are pulling this off and like generating cash flow. Like I’m not sure what you’re seeing on.

Erwin  

Definitely tough for anyone getting in anyone who’s younger. Anyone who doesn’t have cash, fortunately, do have some clients who have cash, so they’re all winning. It’s really sad. Yeah, it’s really sad. It is like the rich are getting richer. Yeah, like they have all the advantages. For example, they can do large cash down payments and not have not had to pay HELOC interest on that money for down payments and when and whatever renovations you’re gonna do. Right, but the reality is who needs the most help? Who needs to do The most for themselves financially? Yes, not the rich people

Matthew  

know exactly. When I see like my sister in law and other people are in their, like, early 20s. I just think she’s like, What are you going to do? Like, I feel like at least for my daughter, I’m like, Okay, well, you’re gonna benefit from decisions that we made, but people who don’t have that luxury, as tough. And that’s why I do and I think that’s why you’re seeing such an uprise in like Airbnb arbitrage and that sort of model on like, social media and, and, and stuff because it is a way for people who, who don’t have the capital to get into like a real estate investment to profit and generate income from real estate, like I was, in my example of like, the Windsor property, like I was saying, it’s like we’re making this month, like 2500 bucks a month, in cash flow, sure, there’s more work involved than if it was a long term, you know, a lot of money, you know, but you’re like, that would be five really good long term properties, if you were able to generate 500 bucks a month, cash flow off, like long term rental, and which is, which is still like a bit of a stretch, I would say now, but like, that’s like five good properties, you know, and if you’re looking more like a 200 to $300 a month, sort of cash flow numbers, you’re talking like, you know, eight properties that you would have to have to be able to generate the same amount of cash flows that we do have one and we don’t have to worry about, you know, roof or H vac or anything like that, like so we take care of all maintenance on a property if there’s any damage done by like a guest like we would obviously have that bear and painted freshened up and the places kept in like immaculate condition, which is like why landlords like to work with us because their property just they would get their property back in the exact same condition that they gave it to us in which a lot of times is you know, when you have a long term tenant,

Erwin  

they lose turnover, I know your turnover costs. I

Matthew  

mean, we had a great tenant, he moved out, he was with us for five years. And like, even though he was an amazing, tenant kept the place good, like treated like his own home, it’s like, it still cost us like $1,500 to turn it over to get it sort of just rent ready again, with paint and other things just to make it look new again to put on the market. Like that chews up a lot of your your cash flow in the midst. So I think that’s like one of the benefits of why you’re seeing, like, we get reached out all the time by investors who want us to do the same model, like rent their property. That’s why I was asking you about Hamilton, because I was like, oh, yeah, we hadn’t been in that market yet. So just seeing what the rent rates are. But we’re seeing a lot more investors wanting to go that route just because of the peace of mind of not having to worry about professional tenants damage people leaving the place dirty. Yeah. So it’s definitely like a growing side of like the real estate industry, which I think is pretty exciting.

Erwin  

So I think it’s for a young person who wants to start in our airbeam arbitrage. And it’s a wonderful way to learn the business. If you don’t have the capital, yeah, right. You’ll learn a lot of but a home construction, learn a lot about like, working with tenants and managing people and managing real estate. And then when you go on a property, it’ll be a lot easier.

Matthew  

Yeah, no, that’s very true. And then like, if you’re able to generate that kind of cash flow, like it gives people the advantage of hopefully being able to, like put that aside, save it up and actually get into their own. It’s hard to generate that kind of cash flow or income per month. Of like, with anything, right? Yeah. Especially with the cost of living and stuff going up. So yeah, I’m definitely seeing a lot more people reaching out. I’m getting a lot of people asking if I do like coaching for them and like people just trying to like get into the model because it’s you know, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but I think like anyone can do it just once you learn the systems and that it’s, it’s definitely a really cool strategy. And I think like a great way for people to get into real estate, especially younger people, or people who just don’t have a capital of their own to, you know, buy something. So

Erwin  

hang on. Well, you were still doing a lot of this from Florida. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sure, not local for a while,

Matthew  

that’s a good thing is like you don’t need to be local for it. So we were in Florida for over six months. Last year, we were actually we went down to Florida to really look at the real estate market down there, because as we’re kind of talking about, like numbers have just been pinched a little bit up here, we found it to be difficult to difficult to justify spending the amount of money we’d have to spend on a down payment to get the cash so that we can get off the properties we’re seeing here that that fit our sort of model of what we were looking for. So that’s why we went down to Florida and we’re looking there and I mean, seems like a lot of Canadian investors that that are pretty well known have been going down to to the states sort of take advantage of the opportunities down there. And especially now like when we went down early last year I found like the numbers were good but like the bidding wars on properties like last January and stuff when we were in Florida and we were looking at stuff it was like we were putting offers on properties in like Orlando and like everything was going above multiple offers, you know, like sight unseen so we it just like we weren’t able to actually like secure anything because just

Erwin  

Just what months were these what month we were you know making offers

Matthew  

so we yeah, we were down there from because as a correction early started, you know, like we were down there in November to May

Erwin  

right so you’re full on like rates are going up. Well, this is last year sorry. Yeah, right, sir. Break something going up since what February I’m sorry. Like,

Matthew  

when I say last year I forget we’re in 20. So that was like 2220 2120 22 started going up. But yeah, before we started going up, sorry about that. Sorry for the confusion. Yeah, so there was still like before rates were going up. And there was, you know, like, obviously, like, huge demand for everything. So yeah, that was, say, January 2022,

Erwin  

you’re probably lucky, you didn’t get anything accepted.

Matthew  

You know, like, the only benefit would have been getting like the low interest rates on mortgages. But now we’re seeing a now when I’m like looking at stuff. So we’re actively looking at, you know, Airbnbs in, in the US. So we’re looking at Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, like all areas of Florida, Smoky Mountains, which is like in Tennessee, Nashville. So we’re looking at the Phoenix like all these markets that have like really great opportunity for Airbnb. And we’re seeing now that because the markets have slowed down so much like the thing that I like about the US market is the ability to do like more creative financing. That’s a bit more of a viable option here. Like here in Canada, you can do vendor take backs and and other things. But I find like, in the States, just because there’s so much supply of stuff and such like a bigger market, doing like creative financing, and seller financing now that the market slowed down is his lot easier, like because people need to be creative to be able to unload these properties now with the interest rates of what they are.

Erwin  

Because I remember when I was in I was in Fort Lauderdale before the pandemic, back then it was standard for 30 days financing conditions. Yeah. Because the market and I looked at a property on the water. And it had been on the market for like seven months already. Right. In today’s market. I don’t load especially with like the last like two years ago, probably a year ago

Matthew  

probably disappeared. And yeah, we were like I said, and we were

Erwin  

already days for conditions. Yeah, we’re here, right? Yeah, you can’t even deliver on Ontario.

Matthew  

If you didn’t have like a cash offer. Or it was hard to get something like we were fighting now in Orlando there was like, Oh, we were interested in a lot of like Airbnb ease around Disney. And we just felt like things were going quick. like it’d be up a couple of days. And that’s it. Whereas now we’re looking at it’s like, we’re seeing things on the market for six months, you know, multiple mines, you’re seeing like price drops, dramatic price drops, like we’re seeing stuff in Fort Lauderdale that January last year were listed at like 1.5. And now we’re seeing they’re going for 899. So like huge, huge price drops. I mean, granted, like I would say what they were trying to list it at last year was quite an inflated number. But you’re starting to see a lot more opportunity and a lot more people willing to get creative and do different things like seller financing is, you know, like for talking to a lot of sellers. They are open to that. You know, it’s

Erwin  

almost unheard of in residential here.

Matthew  

It’s hard. It’s difficult, right? It

Erwin  

seems Jaisalmer finance you get a lot of

Matthew  

gurus here will kind of tell you like, oh, yeah, Finnur takeback in this but I just don’t think it is well. It’s just not something that’s done so much here, I found

Erwin  

what’s usually more like complicated properties, like apartment buildings and large commercial. Yeah, not in a single family home.

Matthew  

They’re in single family, like you can just go on Zillow, and you can like type in seller financing and sort of filter through like people were saying, open the crate, because they’ve had it listed for like six months. And a lot of these people they random is Airbnbs. And they’re not able to generate the revenue that they they want anymore. So they’re just trying to like unload these properties. But a lot of times like they bought them less than two years ago, I’d say 550 And now they’re selling them for 750. So I’m sure they’re happy with the capital gains they’ve got but yeah, so we’re seeing a lot of opportunity in the States right now.

Erwin  

Like the dollars like 73 cents right now. So we’re just crazy because a year ago it was like 80 cents. Yeah, that does not seem to affect you like because I know you have your other businesses I’m gonna guess you’re earning money in US dollars. Yeah,

Matthew  

so we are earning US dollars which shall be just keeping us and we’ll use that for our investing but even when I look at the numbers, when you’re looking at like what it would convert to from like Canadian to us and based on the cash flow that you can get so for example, like we’re looking at a property in Orlando right now with a partner, and we’d be getting this for 700,000 It’s six bedrooms, five bath 3500 square feet pool in the back and like a lot of times in in Florida and other places when you’re buying Airbnb by him but fully furnished. So we’re getting like, you know, 40k where the furniture already in there now are carrying costs on it with with 20% down I think like the monthly carrying cost is about five grand when we included like HOA fees and property tax and you know, lawn care and pool maintenance is about five grand

Erwin  

and mortgages more than that carry on.

Matthew  

So like total, okay, yeah. I don’t know, I don’t live in a 3500 square foot home with a pool in the bathroom legs. So yeah, so you’re all in annual carrying costs about $60,000 us for that property, conservative estimate err DNA and doing our research on it, like we pull in over 100,000 us on that property. You know, and that’s like a conservative 65% occupancy, you know, so we’d be able to generate almost like 40 grand conservatively in revenue, like in cash flow on that property, right? So when you kind of look at the numbers are like, well, that’s what you’d be bringing in on on that property there. So even with the conversion, if you do even convert it back, like some people, usually a better strategy is to keep it in us keep it in like your S corp or whatever, and then just use it to purchase more properties and sort of grow and expand that. But even if you were to convert it back, like I think like the numbers really weren’t for themselves. And like I said that that like conservative estimate. So because of our other business, like the social media and stuff, like we utilise that business to help us fill our occupancy up. So we’re marketing our Airbnb properties, you know, to our audience, where it’s like, especially like Disney, because we have a lot of families that follow us and follow our content. So like being able to market these family friendly areas and properties to you know, a million people online allows us to have a much higher occupancy rate. And you know, that 65% Because we’re able to market to them. And we can even set up our own like direct booking site, and like sort of take out the 3% middleman that we would have with Airbnb only 3%. Airbnb charges 3% to the host. So that’s like our profit margin that cuts out but like it’s also like, Oh, now the person booking with you directly doesn’t have to pay the Airbnb fees on Airbnb ZAN. So you’re sort of saving not only you’re making a bit more profit on your end, because you’re not paying Airbnb, the 3% but also the person booking with you directly is saving quite a chunk. I don’t even know what Airbnb is fee is on the guessing but usually seems pretty high when I’m if I’m looking at Airbnb, and I see Airbnb services, I’m like, oh, it’s quite, you know, quite a lot. So sorry, what

Erwin  

was the asking? What was the asking that are not Orlando hosts? That was 770,000.

Matthew  

Us? Yeah. And it was like, sorry, you can build it for that. Yeah, I mean, and we’re seeing that those kinds of numbers like really all over the US like when we’re like when all over but like all the areas that we’re looking on that we know have a good amount of tourism and people coming in. So that Fort Lauderdale, same thing, we’re looking at properties in Fort Lauderdale that are you know, 800,000, same thing, we can generate 110,000 in revenue off Airbnb conservatively. So we’re still able to generate anywhere between like 30 to 50,000 us cash flow on top of like what you’re paying, and then you’re getting mortgage paid down. And that if you’re not doing the arbitrage model, which is something that we’re looking at down there as well and getting opportunities presented to us for that. So I just find with the US there’s just like a lot of ways to make money. And then I think like if you’re creative with Airbnb, you can also make revenue on different things. So part of the reason why I got into Turo and doing like, you know, sort of renting out like our Tesla, and that is, is because I was like testing that business out to see because I just saw an opportunity when we were in Florida is like, oh, like, what our plan is, is to like, you know, purchase these Airbnbs in Orlando and other cities. And then we’re also going to have vehicles that we have that we would offer to our guests to be able to like double dip. So you know, a lot of times when people are planning a vacation, they’re booking their stay first, and then they’re getting their vehicle. So like when we booked our place in Orlando, it’s like, oh, we book our house. And then we look at like, Okay, now we need to get a car to rent so we can get around. So what we’re going to do is that we offer vehicles to our guests who are booking with us, like, hey, you’d like to book with us, we have, you know, a van SUV, whatever, we’ll give you like, you know, a great rate cheaper than what they would get it for if they rented it, you know, through a car rental agency. And it sort of all built into their, into their bookings. So you can sort of take advantage of a lot of different revenue streams if you kind of get creative with it. Because we were paying like we were renting when we went down to Florida, we didn’t drive down, we flew down. And then we were renting a vehicle and I mean, like to rent a van for for a month in Florida was costing us like, I don’t know, 1500 USD for like a month. And that’s like booking it for a month. Right? So it was Yeah, much to it. Yeah. And that’s just like through and that’s a month like you get a booking, like if you were to rent that for like a week, you’d probably be paying more like 900 bucks for the week. So yeah, so there’s just like a lot of opportunity I find in in the states just because of the amount of tourism coming in to some of those key areas where it’s like, oh, people need a vehicle in Florida. Usually like a lot of Airbnbs like people charge you pool heating, you know you want to heat your pool it’s 30 bucks a day, or you want to barbecue 25 bucks a day you can rent that too. So you just see so many ways that people are making additional revenue on top of just their listing that I just find it a lot of opportunity

Erwin  

right can you sell me Disney tickets for cheap

Matthew  

that I don’t think you can but I’m like I’m sure you could like you could get creative and maybe like offer people I don’t know, gift baskets or something like that to you know like going Aliexpress or Alibaba and order a bunch of like Disney stuff for cheap and sort of give it to guess is like a welcome gift for free.

Erwin  

So I want the listener understand like most people are not this vertically integrated Have your own traffic to your property.

Matthew  

If you didn’t, I mean, like I said, like the numbers that I was stating were really more like what you see when you go to like air DNA and you do your research and sort of see like what, you know, an air DNA is just like a research tool you can use and it’s pulling historical data based on other people who also don’t have your following. So those are numbers that you’re seeing based on, you know, someone who doesn’t have the ability to market to other people still taking data

Erwin  

from Airbnb, VRBO. Home, I don’t see what’s what’s the sort of one that’s

Matthew  

a big one. Okay, but I don’t I don’t want to pull data from there. I know, it’s like, majority of the data that you pull will be from Airbnb, right? Yeah, no, so you’re getting a relatively accurate

Erwin  

sort of just for listeners benefit that the data is representing someone who’s paying for traffic via Airbnb versus you can drive your own truck some of your own traffic as well.

Matthew  

Yeah. So when you’re using air DNA to like run your numbers, it like air DNase using historical data from let’s just say Airbnb to be like, Okay, well, we know similar properties to this that have four bedrooms, two baths over the last year, they’ve been able to generate, you know, $100,000 in revenue at an average rate of $400 a night 65% occupancy. So

Erwin  

they’re in the show, even though even the listings in your area, so you can

Matthew  

pay extra I mean, you don’t even need to pay extra you can use like their rental laser tool for free and get like at least that base knowledge. But then yeah, you’re right. If you want to pay a little bit extra for like city specific data or state specific data, you can do that and get even more granular with their numbers.

Erwin  

I think it was paying like 40 bucks a month. It’s been a while. Yeah,

Matthew  

they can, they can be pricey. I found like, they really I mean, I only use a free, I use a free option to give me like a base idea. Like, okay, give me a broad general overview, like okay, how much can I potentially generate? And then I dive deeper by just using Airbnb itself to sort of see what other bookings are, are there and other listings and competition to kind of get a better idea of what other calendars look like, for the next few months. And you can really do a lot of this stuff for free. You don’t need to necessarily pay for that extra information if you don’t want to.

Erwin  

And how was your experience with traffic Airbnb wise, because we’re in the middle of a recession? It’s funny because I often joke like, like, for example, where was I? I was skiing. This is full Blue Mountain or something? No, I was I was a blue mount a few weeks ago. Oh, yeah. Summer session. We’re having places packed on a Monday. Yeah, not a holiday. Yeah. People are dropping 100 bucks. 120 bucks on the lift ticket.

Matthew  

Oh, man. I mean, we were just in the Bahamas for for a week. And same thing. I was like, it’s full. Everyone’s there. And there’s like a Palm Desert isn’t the cheapest place to to travel to and like you’re just like, man, like, I don’t know. Yeah, it sounds like you’re going to these resorts or ski hills in this just empty because someone’s going out. So like, there’s a recession. Obviously, it is impacting people, unfortunately. But there’s a huge sector of people who aren’t impacted and like they don’t care. They want to have fun. They want to live their life and enjoy themselves. And, you know, we live in a world of instant gratification. So I think like the days of not doing things to hold off, because it’s like the best financial choice. I feel like maybe the generation coming up isn’t as inclined to do that as like maybe our parents generation when they’re a bit more willing to make those sacrifices. I feel like now people are more inclined to be like, Wow, just put on a credit card now figured out lame. Hence my credit card debt site had an all time high. I think right now, too, right?

Erwin  

Interesting. Not the people I roll with, but I will send you a low I roll with are generally much more well off than their parents were. Yes. There’s that too, as well. So one observation I made was, so I see the same place Christmas holidays in March Break, March Break this past March Break with not nearly as busy. So as I was talking to one of the staff a ski place and like it’s not that busy. She was yeah, my friend at the bank, though, says that people are just taking out money and all these different currencies. And that’s where we’re just guessing people were going so people went took a bigger expense to go travel overseas than to go ski so for small, my small observation is people are spending even more money now than they were during Christmas holidays. Yeah, I can’t believe it. I think like is that what you’re seeing that like you must see some of this in your Airbnb information in terms of your bookings or whatnot? Like I imagine you’re busy.

Matthew  

Yeah. So I mean, I found like, March has been a bit of a slower month but I think it’s just because of the weather’s been you know, it’s not like it’s just all yourself, though. It’s all Canadian based right now. Yeah. So for

Erwin  

Florida bookings have been crazy. Yeah,

Matthew  

right now like all the properties that I’m looking at and when doing my research like most of them are 100% occupied for these months. You know, you’re still getting like the snowbirds going down to Florida. They just have no interest in staying up here for the winter so they’re going down regardless every year but even with our berry properties like I’m always amazed at the I’m always like blown away by the amount of money that people will pay for like an air b&b and Barry I mean like this is a four bedroom, two bath bungalow. We did like a renovations. It looks great inside. We did like a little you know, nice like media room downstairs. 75 inch TV a few aims. And when I was initially setting this up, which would have been the last summer I was setting this up to sort of test it out to see how it would do. I was thinking like my max rates during peak season would be maybe like, three 350 At night type thing. And like we’ve had people no word of a lie pay is $800 a night for me like we allow up to like 10 people’s, we allow bigger groups because we have, you know, it’s a four bedroom house, but like we’ve had people pay upwards of $800 A Night to like, stay at a house and bury so like the numbers blow my mind. Sometimes I’m like, What’s the

Erwin  

occasion? Was there an event or no, like, like a pop concert or?

Matthew  

No, I mean, if it’s like there’s Boots and Hearts, which is like a country festival there that we have had people pay pretty good rates. But these are like on a like on the normal weekend. Like a normal weekend, people coming up because they’re like, oh, summer Christmas, like, but over Christmas time, we had family staying with us. And they were paying pretty good rates, probably about like 600 Nights 700 night, but even just like in February, for like a two day weekend, people who booked they had a group of 10 of them as a group of friends going up there for like skiing. And because we charge additional rates for any guests over five people, it helps gives us like a night nice extra boost. So they’re paying I think 400 bucks a night regularly. But then with the extra guests on top 50 bucks a poppy tonight, it ended up increasing our rate to about 800 bucks a night interest. So when you kind of divide it by 10 people, it really ends up not being that much per person, I’m sure when they broke it down by I think just for us like we like I said we’d like to put in higher quality furniture, we like to do different things that just make our property stand out. Like Like I said, 75 inch TV instead of 55. Like a lot of people do create a nice media room, and we got a foosball table and a ping pong table. So kind of gives people a little bit more to do that makes us stand out. So people are willing to pay a little bit extra for that.

Erwin  

And then just naturally, you don’t have to provide it you just provide the venue for the greater experience to happen. Yeah, right. Because you don’t you don’t get that when you’re on like five hotel rooms.

Matthew  

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think like when you get larger groups, because we can do that. It’s like when someone wants to break it down. Like if you were to book five hotel rooms, like how much is a hotel room at night, probably like 200 bucks. 250. I don’t even know if 300. So you probably get like, a significantly higher cost. If you were to stay in hotels. And if you were to just book one place, and then you can all stay there, cook your own food, have a community have TVs in the living room to like lounge in. So it’s different experience.

Erwin  

Totally different. I’d much prefer to really enjoying it. Now. We’re running a time I need to ask for the YouTube business. Okay. Because you’ve been you guys have been out for a long time. Yeah. How long?

Matthew  

We’ve been doing YouTube? I think roughly it’s probably been about 10 years now.

Erwin  

So what’s it called so people can look it up? Yeah,

Matthew  

so our main channel is Health Nut Nutrition. That’s the one that’s run mostly by my my wife. And then I have my own channel. It’s a smaller one. I just started the other. The other year. It’s just my name, Matthew Varga, mine’s more focused on finance, Airbnb, real estate investing. So that’s obviously my focus. And then my wife’s one is more on healthy food, cooking healthy lifestyle, childcare stuff, like parenting stuff. So, so we’ve been doing that for 10 years, we originally started YouTube. 10 years ago, we moved to Australia for two years, we went and live there backpack travelled Southeast Asia and Australia. And we were doing YouTube just to really mostly for our family just sort of like documenting our travels. So they because at the time, there really wasn’t vlogging or, you know, people were making a living on YouTube. That’s how we kind of got into it originally. And then my wife sort of kept going with it. And she started doing more like the recipes and healthy lifestyle stuff. And then just over the years just exploded and in grown into what it is, you know, today, we’re like I said, we’re hitting a million subscribers, I think we’re somewhere like, I don’t know, 100 million views or, or more. So we’ve really, you know, like, created a community online, which is just like a really cool, cool thing that we were able to, you know, not only like, make a living doing that, but we’re also able to, like provide value to people all over the world. And you know, it’s pretty cool the world we live in now.

Erwin  

So I’m assuming you monitor that YouTube pays you for like your content. Yeah. What kind of rates do they pay? I don’t know if you know, yeah. So I want to ask you what you get paid. But what kind of, because I think like most people have no idea. Yeah, first of all, I don’t think a lot of people know that YouTube will pay content providers.

Matthew  

Yes. I always find like one of the first questions like when we like you tell someone what you do. It’s like, oh, what do you do? It’s like, well, like we do YouTube people always ask like, we get paid for that. So like yeah, and then the next question they asked I think it’s like the only job in the world where people can be like, well how much do you make? So they asked like people always ask that I find like you would never ask someone else that like when you first meet them but I think because of the nature of it. Yeah, so like

Erwin  

what you guys are your lives are out there on the internet.

Matthew  

Exactly. And like because we’ve been doing for so long in the sighs I mean, like we get spotted all over so it’s like, become a really cool thing. But so with YouTube, we have different ways that you can like make money from it. Obviously we have like AdSense revenue, which As the ads to get put up on our channel, like before you watch it as I’m sure we’ve all, you know, click the skip ads button many times before but so that’s why pay so I don’t even see them. Oh, so you pay? Yeah, so we get, we get ads through that, that brings in five figures a month off of just ad revenue. Yeah. And then we work with brands. So we’ve worked with it. We’ve worked with Amazon, Walmart, Target Sobeys, like, you know, big multinational companies on lots of different like campaigns and different things.

Erwin  

Like brand ambassadors for for large businesses.

Matthew  

Yeah, usually, it’s sort of, they’re paying to be like, hey, like, we want to, you know, either new product came out or just market awareness. And they’re paying us to be mentioned in a video, one of our videos where we’re talking about either the product, so a product review, yeah, sometimes it’s like food, where it’s like, oh, we work with Sobeys. And we create, like a recipe, using their food products. So they are getting market exposure that way. And I mean, like, that’s also like, that side of the business brings in multi six figures as well working with these large companies. So definitely, social media is a lot more, I think, a lot more lucrative than like, you know, people would probably anticipate maybe not so much. Now, I think people have no idea going into going into No, we were just doing it at that point. Like, we were making nothing like I think we Nicole was really doing it for a number of years making no money at all, I think like the first thing we ever got was like a free straw one day. They ever going back like six years or something like that. But it was like, literally, it was like, here’s a free glass straw. And we felt like, whoa, like we, we just got like, if someone gave us a free product, just to like show it on our channel is mind blowing to us. And then, you know, when we were able to monetize, I mean, back then there wasn’t as much revenue being made from it. But I remember like, when we made like, our first dollar on, like YouTube ads, and you’re just like, wow, and then you just started like to see the snowball just gradually over time being like, oh, and now I mean, people make millions doing, doing YouTube and doing all that stuff. So it’s a cool question.

Erwin  

How does anyone price say, say I want you to, you know, feature my, my water bottle and on your show, just sort of do a product review? Whatever. How does one price that I remember falling Tim Ferriss and how he was trying to price promoting anything on his stuff? It’s not easy. No, it’s all pretty. This is all still pretty new area. Yeah. Not not completely new area anymore. But it’d be based on like views, and I don’t know what else?

Matthew  

Yeah, so I think like, a few years ago, I would say like companies and agencies were maybe a little less knowledgeable and stuff. So like, they were paying more based on how much of a following your hat. So if you had a million subscribers, they were paying more based on just the total viewership that you had, and the size of your channel. But now they’ve gotten smarter. And they’ve realised that like, just because you have a big channel, like, you know, we know people with, you know, multimillionaires on it, but like they have zero engagement. So now, like companies are a bit more wise, where it’s like, doesn’t matter for for eyeballs and whatnot. But it comes down to like, what, what’s the engagement? Like, you know, like, how much are people interacting with your content, leaving comments, you know, like, normally, when someone’s paying you to show a product or show something, it’s like, usually, there’s a link involved to like, go to their go to their website, and like, check it out, or go to their social and follow. So now it’s like, those are things I’ve tracked, where it’s like, okay, where are people actually clicking on what you’re recommending to them a link to buy my water bottle? Yeah, exactly. Right. So it’s like, but if you’re paying someone 10s of 1000s of dollars to show your product, and then like, no one’s clicking on it, or buying it. And it’s just wasted.

Erwin  

Right, much more sophisticated now, much more sophisticated. Now, compared to what Tim Ferriss was talking about, because he was all based on how many listeners he had downloads he had, and that’s how he would price it.

Matthew  

Yeah. And that’s, like I said, that’s how it was done for the longest time. But I think now, there’s a lot better ways to track things, there’s a lot better ways to really see like, well, what value are you using during

Erwin  

benefit? Yeah,

Matthew  

yeah. So normally, it’s like, the more engagement that you can get, the more you can prove that to clients more you have examples of like companies that you’ve worked before, like, the higher that you can higher rate that you can charge based on that, right. And then it also depends on like, you know, there’s upsells and there’s bundles, like, Okay, you on YouTube and Instagram and Tiktok, you know, like, wanted

Erwin  

me on Airbnb, on product placement in my room, maybe,

Matthew  

you know, like, it’s like, oh, like, okay, like, we can do it for this. But, you know, like, we’ve worked with mattress companies, say, for example, and it’s like, okay, well, we can do it like this, but, you know, maybe we can work out a deal where you give us like mattresses that cost where we can buy them at cost, we can supply our Airbnbs for more affordable price. You know, so there’s different ways that you can like work with companies, you know, and like sort of figure out different things but yeah, you know, and then there’s other ways to obviously make revenue from like social media, like you know, creating your own products selling your own stuff online courses. Like I said before, we have like her own e commerce stores. So that’s another avenue that we

Erwin  

direct people to it’s your stores or is it on Amazon?

Matthew  

It’s our own store. So we do have Amazon affiliate, so you can make money through like affiliate links like Amazon or you know, other people’s products. But then we also created our own store that at first we started selling mostly like wholesale items. So because we were doing a lot of food stuff, so we have like a published cookbook. So we had a lot of food products on our store. So it’s like Oxo, you know, Oxyelite, the company on the big hand ergonomic handle. Yeah, so we were selling a lot of these products more like buying it from a wholesaler, you know, and then selling it online, typically with like a 50% margin. So we’d buy it for $10 sell it for 20. But then when you account for people packaging and the packaging supplies, we just found that the margins weren’t as strong as we wanted. So then we started reaching out to companies on through Alibaba and AliExpress. And like getting our own products made through them. So like silicone baking mats, glass straws, like different things like branded your Yeah, we’d have a branded with our logo on it’s

Erwin  

so sorry, isn’t deposited there. Because I think that’s really, really key is I believe it’s successful ecommerce business has to be have a strong brand.

Matthew  

I agree. Yeah, if you have a strong brand, then you can, like I said, if you’re just selling, like when we’re just selling other companies, products and brands, the margins were slim, like we’re maybe making 10% margin or something when you account for all the costs and everything else. And so your rip you off easily. Yeah, someone could. And then like once we started shifting, like, oh, we focused on like, well, we have our own brand, let’s start to like, make our own products with our own logo and our own like label on it. That sort of fit our model of what we’re looking for, like silicone baking mats, you know, eco friendly bento boxes and different stuff. Well, now it’s like, we’re buying them from, you know, China, say $3, you know, and you’re able to sell it at 20 $25. Right, so like, your margins drastically increase and like we’re not over, we’re not charging more than the market is for that type of product. But just because once we started going through, getting rid of the wholesaler in the middle ground and kind of reaching out and getting our own stuff made, like the margin has drastically increased, right?

Erwin  

Because I know a lot of unknown a lot of people approached ecommerce from from the product and did not develop a brand. So while those seem to have gotten out of the market, like a lot of people who started like the last five years, people who didn’t get enough get in early enough and folks who do not have a brand Yeah, they might have a logo and crap and stuff but like, they don’t have an audience to show it to.

Matthew  

There’s a big difference between like, yeah, having a logo and having like a brand and a presence and where people are like, oh, I want to buy your stuff specifically because I I trust you and I believe in what you’re saying and I know you’re creating good quality stuff. But yeah, I think because like over the last five years, there’s a huge push for like FBA, like fulfilment by Amazon and like all the Guru’s talk about how you can make, you know, millions doing that. So there’s a lot or see those ads anymore. No, you don’t want to see it that much. I feel like now it’s the Airbnb arbitrage model you’re starting to see a lot more of but like I do think that that’s, you know, it’s obviously very different than you know, fulfilment by Amazon. But that was like a such a push for so long. dropshipping and that, that I think a lot of people thought that was a way to, you know, make their millions and like you said, by not having a brand and actually like a holistic ecosystem where people want to like actually purchase your stuff. It’s like they eventually faded away, because once the market gets flooded with the same product at cheaper prices, eventually people get priced out.

Erwin  

And almost say, like your brain is also as a you and your wife, Nicole. Yeah, you are the brand. We are the brand you are. It’s a I don’t know, if you want to call it influencer marketing. I think it’s the label. It is. Yeah, it’s not a corporate brand. No, exactly. It’s just unfortunately, what a lot of people who are out of the business now it was just, to me, it was a generic name that we’ll never see again.

Matthew  

Yeah, yeah, I think because we do a lot of, we do vlogs and more personal content, too. So a lot of people who are watching us, like they feel like they’re part of our family and feel like they’re part of us. So when we are selective with what we offer promoted to people very selective because you need to be I feel like, that’s one way that like, if you try to promote everyone’s product, just to make a buck, you can lose credibility really quick. So we’re very selective about what we do. But when we do actually like something and promote it, you know, people trust us because they’ve been watching us for so long and feel like they’re part of our family. So it makes a big difference. Putting in that work ahead of time doing like social media and building a brand and a following. You know, you just have to be prepared to do a lot of work for no recognition for for a long time. I think that’s you know, the key is just being consistent in doing it. A lot that people don’t like about like social media is that it does take a lot of work upfront for some work yeah, like you were doing for search for so long, right? Like how long have you been doing it for you like you guys are? It takes a long time it’s like a slow steady grind by like, you know, it pays off dividends because I’m sure like, people you work with in your your industry, like your company and stuff. It’s like people buy like even myself like I followed you for a long time before I never actually met you We’re went to any of your events, right? If it’s like, oh, I have to watch someone for years seeing with like, anyone else that I’ve ever gone to in either events or done anything. Like I tend to be there personally like watching someone for years or a long time before I’m willing to commit or like to their stuff. So it’s like the grind that eventually pays off. But it’s just for so long. It doesn’t seem like it is right, right. Right. So it brings

Erwin  

up two points. So I’ve been blogging since 2010. Yeah. And the podcast start in 2016. Oh, wow. Really? Yeah, I’m wondering, I’m probably number two in the space in terms of when I started

Matthew  

your 12 listeners, isn’t that 12 her? Some people,

Erwin  

I’ve had some people declaring they’re the 18th listener. So we’re growing, we’re growing, but I was always building an email database along the whole way. So my email database is over 10,000 now so my so my podcast for example, goes to that date of email database. So I that’s the thing that I don’t think a lot of people understand. Just like the new the new E commerce people don’t understand that you need a brand. The news newbie podcasters out there, they understand you have to have an audience, existing audience. I got in with an existing audience. I only had a couple 1000 on my email list at the time when I started the podcast, which is why it went well. It’s why continues to do well, while we continue to see like all these new people podcasting, but it’s going to be a tough slog. Yeah, right. Yeah, do not have a an audience already to share it with. Then the other thing you mentioned, you mentioned that you follow people for a long time. I think that’s wise, because you need to understand people’s track record before you’d ever invest in them. Yeah, right. And I bring that up now because we see the all these gurus who who only did real estate in this boom period, never saw correction before and you know, they’ve coached their clients and now their clients are failing and it’s really sad times.

Matthew  

I’ve seen some people that I’m like, they you know, made million selling, you know, courses on Airbnb and other things. And like, I find, like, yeah, people aren’t willing to actually share like, what they’re actually doing are making a lot of times it’s just like, the surface sloths, a lot of the Guru’s, right. They just show like, I think we’re talking earlier like, it’s all just

Erwin  

good. recording all the good stuff, right? Usually they’re selling something,

Matthew  

but I find like, no one’s willing to actually show you like their numbers and what they’re doing like a lot of people are like, Oh, I make you know, seven figures on Airbnb, but then you don’t actually see show me like the numbers show me what actually what you’re doing show me like the background show me like, there’s a big difference between gross and net to like, any business owner knows like, yeah, let me see the properties right. Like, I remember I like I was saw some people there on a different podcast and someone in the US that I like, and I follow and I heard these guys on in their time with Airbnb business. I was like, Oh, wow, like, that’s really cool. Impressive. So it’s like, oh, I want to see what their properties look like. took forever to find these guys. But like if you’re if you know what you’re doing on like DNA, you can find people find their listings, all their listings are like three stars rated poorly. Clearly, they’re not actually running their business. Well, meanwhile, they’re selling 1000s of dollars courses to teach people how to run an Airbnb business department for money there. Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, sure they had their 10 properties or whatever that they were saying. But like, like I said, I looked at and you’re like, Okay, three stars, no future bookings, like, get you’re telling people like, I’m gonna teach you how to make money on on this. It’s like, I think just people need to know like, there’s a lot of people out there like selling the snake oil. Right? And like, gotta like dive deep into it. I think if someone’s not willing to like, show you what they’re actually doing. Show some numbers show some like physical proof. Yeah, show me the property show me like what you’re doing. If you’re not willing to do that, then like, it’s probably cuz you’re full of BS. Yeah. Right. So I think like, or someone just come out of the woodwork where it’s like, like, I think you’ve made that point before. It’s someone who just got into real estate a year ago, or, you know, and then five years ago, even Yeah, even five years ago, it’s like, Well, you haven’t really been through the ups and downs and learned different stuff. So just be mindful, be mindful in our first

Erwin  

choice. But these groups that like they celebrate the deal, like a deal getting done, which is great. Celebrate getting a deal done. But often all these deals were not any good. Yeah. As in like, even the numbers going in weren’t any good, right? You don’t celebrate that. But in your to your point, like, show me the numbers. Yeah. And when I saw the numbers, I see these folks trying to raise money on online on social media, whatnot. I look at their deals. And like this is this deal is terrible. Yeah. Right. But they’re telling everyone it’s great. And all these people who don’t know how to better deal, they’re like, Oh, I like the person all they seem really fancy the drive the drive, whatever, XYZ car, it’s really nice, you know, nice sunglasses or some nice hair, you know, they speak really well. I’m gonna invest in them without knowing how to vet a deal. Right? And then it all falls apart.

Matthew  

Yeah, so I would just say to anyone who’s like doing looking for like, and I’m a firm believer in coaching and I think there’s value and there’s so many things that I that that’s like one of my downfalls like don’t do enough coaching and I’m really trying to like, get more into it. Like actually, like hire coaches for things. I tend to always be at the mindset of like, oh, just figure it out myself, which is like, not the best way but like, I’m stubborn sometimes. But I’m just like, oh, whenever I do, actually, like have a coach someone who’s teaching me or helping me it’s like I find like it makes a big difference. It’s just like fun. Finding the good people because now I think it’s well known that you can make a lot of money coaching people, because people are always willing to pay good money to like better their lives and do different things. So a lot of people take advantage of that. So I think just like said, doing that research and looking at the scenes and like, if you have someone that you want to get coaching from, like ass, asked to be like, show me what you’re doing, like, let’s see some numbers here. Versus your properties. Yeah. So it’s not willing to show you like, there’s a reason because like, why wouldn’t so if I’m coaching someone about Airbnb, and they’re like, Okay, well, like, Let’s see your progress. And like, sure, like your take a look, here’s my calendar, here’s this, like, here’s, here’s the numbers we’re making, like, why would I want to hide that if I am doing good, I should be proud of what I’m doing. And if I truly believe I can help people achieve something better their lives and like I should be showing them how it’s how I’m better in my life, by that way, to you know, show them what they can do if they put the effort into.

Erwin  

I don’t worry over time by how to estimate Florida. Sorry, you’re talking about your visa? Share? Yeah. What’s your plan? Like? What’s your plan to like? split time living?

Matthew  

Yeah. So right now,

Erwin  

I’m actually curious about Yeah, so

Matthew  

right now we’re working with our lawyers to get an E one visa, the typical visa people go for in the US when they’re like a real estate investor, or someone who’s Canadian trying to get into the US usually go for an E two. So a lot of the people I know who are applying for visas, they’re they’re going for an E two, which is like an investor visa. And usually that one, you need to invest a certain amount of money into starting a company or buying a company in the US show that you’re going to be enhancing the economy there and putting money into the system. And that’s the route that you can go to get like a an E two visa,

Erwin  

these guys are open to foreign buyers. Yeah,

Matthew  

like if you can, if you can show like hey, like, really offensive. Yeah, and you can go in and be like, Hey, I just bought this x business, it’s generating this much I’m gonna hire these people like I’m, I leased an office space, if you can show, hey, I’m putting money into the economy and I’m doing it then like applying for a visa is it takes a bit to get through it. But like most people can be approved for visa, because you’re you’re bettering the economy there. And that’s what they’re looking for. So we’re going to do an E one visa, which is a bit different. And it’s just because we have an online store. So we already do trade with the US. So that one, we’re doing basically like a sort of like an investor trading visa, but it’s because we already have a relationship with selling to the US sort of allows us to get a visa without having to put like, a big initial investment into the US. So like the EU usually have to like put, like, you know, they usually say the numbers like $100,000, sort of what they’re looking for to show that you’ve invested in and you’re, you know, doing things with the visa that we have just because of what we’ve been doing already, it allows us to not have to actually put any money upfront, we’re basically just saying, Hey, we already do a lot of trade with you, we’re already benefiting your economy, we just are looking to expand in the US and do more. So we need a visa to help us with that. So that’s the route that we’re going just because you don’t need to put that initial upfront cost. So it really works out for us. But our goal is to spend probably like, more time in the US thing thing Canada like I’m not a big fan of winters, my thought is I would always rather vacation somewhere cold for skiing and snowboarding, then like vacation somewhere warm for for a week. So that’s sort of, you know, what we’ve been working towards. So yeah, our plan is to move down to Florida, and start really growing our Airbnb business that are in our investing down there. So we’ve already been working with, you know, Canadian investors and US investors looking at properties to really grow our, our US presence down there. And just by getting a visa and being present in the US, it’ll just open up more doors, better financing opportunities, if you’re a Canadian trying to invest in the US, you typically have to put a larger down payment no different than an investor foreign investor buying in Canada yet to put a larger chunk down. So by us getting our visa there, it’s gonna allow us to work with our investors that put less money upfront to buy properties. And I just like I said, I just see a lot of opportunity in us real estate, like we’re talking about the the numbers down there. And I mean, those are just like solid cash flowing numbers on just sort of regular, you know, properties for air b&b. So the numbers just really speak to us. So we’re just looking to devote more time and energy down there. And, you know, our goal is to try to help Canadian investors invest in the US just because there is a lot of opportunity there. But there’s a hurdle of like learning how to invest in the US and what you need to do and how to set things up legally. And like I said, the financing stuff. And I think that scares a lot of Canadians away from investing in the US, like a lot of people reach out to me. It’s usually that like, I don’t really know how to do anything down there. Like it’s a different market. It just seems like everything’s so different. So this just allows us to help people who want to invest in the US have a better opportunity of doing it. And like I said, I just think that the numbers speak for themselves there. So

Erwin  

you’ve been really generous with your time.

Matthew  

Enjoy great commerce. Patience. So long, it’s been a couple of years

Erwin  

you’ve been away. Yeah. Any final words,

Matthew  

any final words that you feel like you need to have some, like wise words of wisdom, I just think for people, it’s just be open to looking at, like, different opportunities. And I mean, like, when I got started in real estate, it was the traditional long term buy and hold, which I think is like, you know, was a great business model at the time. And like, I still think there’s opportunity there for certain people who are looking for certain types of, you know, safe, easier investments. But I think there’s just like, so many different things that have opened up over the like, since I started investing and probably since you started investing with like, Airbnb arbitrage cash

Erwin  

flow and single family home back when I started,

Matthew  

yeah, exactly like, back then it’s like, oh, you could buy a property and be like, I’m making 500 bucks a month off this, you know, get a couple of those. And you could leave your nine to five and, you know, like, run real estate as like a full time business, which I feel like, you can’t really do that now. But with some of these other options, like you do have that, that ability, it’s just being creative getting outside of like, the typical box, I think, like we’re a lot of people are talking about with real estate, a lot of those take a little bit extra work, you know, but I think like the work pays for itself. And I think also not being like if you’re not in a an area, or a city or province or state that the numbers make sense. Like don’t be afraid to invest like elsewhere in different areas where the numbers make a bit more sense, the work upfront might be a little bit more, but you know, if you can, if you can get into a market, the numbers really make sense for you and can help you achieve like your actual goals in life. And I think it’s like worth it in the long run.

Erwin  

Fantastic. I have a selfish question. What do you think the market timing right now,

Matthew  

you would know more about like the Canadian market timing, I think US market talk to us timing is is fantastic. Right now, because I just think, like, I think earlier, there’s a lot of creative options, because people are sitting on properties for months and months at a time you’re seeing like, prices drop in a huge, huge drops, because rates are going up because rates are going up. And like a lot of people today. Yeah, rates went up again. So people aren’t able to unload their properties, there’s a lot of supply on the market. So people are willing to be creative. So if you can come in and offer them, you know, seller financing option that works subject to you know, like I’ve been learning more and more about that down there, which is like another great creative option where you just take over their mortgage payments for them. So you can actually look to do something like that, where you might be able to take advantage of their low interest rates that they had from locking in a mortgage like two years ago. And people are really open to that sort of stuff. And I also find even if you are looking at like the Airbnb arbitrage route, I find like I’m getting a lot of people in the US who are like really open to that when they probably wouldn’t have been a few years ago or last year because they would have been like, well, I can just do it myself or I can rent it long term. But now that there’s so much supply sitting on the market, like people are willing to give up two months rent free, lower security deposits, like different things are willing to like give concessions where you know, like we know a year two years ago, you rip roaring Yeah, like, like they were in the driver’s seat. And if you wanted to get something you just had to like, take what you were given and, you know, hope for the best words. Now I feel like people who are willing to like who are actively looking to buy or do things like you’re in the driver’s seat, you have a lot of opportunity to like, negotiate and talk to people if they’re not willing to be flexible or do what you want. And let’s move on to other properties

Erwin  

raising man, thanks so much for coming in.

Matthew  

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Erwin  

Before you go if you’re interested in learning more about an alternative means of cash flowing like hundreds of other real estate investors have already then sign up for my newsletter. Find out for yourself what so many real estate investors are doing to diversify and increase our cash flow. And if you can’t tell I love teaching and sharing this stuff.

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Erwin  

Hello and welcome to the investing show. It’s Erwin Szeto. Interesting thing about the show is I never have any idea what episodes will perform well. And last week’s episode with Ben Bergen did indeed surprise who knew that you are some good listeners would be interested in a newer investor who almost lost it all. Even though they’d spent they spent around $50,000 In real estate investor education. Please allow me to reiterate based on my inner observation, what allowed Ben to survive with a he was local to his investments. So we had a local team, and he can be hands on beyond sight the hands on, he then has a construction background. And because he’s full time in real estate and allowed him to have more control in his project and control his renovation costs for an out of town investor who doesn’t understand renovations, or how to work with contractors and has no income coming in. Because they already quit their jobs on some sort of promise to retire on real estate investing that and plus investor we’re Flirting with Disaster. I’m not saying don’t go big, I would just say go about it slowly. Ideally have deep pockets from a quality portfolio of properties or security, and to have high quality mentorship and coaching than those who went bankrupt recently. I’ve had several guests on the show who follow that exact path. Charles was difficult. kowski can be in the panache, Ryan cars or Koechlin. Quint de Souza, St. Good, trotty. Nice and Stuart McPherson from Ottawa, cherry. All of the above investors benefit from the market. A lot of time in the market. They’re still investors, strong analyzers, it already made very good incomes before investing. Some have extensive renovation experience and construction experience, some benefited fitted from intergenerational wealth. The whole point of this show is to share with you my 17 listeners, what has worked and what does not work. None of the above, investors went as highly leveraged with expensive debt as the folks who are losing their shirts right now. That’s, I think that’s pretty obvious. None of them we’re trying to be nearly as aggressive and grow as this fast early on. Back to our last guest has been Bergen. What surprised me was how many folks DM Ben and I, their approval and sharing the truth about real estate investing, which include includes a near bankruptcy, one said it was refreshing to hear an episode that was not all about cheerleading rah rah, getting rich quick, let alone tie leverage in real estate. events during the same event had some big names in the industry sending along positive messages, folks who did not know Ben previously, it says investors derive value from learning from loss. So they made it void the same, which is why I don’t understand why some of these networking coaching groups are not open, about sharing about losses that are going on even within their own four walls. Even Warren Buffett, the greatest investor in the world, maybe because he is the greatest investor in the world. He’s willing to suck up his ego and share lessons from, for example, the Kraft Heinz merger that didn’t go perfectly well. Mostly the company did quite badly, or why his airline investments were losers. I do believe all educational groups mean well, but teaching excessive risk not sharing about losses in my experience. Well, note that I’ve seen this all before. I’ve seen people go belly up back in 2008. From excessive greed, ego investing back in 2008. During the credit crisis during the correction during the recession, those who failed to teach history failed to prevent their clients from repeating history. Shut up to professional real estate coach Elizabeth Kelly for referring Ben Berg into me and the guest of the show on a personal friend Jerry and I had a wonderful March Break. It wasn’t without bumps. We found out last minute that our short term rental we were sharing with our friends, short term rental STR for short, had a max limit of occupants. So when we were over it, so we had to borrow our friends College, thankfully, potentially Wasn’t she didn’t need it. At the time. She wasn’t using it at the time, while our friends stayed in an str. we skied for five days, while at least the kids and I did we see for five days as they were in heartbreak camp. Do the parents that we were with are mostly accountants. So they can see nearly as much as I did, some didn’t see at all as it is tax season including green cherry. So I booted around the hills checking on everyone’s kids. I hang around my kids camp for quite a bit as as well as 80% of the time I had no one else to ski with. I was welcome as I stayed away from the state of truckers way and I had some use to the kids. Because I happen to have a highly valued skill I was able to lower raise and lower the chairman restraint bar. For those who don’t know that’s the that’s like a seatbelt when riding a chairlift at a ski resort. By midweek the kids have learned how to lift and raise their own restring bar so I started getting ditched which makes me emotional this small moment is reminder how my kids are growing up in need me less and less I know they won’t be around next season. No, my dad jokes are pretty horrible. I tell them to their friend, I tell them to their friends anyways, they’re kind of at the laugh, but they are terrible. And soon enough, this old man will be able to keep up with all these young kids. I’m grateful to provide and enjoy these experiences with my kids as my parents. They immigrated here to Canada, when they were only 17 from a tropical climate of Hong Kong, with no money and no one to teach them the basics of university before so I only ever skied during school trips growing up, which is already grateful for an opportunity many hours. To this day. I remember seeing my friends at school, in their nice ski jackets, they would collect ski passes, so they leave like the ski pass attached to their jacket. And that was never me. So to this now to fast forward to today. I didn’t say I’ve had friends comment that you know, electricity tag on and like yes, and I’m keeping it there. It’s silly. I know it’s silly. Maybe I’m just making up for lost experiences. onto this week’s show. We have founder of property technology company, Bill Lika. On the show, he is the founder and CEO of SingleKey. And if you haven’t heard of them yet, you’re going to want to pay attention to the show, because in my experience, they are providing investors a tonne of value at affordable prices. SingleKey is now the largest tenant screening service out there especially with their last fall they acquired a company called Naborly. So if you been an investor for any amount of time, you likely know who Naborly is single T has consumed them. So now their their tenant screening services have, you know, scaled up and include best practices from both companies. The majority of professional investors I know, were already using a SingleKey before I ever met a biller, because it’s cheap. It’s cheaper than it was one of the great things about technology is it’s brought down the price of credit checking tenants. It’s done online, using their fast cheap encrypted software. And the reports are written in plain English. Even our local bank REIT uses SingleKey and they have I don’t know how many hundreds or 1000s attendance. Anyways, below is a smart, he’s super smart. As you can tell. He has both degrees in engineering, and an MBA from the same business school that I graduated from at Western University in London. On today’s show below shares his journey of graduating from school and starting up a real estate technology business. He was previously in financial services. And he’s brought to us this company that a small investors get to use the same tools that big corporate REITs use. SingleKey will even underwrite insurance on tenants, which can be purchased by the landlord, US or the tenant, the tenant can insure themselves. How amazing is that? For anyone who follows the news or has been around or have people have friends or family looking to rent places, then you know that the rental market is highly competitive in most many major sized cities. If I had to enter a bidding competition to rent a place, I personally would insure myself, I would buy insurance on myself to be able to pay rent in order to set myself apart. Hopefully no one thinks that’s a red flag that I have to buy insurance. I would do everything I’m big on winning, I enjoy winning, I will do everything in my power to be able to win in a multiple offer situation. Villa was also kind enough to share what features are coming up in the next few months that will forever change, change how we screen non Canadians and also report tenant rents on your credit, aka Equifax. This is not an episode to be missed. So please enjoy the show. You really need to know what’s on the horizon for for Best Practices and Technology for tenant screening. So you do not want to miss this. As a bonus biller was kind enough to provide us a discount code. It’s Irwin, five letter word starts with an E, my name. And now we get to 20% off of your tenant screening report, your tenant screening and background report. And it also works on Americans. I’ve included a link in the show notes. Please enjoy the show. 

Erwin  

Hi, Viler, what’s keeping you busy these days? 

Viler  

Erwin, how are you? Thanks for having this podcast. What’s keeping you busy? Well, running SingleKey is kind of like my day job. So that’s always a nonstop project. Some of the big things that we’re actually working on now in q1 of 2023 You know, we’ve got a brand new website coming out so keep an eye out for it two weeks from now it’ll be online and we’re working on completely refactoring our application. So all of the products you know and love the SingleKey are gonna have brand new look brand new features, all that stuff is coming up at the end of March. So as you can imagine, there’s there’s a bit of a spread now to the finish line to get a lot of these big initiatives out and excited to see kind of the results from them. 

Erwin  

So this is pretty exciting stuff and like we were chatting before we were recording. Tenant reporting has come a long way. I’ve been a landlord since 2005. So you know I was doing the old school and we didn’t even always get a cracked was having folks papers to fill up paper forms to fill out for tenant applications. And then like the process kept changing, like the regulations around privacy and whatnot. And like, I remember literally having a tenant fill out a form. And then the company that would that was going to actually run the check said, this one’s no good. It’s outdated. The Privacy language has been updated. Don’t do it again, like, oh, yeah, choice language for that. You know, I mean, it’s so much easier now, in terms of being a landlord and for tenants to submit, especially great tenants to deal to apply for rental property. 

Viler  

No, absolutely, I think I think there’s been a lot of changes kind of in the macro environment as well earned it because like, you know, 2005 was a very different real estate market than right. So I think the stakes have have increasing significantly where, you know, rents are higher property values are higher, also, it’s just a much more competitive rental market, there’s less stock available, there’s less vacancy than, then there was historically low vacancy. So you know, now we’re seeing kind of like, not only that, but also the risks are higher, too, right. You know, right now, we’re in an eight month backlog at the LTV, so you don’t lose a whole year’s worth of rental income. So 20 $30,000 is at stake, I tell people, it’s going to cost you more to have a baton in your property than if you total your car in an accident because of the losses. So what’s happening now is that you’d have to be crazy not to actually do due diligence on a tenant before you put them on the lease given how severe the losses can be. So where 10 or 15 years ago, were like doing a credit check was not really kind of the mainstream thing to do, people would just kind of like meet tenants, you don’t you kind of suss them out and get a good feel for them, and make a decision based on their income or whatever. Whereas now, people are going a lot deeper, and rightfully so because they have a lot more to lose if they don’t get it right. So for that reason, because it is much more of a need now that you’ve seen a lot of a lot more kind of products in the market like SingleKey like Naborly and so they have tools out there to help landlords kind of facilitate that process of tenant screen. Because you know, and we were talking about this before, as you mentioned, you know, before, you’d have to ask the tenant to go to Equifax or TransUnion. And actually, yep, I did that. And then just kind of by the report printed out and handed over, which takes a lot of time, probably why because you know, these are not consumer companies that they sell to banks and insurance companies in the volume of millions, boards of tenants isn’t really their priority. And they don’t have a great experience for that reason. So I think that’s where we kind of come in is that, hey, we looked at the rental application process, and they said, Okay, well, how do we make this super easy three clicks to order, like, you know, less than five minutes to get your report proposal entered, and the tenants make it a very simple, easy online mobile experience for both for both sides. And then don’t just stop with the credit report. But let’s ask for more questions. Let’s have a full on online rental application, let’s allow them to upload proof of income and pay stubs, an employment letters and IDs and pet photos and everything, they need to basically build that online kind of like tenant resume, and put together a nice package that they can hand over to the landlord. And then, you know, let’s do that in a compliant way, where lenders can get like a link directly from SingleKey and not just like a PDF that can be modified, etc. So the next frontier that we’re all kind of working on this year now is how do we build trust on that application? And how do we deal with some of the fraud that we’re seeing in the market now, especially given how competitive the market is right now, I don’t know if you’ve experienced any of that yourself. 

Erwin  

I see some crazy stuff. In terms of fraud. Like I was saying, before, we’re recording, like, you mentioned that you mentioned a lot of risks to the landlord, because properties are more expensive, or mortgages are bigger, right. So to be vacant, or sorry to be having non payment or rent is the risk is higher than ever. But for the listener, like don’t be scared. I’ve been at this for a long time, I think I’ve only had really one significant non payment of rent tenant. But it was it wasn’t a huge amount either. But my point is, the tools and technology are better than ever it kind of like you owe it to yourself to kind of go through that process and do their homework upfront, because I’ll go a step further. What I’ve been telling you, especially my clients have been telling you is you’re negligent to not do a proper tenant check. Absolutely. Right. Yeah, it’s no different if you’re, if you’re gonna loan someone $100,000 Here I am learning someone an asset worth $500 million, or half of that because they’re in the duplex of mine. That’s an asset worth, you know, 400,000 500,000. So a significant mount of due diligence is required. Absolutely. And it’s easier than ever. Right. And also, just to take it let’s take another step like I was telling you before, whenever you read about professional tenant stories in the media, I always tell people, like people always send it to me or people say, oh, what this happened this happened like, yeah, okay, read the whole thing. So that’s the first thing is read the whole article, get the entire story. And near the usually near the bottom, you find out that the landlord did not do a tenant checked, right? Or that the landlord did not Google the phone number that was given to them. Because literally, in one example the phone number led to a escort company. So if you just Google the phone number, they would have found out that that belonged to an escort company. 

Viler  

No, you’re right. It’s easy to kind of like check those things after the fact you know, like, oh, wow, I pay close attention like I could spot some red flags, you know, up front as opposed to being frustrating. 

Erwin  

So actually already recorded the time. missing men just with McKenzie on how to read your credit report. Sorry, let’s actually go back for anyone who doesn’t know SingleKey Naborly. What is it? 

Viler  

Yeah, at a high level, our mission as a company is let’s take the risk of renting for, you know, small landlords, independent lenders that are out there kind of, you know, building their real estate portfolio. And you know, as you know, very well are in real estate investing has become a very common practice now, for most agents to build, you know, to build wealth plan for retirement and kind of create greater a bit of a nest egg, right. So we want to do is make sure that they protect it. And what we found is where a lot of the landlords that are doing this out of their desk get in trouble is when it comes to these tenant issues, because they’re not, you know, they’re not like a big property management company. They’re not professionals, and they don’t have the team of paralegals and superintendents, and what have you do to really support you if anything goes wrong. So we decided, hey, why don’t we bring the tools and the scale and the risk management tools that the big multifamily guys have in the hands of the small mom and pop landlords are protected, basically, their investment and the way we do this in three easy steps. So first, we’ll help you screen your tenant do their proper due diligence that we just talked about upfront to make sure that you can reduce the risk as much as you can spot any issue that refines before you lease out to the tenant once you listen to them. Second step is we offer a kind of almost free rent collection tool that not only automates rent collecting for you, and, you know, basically through a pre authorised debit solution, but it also takes us payments or a portion to the Bureau, which is great for two reasons. First, it helps tenants build credit through their rent payment, which is very important. But secondly, it also incentivizes them to pay the rent on time, so that they don’t constantly miss it or late, which could affect their credit. And then thirdly, after we collect the rent, we then guaranteed even if tenants don’t pay, so that’s our rent guarantee programme, which is more of an insurance type product that basically, the lender pays us about 5% of their monthly rent. And in exchange, what we do is we guarantee up to 12 months of rental income, in case the tenants stopped paying. As part of that package, we also cover any property damage for up to $10,000. And we even support with the legal process of eviction, if required by hiring a local paralegal, having them assist you in covering their fees as part of that package. So the idea here is that, hey, let’s make sure you get your rent check no matter what even if a tenant stops paying. And then you know, if you do get in trouble with it, then we can step in to basically supporting the legal side. So you’re not stressed and worried about that process. And you know, one of the key principles around this is the fact that as a mom and pop, I’ve got maybe two, three properties Max, or on average that I’m managing, if one or two of those tenants stop paying the rent, who’s uncovered the mortgage, right, I don’t have the scale of 1000 units, like the big guys do, were bad rents is just part of my p&l, and now to 30%, I don’t really care about it. For me, as a small homeowner, if I lose that rental income, I’m a very difficult cash flow position. Now, because I can’t make I can’t make the mortgage, I’m at risk of losing my property. And we saw this happen during COVID, you know, when when we had those eviction bans in every province, where you know, some lenders want over a year, like getting your rent check. And some of them were in a very difficult situation, some of them have to sell their properties, oftentimes at a loss because there wasn’t liquid tenant in there, because they couldn’t afford to stay liquid. So the point with the rent guarantee programme is, hey, you can make use of our scale and our large portfolio to basically spread your risk over the 1000s of guarantees that we have, are just chipping in a little bit. But then hey, if you’re the unlucky laner that month that didn’t get take out that bad tenant, well, now we can actually dedicate resources towards covering your loss, Roski income, and then also providing kind of like the risk management solution and legal support that you need to kind of get the tenants out and, and go back to being liquid again. So that’s the whole concept behind the business, what I think is fascinating about your rental guarantee insurance businesses that tenants have to go through your application process. And then actually, quick question. So let’s say a tenant fills an application. I imagine you’re not going to insure all of them. Yeah, no, and I’ll get into that a second. But, you know, I love what we talked about before everyone we said hate you’d have to be negligent not to actually seen it that way. Oh, absolutely. Well put yourself in our shoes. Right, we’re guaranteeing up to $60,000 of Washington income for the Senate, that will be the same as us pretty much issuing the Senate a $60,000 line of credit. Now what bank? Can you go to and get a 60,000 credit without running a credit check? Yeah, you’re willing to put your money where your mouth is exactly the same thing for for the average landlord, even if you’re not on the rent guarantee, this tenant now pee, you know, if they stopped paying the rent, that you’re gonna lose tenant, it’s gonna cost you 10 or 12 months of rental last rental income, that’s a lot of money that you’re pretty much putting at stake. It’s the same as basically a right underwriting a loan for this tenant for that amount. And if they don’t pay, you’re in trouble, right? So that’s why it’s so important and critical for you to take the proper steps and go through that new diligence process. That’s the mindset, you have to think through that, hey, I’m giving this property to this applicant that’s worth 2000 $3,000 a month for 12 months. It’s the same as me, basically giving them a 20 $30,000 line of credit. Yeah.

Erwin  

I think it’s brilliant that you made this offering, because that’s usually the number one concern that investors have before becoming investors is one of 10 doesn’t pay with the trash property. So you have provided the solution for set problem.

Viler  

That’s how we came around to this. You know, we were talking earlier, Hey, how did you kind of guys think about how did you start SingleKey people with the original story? This was a concept that really kind of anchored, you know, with me, I’ll tell you kind of how we started. So basically, my background is I was an intern You hear the NBA same school, you went to the best business school in the world, we all know that. And then I spent about five years in kind of consumer risk and finance that you’re looking at the banks, the bank and Capital One. And then we were looking at, like, I was looking at credit cards at the time, we’re looking at, like the spend at the most people are spending spending 30% 40% of their of their monthly income on just rent. And there wasn’t much the bank was doing for them, right? There’s no financing behind it, there was no insurance, there’s no lending, there’s no you know, risk management. And we’re like, Okay, well, that’s a huge share of wallet. And you know, nowadays, you can go to clean tire and buy a fridge and put on a credit card and get some money behind it. There’s no financial instruments to help support rent payments or secure payments. So you know, we started digging in, started talking to homeowners started talking to tenants trying to get a sense of kind of what’s a problem that we can solve working, we add value as a financial institution. And that’s what we zeroed in on is that, hey, there’s a lot of challenges, you know, and yeah, you know, I need some help listing the property itself, finding good tenants need some help collecting rent, blah, blah, blah. But the one thing that was a need, like a must have was, I need to get that rent check at the end of the month, because I need that to be in a mortgage. Right? That was a real pain point that needed a solution. And once we looked into it and looked at the numbers, we’re like, Okay, well, this is a perfect use case for applying an insurance product to something that doesn’t happen very often. Because as you know, most tenants are good or great tenants. But you have a few bad apples there that when they do go bad, it cost a lot of money. So it’s the same as car insurance, right? You know, hey, you’re protecting yourself in case of a delinquent. In default, that could be very expensive. And we can put some sort of small premium against that to offset that risk and and spread that over large portfolio. And that’s what was seen when he was born. That’s a mouthful. Sorry, what you were, is that what you’re discussing lucky? Well, it’s 2017 was the initial kind of incorporation. So But five years ago, and then 2018, early 2020, right before COVID is only brought the rank guaranteed to market. Oh, nice timing. And that was a bit of a scary moment. You’re right, because the world pretty much kind of just completely flipped upside down during that period. And, you know, we thought as a risk management company, we’re like, Okay, well, it doesn’t get riskier than this, you know, you’ve got your global pandemic event, like, job loss, you have addiction banned. So you, we had Doug Ford go on TV and say, Hey, don’t worry about paying rent, make focus on paying your groceries, right, a nice guy out there, but you know, regardless, and, you know, it was a good kind of stress test, I think for us, because we were one of the few companies that was able to make it through that high risk period and come out the other side and still be successful and profitable. A large part of that is due to the fact that we always, we always kind of like focus on the underwriting first. So you know, like you mentioned, first, we don’t allow anybody to get on the rent guarantee without going through a proper screening, right? Getting a credit report, proof of income, all that stuff is part of the actual underwriting process. And while we actually have a very kind of a low hurdle for guaranteeing tenants, I would say 80% of the applicants that come our way get approved, we don’t even look at credit scores, we’re primarily focused on, you know, spotting any red flags, any recent bankruptcies, judgments, and then we’re looking at income, hey, do they have enough income or stable income to cover the rent payments, we’re looking for a 45%, you know, rental income ratio, or below, which as you know, is that’s actually a pretty low hurdle, because most lenders will look at more, probably more of a 30% Rent income ratio, so we’re able to go 45, and that’s based on gross income, you know, before taxes anything else altogether, including any assistance that you’re getting. So you know, as long as if he should be the primary checks and make sure that he, because you know, everything in life follows the 8020 rule, or 9010 rule where you know, 10% of difficult tenants are causing 90% of the headaches. So if you can figure out who he is the kind of really identify those folks in the application process, you can really manage risk very effectively for him or for him

Erwin  

The 80% of tenants getting approved is actually surprising to me, I thought I didn’t think I’d be so high. 

Viler  

We wanted to make sure that I mean, the point here is not to kind of basically put forth a barrier where we’re excluding people from this programme. And in the future, we’re looking to make it even more inclusive. And we’re looking for ways for now to actually also add in students or new to Canada, folks that have no credit, no income, hi, we kind of bring them in as well, right? The problem is constantly evolving and adding in more kind of segments. But the idea here is that he, you know, again, the vast majority of tenants aren’t good tenants, and bad credit score doesn’t necessarily mean a bad tenant. And I say that while we offer and sell a credit report product, but you have to take a bit more of a in depth look, you have to look at like, Okay, well, what are their debt payments? You know, how much? How much have the board? Have they been paying those those bills on time? Do they have any history of kind of constantly, you know, going to collections or kind of going through bankruptcy, you can just remember and kind of make a decision, it’s more of a holistic kind of view of that person. And we found that, you know, funnily enough, we found that credit scores are actually not the best predictor of tenant default, because somebody with a prime credit scores over 720 They’re gonna have their pick of the market right there, they’re gonna have an easy time finding a new place to rent. So we’re somebody with lower credit score closer 600 or below, they’re gonna have a hard time so when they do get that lease, they’re actually much more appreciative and more likely to kind of go the extra mile to be nice to their landlord and and kind of do what they can because they know they’re gonna have a hard time finding another place, you know, if they move on. So it’s an interesting concept. What makes the biggest difference in my opinion is just affordability making sure that you’re not biting more than you can chew. That’s why that that renting ratio Be matters. And on top of that, you probably want to layer on hey, what if they’re paying $2,000 in rent payments, do they have an extra 1000 bucks of that payments that they have on their on their credit, because at the end of the day, if you have money left over to just set aside in case of a rainy day, if you have access to credit, those are things that will help you get through a kind of like income shock, let’s say you lose your job, or you have unexpected expenses, having a bit of room in your income versus your expenses, is really going to make you a great tenant, and be able to get through those rough times. 

Erwin  

And just for the listeners benefit, like I’ve been through the SingleKey process and application from the tenant side, and it’s quite dynamic. And you can, like you mentioned, you can add, like your pay stub, you can add bank statements, your ID driver’s licence, you can add your whoever else is gonna be living with you. Right. So you know, if, for example, if you have two, three incomes in the family that doesn’t only help it will help their application. Actually quick question about that, that leads me to think, see, there’s three people on the application does the charge change for the tenant application? 

Viler  

Well, we do charge per applicant basis, because everybody will have their own credit history, their own background kind of information as well. So while we can kind of like it typically will ask for the household income, like you said, just to kind of assess the ability to pay for for the entire household, we will run individual credit checks and background checks for each of those applicants separately. But you know, it is kind of an approach on a per applicant basis. Yeah. 

Erwin  

And it’s only $25, retail. The Equifax was I think, like at least 36, if I remember correctly, and that was 10 years ago. Sorry, that was nearly 20 years ago. So it got cheaper. Right, yeah. 

Viler  

So I think more people use this. And now that the volume I think helps with it with that, and you know, keeping the price low is important for us as well, just to make sure that everybody, there’s no excuse not to use it. And everybody can go through that process. And it’s a product that’s constantly evolving, as I mentioned, at the end of March, that we’re actually releasing a new version of it, it’ll look a bit different, you have the option between the new and the old, but we’re adding new features. So for example, we’re looking towards adding an international credit checks, so you can actually scroll Wow, I’ve never seen that before. Brand new kind of feature now. And we’re working with a partner out in the US who has access to multiple credit bureaus across the world, and they’re able to cover about 60% of the world’s population, that will be a bit more expensive, but it will give lenders and property managers despise risk. Especially if you have no other kind of way of checking references for somebody that’s, you know, international business, at least, to kind of have a good kind of view of their, you know, financial standing. And the cool thing about this now is all the international reports, it doesn’t matter if you’re from India, or Europe or China, they’ll get standardised so they look just like an equipment, you know, the typical Equifax report. So you’ll be able to kind of read and understand it, they’ll even have a score that’s out of 800, similar to your Equifax standard credit score. So I’m very excited about that. Other really cool features that are adding, we’re adding kind of like an ID verification, again, to deal with some of these fraud issues or kind of remote screening. So folks that you know, if you can’t have them have a chance to meet them in person, but you just want to send them that application link, while we’re adding in a selfie and Id check where they’ll go through kind of an AI comparison of their liveness check, where they have to basically take a three dimensional selfie, and it’ll match your face with their ID and, and run their driver’s licence and make sure that they are. So that will be like an add on that you can add to your report. We’re looking into bank scans. So the ability for hey, if they have no credit, or you know, low credit, if you want to go one step further, and dig in deeper, we can allow you can allow the tenant to log in with their bank account, and we will look at 24 months of transaction history and assess money and money out. So you know, what’s their income? What are they? What are their spending look like? Do they have any savings? Even things like did they pay their last line or on time, because we can see the rent payments on their on their transaction history. So these are some of the really cool things that we’re kind of adding on to the technology stack. And these are the landlord benefits a lot more coming on the tenant side. Now we’re actually working towards building a tenant portal, where, you know, we realised that hey, you know, we’ve got 1000s of tenants coming to St. Louis being invited by landlords to run the rental application, what can we do to add value to them as they’re going through their kind of their own journey and moving into new home? Well, one thing that we realised early on is that, you know, lenders don’t like to see paper applications anymore, because they don’t trust them. Because they’re like, yeah, if you send me a PDF, or a screenshot, you can easily just modify those on Photoshop Photoshop, yes. 

Erwin  

So everything can be Photoshop, I trust nothing.

Viler  

So I’m not gonna accept that I’m just gonna run my own credit check again. Well, the problem with that is that you apply to five different listings, now you’re gonna get hit with five different credit checks, which is not great for your credit score. So what we’re doing is we’re building what’s called a universal rent obligation. So the tenant can basically get access to their SingleKey report for some line of runs before them, they can log in, and then just share a link for them from SingleKey directly with as many ones and it’s not non modifiable, they can just basically get it directly from us. So they don’t have a chance to change it. And even if you do print it out and hand it off to your landlord, it’ll actually have a QR code there. It says scan to verify me see actually, you can actually scan that report, it will take that SingleKey fee site and it’ll verify all information. So these are some of the things that we’re doing to kind of really kind of combat fraudulent credit reports, frozen income information because we can tap into your bank account and pull it directly, as opposed to just allowing you to upload an employment letter. So this is a great kind of use case of like, Hey, here’s the technology saves you from doing going through the manual steps by just automating a lot of these things through through different data providers. 

Erwin  

That’s super cool. Even other new features that you mentioned, like international credit checking, like that’s a huge win for international. Anyone, just for example, it’s actually interesting. It was always hard to get the data on how many work visas and student visas were being given out each year. So now we know the numbers over 400,000. And likely, these are all renters. Yeah, that’s a lot of volumes or process, right? 400,000 a year? Yeah, that’s a lot. How would we have ever processed their credit. And then what I saw in practice was people were usually asking you for six or 12 months rent upfront. 

Viler  

And I was just gonna bring it up as it that’s a big challenge now, especially like in the super competitive rental market that we’re in, you know, if you have no credit history, if you have no local income, you’re forced to basically pay up front and cash six to 12 months of rent, nobody has $30,000 in their bank account, to rent out a lease. So he puts he puts renters in a very difficult position. So we’re we’re actually kind of expanding, we’re actually running a test with our underwriting partner, where SingleKey will be offered as a as a guarantor service, meaning that hey, if you’re a tenant who has no credit history, and you need like a local guarantor, we’ll be your local guarantor as 

Erwin  

holy cow really, really willing to put your money where your mouth is 

Viler  

similar kind of spin off on the on the existing rent guarantee programme for landlords, we’re just taking that offering to tenants and saying, Hey, look, you know, we’ll guarantee your landlord and damages and legal fees, so that you in their eyes, you become a risk weekend, and now you get first line access to that property, and they won’t, they’ll feel more comfortable renting to you without asking for six months or 12 months, 

Erwin  

you’re coming to me as an insured a tenant. Exactly, that makes you much more better qualified candidate. 

Viler  

So that’s kind of a whole bit and the problem we’re trying to solve is basically how do we get people away from these large deposits and more of an insurance product. And this is a better solution for two reasons. First of all, the obvious solution is that it’s much, much more user friendly for the tenants, because they’re not having to write $30,000 checks in front, they’re just paying an extra 100 bucks a month for the for the insurance premium, on average. And then for the landlord is actually better risk management tool. Because, you know, I’ve had experiences where I’ve gone in front of the LTB with like a 12 month deposit, you know, needless to say, they frown upon that, right, and then keep in mind that a six month bonds it all it does is it just offsets the problem by six months, you know, like the risk doesn’t go away, he just gets pushed back six months, because what happens if the stock price went down month seven, now you still have an eight month eviction process ahead of you where you’re gonna lose a month. So it’s not it’s not a good solution. It makes it harder for you to be in fight those cases, it only does it offset the problem. The rent guarantee is a much better solution and is much more tenant friendly as well. So that’s kind of the mission we’re on now is let’s replace the deposit with the rent guarantees that you know, which were better for both parties.

Erwin  

This is exciting stuff. Oh. Viler. I apologise. I should ask the sooner just in case anyone’s confused. A SingleKey now owns Naborly so is Naborly effectively, just, it’s just not only a SingleKey as one company now. 

Viler  

Yeah, yeah. But we acquired Naborly in late 20, late last year, so about four months ago, that was a big kind of milestone for us. Because, you know, as you know, Naborly has had a great brand in the market. And they were probably the most popular where they know that, yeah, they were the most popular tool in Canada, especially since they offered the start offering a free report for a while, which made them very popular with a lot of lenders out there, they had built a great platform, very kind of easy to use very kind of a lot of focus on designing simplicity, and kind of getting as much information as possible from tenants and put together a great profile. And, you know, I think, you know, for us, that was a big milestone, because we got to basically acquire one of our main competitors, and also increase our reach by, you know, two or three fold and bring in their database of users on the SingleKey as well. And then on top of that, also getting their IP and their technology and being able to layer that on top of over offering the SingleKey. So some of these product releases that are coming to market now. And end of q1 is basically a combination of Naborly stack and SingleKey kind of coming together, putting forth the best of both worlds. So we’re excited to see how well received that that new solution will be. 

Erwin  

Viler, you mentioned something shocking before we were recording, you were saying that SingleKey is significantly more popular in Alberta than Ontario. Yeah, even though we are what like four times their size and population. 

Viler  

I wouldn’t say we sell more more in Alberta and Ontario, but on a per population or per capita basis. basis. Wow. Double or if not more Alberta than then in Ontario, because our risk is what’s greater here isn’t. Right. And it depends on the product. Some products for example, the report is really well in Alberta has been really kind of embraced by the community there and I think we’ve been lucky to kind of work with great partners and McKenzie being one of them. He welcomed us into His Alberta Linder community Facebook group and promoted us heavily and did a tonne of great get reviews. So we’ve been able to get awareness there much faster now, which is, which is great. So I think for this year, that’s the next challenge now is how do we kind of really get awareness get get everybody in Ontario, to know what we’re working on and how we can add value to their business. And you know, try to reach the same level of penetration here in Ontario that we have an Alberta, 

Erwin  

right, are you looking for penetration in Quebec and BC, where they also have difficult no laws? 

Viler  

You know, we are Canada why so we do well, in BC as well, we’re available in the Maritimes as well, Quebec is a bit more of a kind of a work in progress, because they have kind of their own laws and regulations. And also, there’s a few kind of language challenges that we’re wrestling with as well. So that that will be an ongoing challenge. Rocket back always gets like missed on everything. It is a market that does require these types of things, because are these types of solutions, because there are a lot of lenders out there having challenges, and we have a few kind of folks that use us and love us. And we want to do more there. If we have the opportunity 

Erwin  

Poor Quebec investors, for anyone interested investing in Quebec, you know, you can always talk to me, we can help you in Ontario. So I want to ask the startup story. So again, we went to the same business school, I studied startups, you know, I had the privilege of being lectured by one of our professors, or she wasn’t even really a professor, but the owner of Bombay company, or company, it’s no longer here. But it still is fascinating to hear his story he was, I think he was close to 80 years old. But he was so rich and so nice, that he flew himself in from, like, his house is built on a mountain, I think in California overlooking the ocean. So I’m pretty sure that the school cannot afford to pay him for his travel. But yeah, to give back. That’s what he did. He flew from California, to London, Ontario, the major metropolitan in Ontario, to teach us about entrepreneurship. So I personally have always enjoyed learning about businesses and businesses, I’m interested in learning about your own journey about you know, I imagine you had a lot, you’ve paid a lot for school. I’m guessing you’re paid a lot of money at your job when you’re working at the banks. Right, and you decided, screw it, I’ll start my own business. 

Viler  

You know what, I think there’s a lot of pros and cons to doing this Erwin. And you know, you’re an entrepreneur, so obviously, you know, kind of that very well, I think, on the pro side is that you get to do what you love. And you get to kind of like, you know, work doesn’t feel as, as kind of taxing as it does, you know, if you’re not doing what you love, you get a lot more kind of creative energy, because you get to kind of basically control your destiny and kind of do what you kind of think you get to respond to the market, you get to listen to customers and kind of do something that they appreciate and and kind of get that feedback, which is great. So you know, when you’re building that, that’s definitely the the benefit. The cons are that hey, now it’s just it is a very risky proposition, right, you lose a lot of, as you mentioned, you’d give up kind of stable income and kind of security for somebody that is a bit of a gamble. In that sense. I think I think also, I think by nature, you have to be somebody that enjoys this type of life, where you know, you’re not risk adverse, it doesn’t keep you up at night, you don’t have kids, so you can take a bit more risk. For sure, right. That being said, I see some of the more some of the most successful entrepreneurs I know are in their 40s. And they do really well because there cannot be they can leverage life experience and bring in a lot of transferable skills in the business. I think also, like, there’s something that, you know, it should be noted that it’s not for everyone, I think you have to stop there are certain I think traits and, and kind of characteristics that separate entrepreneurs from other people. And you know, you have to have the hustle and the grit and hard work, there’s no substitute for those things, you know, how smart you are a well educated, if you can’t do the work and kind of really kind of solve problems fast, you’re not gonna make it right. So you have to be a bit self aware as well. And I think for me, what gave me confidence is that this is my first business, I had another one. During school, I was out there kind of running my own landscaping business. And then afterwards, I heard all my buddies and we kind of had our summer jobs and kind of going door to door and selling and growing the business. So you know, at least I have kind of the fundamentals and the basics down on how to, you know, good run a business kind of sell to customers, talk to customers, build a team, manage them and all that. So which which was helpful for me, but I think you don’t really know until you try it. You know, the best thing that to do, especially at a young age during your 20s or you know, like you said you don’t have a lot of responsibilities. Take the shot, you won’t know if you’re good at it until you try.

Erwin  

It’s fantastic. And obviously, I’m guessing you’re pretty bright. You have your Bachelor’s in engineering from U of T, which I’m pretty sure it’s not that easy to get into. You have your master’s in business from the best business school in the world. Obviously, I have a biassed opinion. You’re no dummy. With a fair assessment, 

Viler  

Investing in yourself and your education. It’s probably one of the best things you can do. It’s by no means a requirement. I’ve seen a lot of fantastic entrepreneurs with no education at all right? Absolutely. But you know, it’s helped me I mean, hey, my first kind of like investors and kind of partners into the business. We’re all guys that I met at the ivy business school, right. Oh, the networking paid off this I love it. It opens doors, it also puts you in touch with people that kind of have the experience or the knowledge and the skills that you need. So it’s a good kind of supporting network in that sense, and people reach out to and get help and, and all that, right? Yeah. 

Erwin  

So for the listeners benefit, if you’re not familiar with how, at least how the MBA at Western works. Again, number one, number one business school and world does the requirement of entering the MBA is real world experience. So I imagined, from my own experience, when the MBAs that I met, it ranged. And on the top end, you would have occasionally someone who were serves on like six boards of like publicly traded companies. So again, the experience is vast in range, but there’ll be like top end, like literally, it’s actually funny, because that gentleman actually sat in the class by class was Managing Board of Governors. So they literally had someone who sat on like three or six boards, as a student in that class. So wonderful experiences to share in value and networking to be obtained at bat potentially, while doing an MBA. 

Viler  

Absolutely. You’re really selling me MBA or? 

Erwin  

No, no, no. So my own journey was right or wrong. I did consider doing an MBA at the time, I think the price tag was at least 30,000, before housing, travel costs, books, all those sorts of things. I literally chose to buy a house instead of an income property instead, instead. Not to say my point, though, is that networking, where there high value people is never a bad thing? Absolutely, it’s a great place to find high value networking opportunities would be at a business school. 

Viler  

Absolutely. And you know, what I, if I may add, I think, look, I think at the end of the day, the best way to kind of your life goal is to kind of build wealth and make money, entrepreneurship may not be the best way to do that. Because there’s a lot of risks, there’s a lot of things that go wrong, you may be better off just kind of working towards a high powered career as a lawyer or a doctor or what have you. Because, yes, it takes probably same amount of work, but the risk is much lower, because you know that if you have the skill set and the experience, you will have pretty much high a higher market market value. But I think the the X Factor is are you doing what you love, right? Is that kind of what gets out of bed in the morning and gives you energy and kind of kind of, you know, inspires you to kind of work hard and then push for some of the roadblocks. And if not, and if this is what kind of, you know, what drives you, then that’s what you should, 

Erwin  

just because I love options. One other option where view, for example, is I’m gonna guess that your executives are quite well paid. And they take considerably less risk than you take. Fair enough. So that’s it may still get a taste of the entrepreneurial world. So nothing wrong with that. 

Viler  

I mean, we do and look, at the end of the day, we’re still young business and fast growing business. So you know, everybody has a stake in our success, and we kind of all benefit, we all kind of go down together. And that’s, that’s right. So it’s, a lot of these guys took pay cuts to work as SingleKey as consulting or kind of banking or engineering careers. But they also have some upside. So if we do kind of really well, they’ll, you know, they’ll they’ll do well as well. Yeah, I think that’s that’s the main thing that to kind of think about, 

Erwin  

you know, I love it all. I don’t think there’s ever a wrong answer. I think everything’s great. 

Viler  

pointer as well. By the way, if if you want to try out your hand and kind of like working in a small business or startup, the best thing to do is go work for somebody else, right? Go work for somebody where you can learn on their dime. 

Erwin  

Yeah, let them take the risk while they pay you.

Viler  

Right, so it’s the best education you can get.

Erwin  

So I think we need to spend more time on SingleKeyKey because again, I think we just went through so quickly, for example, I’ve lost in rentals. Yes, that is that is your, your SingleKey accommodates for single student tenants. 

Viler  

Not currently but we are with a new programme with a new tenant passport that we’re offering around. So the one that kind of allows for new to Canada and students, etc. So we can kind of talk a bit about that. Sure. 

Erwin  

What about just like, you know, my typical tenants usually like you know, 20 years old. So again, my experience is majority of my tenants are Canadians, like they have driver’s licences. They’re Canadian. Actually, no law, young people don’t have driver’s licences these days. But for example, if I wanted to, and then in practice a lot of landlords student rental landlords do not and then give this to give context like my properties have usually around six students in them. I’m not talking about instrumental means a lot of the rooming I guess they already like Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think I don’t know how you lived when you went to Western. ruin a house that’s free? I said, Yeah, that’s that’s the scenario like a rooming house. Is that user like new? Yeah, it’d be house users can can apply using SingleKey as well. 

Viler  

They can definitely apply using SingleKey piece so we can run the credit, credit and background check and all that stuff and then process the rental application and show you know, the rent guarantee doesn’t currently support them yet, but it’s something we’re working towards. New Version. Yeah. 

Erwin  

Well, if they are willing to put a guarantor on it? 

Viler  

then yes, if they if they’re willing to put a guarantor that has income like a parent, then then we can guarantee them. Yeah.