The Truth About Real Estate Investing... For Canadians

Speaking of #1 Investment strategies, this week’s guest has done plenty of basement apartments, probably a few dozen over the last few years.  Ryan Carr is a full time real estate investor who’s big on the math of real estate. What folks may not know is the way he runs his business is highly calculated hence I wanted Ryan on the show to share: from leaving his job as a mechanic to be a full time investor, to hiring several full time staff, to scaling up his business to around a dozen or more property acquisitions per year.  Properties including multi-family, in fill development, tiny homes, coach houses, and vertically split duplexes. Ryan’s has a great business I think many could model how to build and scale their own businesses so without further ado, I give you Ryan Carr.

This week’s guest is friend, real estate client, Stock Hacker, iWIN Member Karen Cumming You may remember Karen Cumming from the decade she spent as a television reporter at CH-tv - a station based in Hamilton that also serves Niagara and the GTA.  Years before that, she worked as a radio newscaster and talk show producer everywhere from Hamilton to Toronto to Montreal with CHUM Radio and Corus.   There’s a good chance you may have heard her name thanks to something that has nothing to do with media, though, and everything to do with space. A project, in fact, that is literally “out of this world”. Karen is one of what’s known as “The Mars 100” - 100 people from around the world who have made it to the final round of astronaut selection in a legitimate mission to colonise the red planet with a company out of the Netherlands known as Mars One.  Long before her space adventures, Karen became involved in real estate investing back in 2008.  You remember - the year the markets tanked. The year “the experts” would

Today’s guest is Chris “The Captain” Hook, our friend and client since he met him back in 2012 when started investing in real estate.  His journey in Real Estate Investing began by being fear stricken at purchasing a Stoney Creek Townhouse for $214,000 because it would only cash flow $100-$200.  Fast forward to today and this same townhouse is selling for $399,000. The moral of the story, don’t be stricken by fear as it will cost you. Since then he has tried several different real estate investment strategies, such as: RTO, flipping, regular buy and hold, legal second suites and student rentals.  His current portfolio consists of 2 legal duplexes and 1 in the final stages of being converted. Real Estate has allowed his wife to stay home and raise the kids, while trying to start a business of her own. As he looks to continue to grow his portfolio through joint ventures and one day getting involved in a development opportunity, he is also looking at alternate ways to generate income with the ultimate goal of be

Speaking of successful clients we have Kaush Nanubhai returning to the podcast.  When we first met Kaush years ago, he had a full time job in Toronto and was stuck in analysis paralysis for close to two years before buying his 3rd investment property after a long hiatus from buying two condos in downtown Toronto.  Fast forward to today, he’s quit his day job and gone full time real estate investor and here to share about the transition to full time investor and his latest project: an infill development where he bought a house, renovated the basement for a legal basement apartment then severed half of the lot to build on it a modular home that took only 30 days to deliver.  The house is currently being finished on the inside including adding a basement apartment. This basement apartment strategy sure is popular!! Without further ado, I give you Kaush Nanubhai.

Elizabeth is a friend, Real estate investor for 15 years, specializing in Buy, Rent and Hold, Rent to Own and Flipping strategies.  Legacy Trainer for 8 years, Investment Coach for 4 years, Founder of Sandstone Property Management (Kirkland Lake), Member of the Executive Advisory Council for Ontario Landlords Watch

On to this week’s guest, he’s an old friend from REIN and his name is Ming Lim.  He’s a real estate developer, investor in Waterloo and Toronto, Realtor, smart guy who just left his full time job to be in real estate full time.  I know a lot of you out there are looking for a path out of your full time job and Ming is here to share his along with how he’s able to cash flow in Toronto. Ming and his friends are also hosting a conference that’s coming up really soon: February 1st and he’s here to share about that too. Details are in the show notes so go check them out. Website is www.volitionprop.com/quickstart

This week’s guest knows all about maximizing return on investment and just as important return on time.  John is an old friend, a very successful part time investor in Hamilton and the Niagara Region as he has a full time job in Toronto that he loves.  This recording was originally done in 2017 and is the #1 downloaded episode of all time for this show. For those who want real estate as a side hustle, that’s totally fine. So without further ado, I give you John Roumanis.

On to this week’s show!! We have a special guest in Evelyn Lamarsh.  Evelyn who was on stage in front of almost 1,600 at the Wealth Hacker Conference and one of my first clients emailed me this morning: "Hey Erwin, Just for fun I keep track of my total rents paid over the years. As of this year, tenants have happily paid me over one million dollars in gross rents!

This week’s guest is my friend Andrew Hines and this is a great episode. We talk about developing real estate and where the development market is going, high end student rentals, how Andrew didn’t have to invest in disaster properties to receive great price  appreciation, the importance of having a great mentor, borrowing private money to invest with. Again, a great episode.   Andrew Hines is a real estate investor from Burlington Ontario and he's primarily invested in London Ontario. As of the time of publishing this interview Andrew has a approximately $4,000,000 in real estate holdings and is the host of The Andrew Hines Real Estate Investing Podcast. Andrew advocates the use of the BRRRR method to achieve financial independence and he has become quite proficient in construction management, building and development due to his value-add approach to real estate investing. Andrew owns several companies, including a construction general contractor, and has built out multiple investment property units in Southw

On to this week’s show! We have a very special guest in Derek Foster of Ottawa, Ontario.  He’s happily married with eight kids. Derek jokes it’s because Derek doesn’t have a regular job and neither does his wife so they’re home a lot hence the eight kids.  Derek is a six time best selling author and my favourite book of his is Money For Nothing And Your Stocks For Free because he introduces his strategy for option selling. If you’re new to investing in the stock market, I recommend you read Derek’s books as they are written at an introductory level for a grade schooler. I wish I’d read these books when I was younger as I’d be further ahead. Anyways, I’m a big fan of Derek and it’s not easy to get him as a guest so I bought of bunch of his books to get his attention that I’ll be giving away to iWIN members.  Derek explains on this show how his strategy worked, the mistakes he made and his biggest wins. How he lost 75% of his savings before finally getting himself properly educated.   For anyone who thinks stoc

There’s so much going through our heads in the last 48 hours. As excited as it was for us on Saturday at the Wealth Hacker Conference, we didn’t start out that way. Our journey started off around the time when Cherry’s grandma passed away. A small idea was planted by Maryanne Gillespie, Erwin’s coach, to host free classes to share the idea of building long-term wealth through real estate investment. We discussed and we brainstormed, nothing really firmed up and Cherry took off to Hong Kong to attend her grandma’s funeral. When Cherry arrived at Hong Kong after her 16-hour flight, Erwin already recruited a bunch of his friends, most of them are real estate experts, to join him on hosting an all-day educational event. Talking about taking action, I’ve never wasted time to take action! That was the beginning of Wealth Hacker Conference. In February, we attended 10X Growth Con at Marlins Park Miami, part of the 32,000 people who attended the event. We were completely blown away by the 10X philosophy, but we had l

Hello Wealth hackers!! What a week!! Fresh off Thanksgiving so it’s already a short week and I took a 6am flight to Miami, Florida on Tuesday for my meetings with Grant Cardone and Steve Spray at Cardone Enterprises.  Honestly, I don’t usually book my own flights, Cherry usually does or my travel agent but being ultra frugal at times can cost me in different ways than money and this time it did. Getting up at 2am for a 6am flight really cost me a lot of energy on Tuesday so let that be a lesson learned for next time. Hotel check in time is not until 3pm anyways so arriving at noon wearing in a suit jacket in humid, 28 degree celsius weather while dragging luggage with me is hardly practical… Thankfully, I was able to check in early, Thank you Courtyard Marriot, at noon, I felt like crap so I had a nap and did some work. Till my 3pm meeting with my videographer Dorian Nash. Dorian is a good guy, 25 years old from Michigan and moved down to Miami to get out of his comfort zone, make more money to pay off his st

Here’s a quick update from these parts, my stock option selling is going great, my realized return is $550 and I’ve collected $1,100 in cash.  In bigger news, my AirBnb is now sold, fully furnished and we close in just a few days! I can’t wait to have that capital back so I may trade more stock options!  The plan is to increase my bank roll into six figures and take it from there. The last six weeks have been amazing for myself and our group of 70 stock hackers. With each day that passes, we have more investors reporting in their first thousand dollars in profits.  Several have a couple thousand, my friend Monica reported 10% in returns in just six weeks. That’s the high number for the group thus far and just to clarify, those are absolute numbers not annualized and the last few weeks have been quite good for the market… let’s see how long the stock market holds up. In even bigger news, we’re about to pass 1,200 in ticket sales for our Wealth Hacker Conference.  I’m realizing I don’t mention often how many ti

Hello Wealth Hackers!!  Welcome to the truth about real estate investing show and we have a special guest in Grant Cardone this week.  If you’re not familiar with Grant, he is the bestselling author of The 10X Rule and If You’re Not First, You’re Last as well as a sales trainer, speaker, and entrepreneur who has worked in real estate and the auto industry. Grant Cardone is a real estate mogul who built his $1.2 Billion portfolio of multifamily properties from scratch. Moreover he was named the #1 marketer to watch in 2017 by Forbes Magazine. You know that saying how you can judge someone by how they speak to the secretary? Well you should see Grant. He definitely leads from the front and I can see it in his people who work with him that he’s well liked. Grant will say people only like him because he makes them money and he’s definitely charismatic, funny, and witty. Other than hanging out with Grant, I was hanging out with one of Grant’s lieutenants in Steve Spray, he’s the host of Cardone University’s Master

Hello and welcome to the Oliver Manalese show with your guest Erwin Szeto. LOL. This episode is something different.  My old friend Oliver Manalese, one of the most successful rent to own investors I know asked me to be his first return guest on his show.  Oliver is a good guy, his business is to coach people through their problems, many self inflicted. I joked with Oliver when booking our interview, I told him “you’d be losing you S&$% with me if I was your client” I know my coach already is. LOL. Anyway, the tables are turned today, Oliver has known me for years, since 2008’ish so it’s cool to be interviewed by an old friend who will ask those next level deep questions. Without further ado, I give you some guy, he’s a husband and dad trying to figure out the most efficient path to financial peace and to make his kids proud.  

Hello Wealth Hackers!! Welcome to the Truth About Real Estate Show!! If you’ve ever felt like an underdog or that project or investment you wanted to start looks insurmountable then please just think of this podcast. Everyone and everything starts from the bottom. If you did me the displeasure of listening to the first few episodes of this show, you know how bad it was.  I was nervous like heck, I spent hours to prepare and produce the show as part of a six episode experiment. I stuttered more than usual. I like to experiment, a test, so if a project fails, you move on to the next thing, learn lessons and move forward. I knew from the beginning, I wouldn’t be the most well spoken, our music is well, something I put together on GarageBand, our audio quality won’t be the best as my guests are hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away plus driving is just a time vampire. I’m not sure what happened in the last month but we’ve had an overwhelming inflow of positive feedback.  Shout out to Jody Fleck, you’re ema

On to this week’s show which has been a year in the making! Rachel Oliver is an award-winning investor and co-host of Mothers of Real Estate TV Show. After 20 years in the corporate world, Rachel retired from the rat race to spend more time with her family and invest in Rent to Own properties. Today, she is affectionately known as the “cashflow queen” because she helps investors profit with Rent to Own properties — without headaches of being a landlord. She is also the author of an Amazon best-selling book Rent to Own Essential Guide for Homebuyers. Together with her husband (Mr. No), Rachel owns and operates Clover Properties, one of the most reputable Rent to Own companies in Ontario. Connect with Rachel at Rachel@RethinkRentals.com Host notes: pay special attention to husband Mr. NO Neil Oliver’s role and how Rachel gets her leads, and their qualifying criteria. The Oliver’s are extremely good at what they do

This week’s guest is a real estate investor who received media attention east of Toronto. Alex Kouramanis is real estate investor from Toronto, specializing in the Wholesale and Flipping strategies in markets throughout Ontario. He has been investing for over 6 years, with the last 2 years being full time. In addition to investing, he is an online educator on Udemy and Skillshare, teaching Real Estate Investment, Negotiation and Personal Finance. Alex also co-hosts the monthly meetup TREIA, the Toronto Real Estate Investors Association with his friend and partner Luc Boiron.

“Christian Szpilfogel started as a hobby investor in 2005 in the Ottawa area and, with Chaunei Chan, converted the hobby into a full time business in 2017. Originally they would acquire cash-flowing Multi Unit Residential (MUR) buildings and ride the market but this has been refined into a more focused forced appreciation strategy including MUR renovations, expansions and new builds. Their early days taught them the basics of property management and as their portfolio grew they have become much more sophisticated in the management of their properties and the more intricate aspects of tenant management, especially when they pick up distressed assets with troubled tenancies. They have applied a number sophisticated methods in property acquisition, advanced financing and credit techniques, property management and tenant management. While they predominantly focus on MURs they also have about 25% of their holdings in commercial units. Christian enjoys giving back to the community and is an active participant in va

Speaking of short term rentals, Mr Sve Pavic uses AirBnb as part of his repertoire in his rental hacking.  He is the CEO of RentalHacker.com and LUX Rentals. Sve’s a young man who’s already spent an extended period of time in Costa Rica with wife and young daughter while operating his rental portfolio from there.  What’s interesting about Sve’s story is how he’s implemented several strategies: rooming house, AirBnb, legal suites, mini hotel and he’s getting great rent by pushing the envelope with just a small number of properties. I think Sve’s story should give a lot of young people and those just starting out a lot of hope. Plus his use of automation in his management is impressive.  Get those pens and notepads ready! Without further ado, I give you Sve Pavic