The Truth About Real Estate Investing... For Canadians

We have my old friend Aaron Moore on the show who is an extremely successful real estate investor, wholesaler and flipper. Aaron and I met monthly to mastermind for three years so I know him well and can verify he’s a nice guy and he’s much more successful than many of the real estate influencers on Instagram. Aaron is the only wholesaler I know who guarantees the purchase from the seller including the time he got caught in the downturn, knew he was going to take a loss and did it anyways. Aaron takes us back to 2008 when he would deliver hundreds of fliers and hang bandit signs, you know those unauthorised sings on traffic lights saying “I Buy Houses.” Soon after successfully cracking the Google SEO and Ads code back in 2010, Aaron’s one of the best at generating leads for off market properties.  Hence he can wholesale 66 properties in a year. Aaron walks us through how he grew his organisation, number of employees, his journey from harder deals to easier for long-term holds, what he thinks of the current ma

We have great guests who just launched their new apartment building REIT, a real estate investment trust. If you don’t know what that is, it’s like a fund where the underlying is a bunch of apartment buildings and regular investors like you and I can own shares in the fund to participate in the investment.  Mike Rockall and Mark Baltazar our guests today are the founders/owners of Peak Multifamily Investments and I’ve known Mike a long time, we met sometime around 2010 as we were members of the same real estate investing network.  I know I talk like an old person because I am but I knew Mike when he was still in college but thanks to hard work, surrounding himself with go-getters, great mentorship he’s been full time in apartment buildings for several years and now co-founder his own REIT. On the show we discuss the journey and get a bit detailed in how and the costs to start a REIT, who they have to hire and partner with to raise capital. We touch on securities regulations which anyone listening who raises c

On to this week’s guest who’s tired of the real estate craze! At least the craze has died down a little with several education companies and coaches having disappeared.  Such is the real estate cycle, weak hands get flushed. We have Dominique Chénard owner of Chenard Wealth who provides managed investments, financial planning, insurance, group benefits, and Accounting Services.  She is CFO of her four rental property business to her husband who serves as COO with a plan to stop growing the portfolio at five properties. Even though Dominique attended a weekend course years ago and hired a coach for two years… well, I’ll allow her to explain how she does not follow the hype of aggressive growth, wants to balance her life, running her own business plus all the non-real estate stuffs she invests in, plus we chat about why she hires an Accountant even though she is one, and how she’s fighting inflation.

We have Matthew Lee and Ming Lim, the owners of a full service real estate business called Volition Properties who happen to host the largest meetup in Toronto and if you can believe it, them and their community successfully invest in Toronto and we’re not talking about condos, we’re mostly talking about small multifamily including significant renovations to add apartments including laneway suites since 2012.  If you’ve been investing the right way in Toronto since 2012, you’re likely rich like these guys and their clients who’ve added collectively over $100 million to their net worth.   Volition offers advisory services, investment realty services, design & renovation AND property management services.  These both also have good size portfolios, wives and young kids.  How do they do it? Let’s find out! If you enjoy the episode, Volition is hosting a meetup Wednesday, May 17th, doors at 6pm on the Danforth. Link in the show notes to register and the keynote speaker is one that’s not to be missed! https://w

Today’s guest Michael Ponte is an old friend of mine, us old guys who’ve been buying properties and REIN members over ten years ago. We’ve known each other and run in the same circles what feels like forever and forever is the perfect time horizon to own real estate.  Michael owns, with partners Apartment buildings across the country: BC, Alberta, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, probably Saskatchewan too. Michael is a Savvy Investor and that’s his social media handle and name of his private Facebook Group with over 5,200 members. Michael being old school, he’s investing successfully in the multifamily apartment building space, has no trouble raising capital and educates others how to do so as well while living in BC but most of his portfolio is out of province.  On today’s show Michael shares how he’s navigating today’s interest rates, how multifamily is fast money, i’m kidding, it’s not. He walks out through the numbers of a couple of apartment buildings including how he found the deal. The different phases and

On to this week’s show! We have Matt Biggley who is doing some very profitable investing in the Windsor, Ontario area now with a portfolio of 31 doors and some waterfront small developments and luxury short term rentals. Key to Matt’s journey are successful partnerships so we spend some time on how to identify strategic, long term partners. Matt Biggley describes himself as a lucky husband; a girl Dad from a family of all boys; a reluctant renovator who once had a chance at an HGTV show; a History teacher once named the Best Teacher in Ontario, but who couldn’t remember names and dates; a top Windsor-Essex based realtor who got his license as a side hustle but has quickly become a top earning agent; and an experienced investor with an Airbnb and 31 long term rental units, who hates flips but is still dumb enough to occasionally do them anyway. Despite telling his wife prior to getting married that he didn’t like renovating, he once lived in 6 “forever” homes (aka “fornever homes”) in 8 years, taking on massiv

On to this week’s show! This week we have Matthew Varga who together with his wife Nikole have several six figure ventures: a YouTube Channel HealthNut Nutrition Inc. with almost 1,000,000 subscribers for which they generate ad revenue, show sponsorships, and an engaged audience to market their ecommerce store towards.   A growing portfolio of real estate investment properties include some that are AirBnb AND Matthew is doing what’s called AirBnb arbitrage which means he’s the long term tenant to other investors then furnishes and operates an AirBnb business in the property to make money to pay the rent and keeps any remaining profits. AirBnb arbitrage can be a great way for newer investors to break into the market but not without risk.  Matthew was kind enough to detail his wish list of features in order to command great rental rates before taking on an AirBnb arbitrage opportunity. Matthew also recently returned from Florida as he nows spends winters there to both avoid our cold winters, goes looking for re

On to this week’s show! Today we have the host of the mega conference the Multifamily Conference, Seth Ferguson, on the show. If you were at the event headlined by Kevin O’Leary last year you know it was a really great one and this year, Seth has been inspired by 10X with headline speakers Grant Cardone and Alex Rodriguez who is best known for his successful baseball career. At one time being Baseball’s highest paid athlete, more recently on television’s Shark Tank and he’s a mega apartment building investor himself. The event will be a big one with somewhere around 2,000 attendees from all over North America expected for a three day event. I’ll have a booth there so please come by and say hi or I’ll see you at one of the evening events or lunch or breakfast. I do enjoy networking and if networking is your thing then you’ll likely want to be at Canada's largest investor conference of the year. Seth here today to share about what it takes to run a successful conference, what one can expect, how there is someth

We have the founder of Property Technology company Viler Lika on the show. He is the founder and CEO of SingleKey and if you haven’t heard of them yet you will want to pay attention to this show as in my experience, they are providing us investors a ton of value at affordable prices. SingleKey is the largest tenant screening service out there with their recent acquisition of Naborly. The majority of the professional investors I know are already using their tenant screening aka credit checking online software as it’s fast, cheap, encrypted, and the reports written in plain english. Even our big local REIT uses SingleKey. Viler is super smart having both degrees in Engineering and MBA from the same Business school I graduated from at Western University in London. On today’s show, Viler shares his journey of starting up a real estate technology business that brought us small investors the same tools the big corporate REIT’s use. SingleKey will even underwriter insurance on the tenant which can be purchased by th

We have Ben Bergen who has acquired 14 properties over a short period of time and has the scars to prove it! Ben is a graduate of one of those many $13,000 per year group coaching programs, spent close to $50,000 and in his words he grew too fast, too soon, ego driven, nearly lost his shirt when he had 3.5 major renovation projects on the go. My observation is if not for Ben’s own sweat, hard work on the tools as he is in construction, he would have ended up bankrupt like some of his coaches and fellow students. In the business world Ben filled both the visionary and integrator role. If his business was Apple, he was both Steve Jobs AND Tim Cook or Steve Wozniak.  As in Jobs could sell big dreams, raise capital but Steve Wozniak had to build the actual computers or Tim Cook had to make the Operations as smooth and efficient as possible. In my study of failed real estate investors, they were incredible at raising capital, their influencer marketing was expert level BUT they could not execute on their vision of

With all the craziness going on it’s nice to have a palate cleanse with go getters like my old friend Amanda Bouck and Marty Gordon. I first met Amanda around ten years ago at Rock Star Real Estate when she was running the day to day as the in house Property Management business. Fast forward ten years she’s managed a team of coaches, created educational content at Keyspire and together with her husband Marty, a licensed carpenter who’s gone from employee in construction to general managing their own property management company and investment portfolio of small multis in Guelph to small apartment buildings in London.  Apparently Marty has free time between all that, their one year old son to coach as a Keyspire coach as well. Hey, I’ll never fault anyone for multiple streams of income ;) Amanda and Marty’s journey from beginner investors in their early 20s to the present, 17 years later, a fair sized portfolio and getting close to buying and building their dream home on large acreage and custom built mansion.

On to the show! I had no idea how many new tax rules we investors have to deal with this year, the Underused Housing Tax is especially concerning as I’ve spoken to many pros out there who don’t understand it either.  What’s worse is the penalty is $5-10k for not filling and a lot of us investors have to complete and submit the Underused Housing forms even though we are an excluded owner thus having no liability. We still have to file the forms though. I’m not an Accountant though but I did invite my lovely wife, Cherry Chan, CPA, CA who happens to be the most in demand Real Estate Accountant speaker to share some of the top tax changes we investors face for 2023. Cherry does break down these same tax tips on her YouTube Channel Real Estate Tax Tips so make sure to subscribe to her channel along with the 10,000 other subscribers. https://www.youtube.com/@RealEstateTaxTips In case you’re curious, yes Cherry is still accepting new clients but not sure for how much longer. admin@cccpa.ca is the email address for

Today we have my friend Saurabh Singhal who is a real estate lawyer and litigation specialist out of Mississauga, Ontario. Saurabh services some of our clients and a whole lot more investors from the general public so he’s seeing first hand the financial difficulties that speculators and private lenders have put themselves into.  Saurabh himself is working on 32 files for power of sale, meaning the borrower is in default and the lender is forcing sale to repay the debt. We also discuss lessons from many 2nd mortgages gone bad. To my 17 listeners, please do extra due diligence out there when vetting partnerships and private lending. There are exit scams going on where gurus are looking to raise capital while already bankrupt or approaching bankruptcy.   At the same time, fear is high and the time to be greedy is good timing. As always, my preference is to invest in assets I control in the markets where I’m an expert and recommend my clients do the same. If these 32 investors in power of sale were to have follo

We have something a little different, a real estate investor with a lot of heart in Melissa Dupuis, we rarely have investors on this show who target those on social assistance but Melissa has with her renovated, repositioned 10 bedroom rooming house. As we don’t have many rooming house investors on this show, we spend some time on the subject in terms of numbers, target tenants, regulations, and of course the numbers: $525k on the buy and after fully renovated, $6,000 plus per month in rent. Melissa is a true sophisticated investor as she’s an avid student and action taker in converting underutilised properties as she’s currently converting a duplex into a triplex to improve cash flow in this rising interest rate environment. As always, real estate investing is a team sport, Melissa has engaged in hiring a coach and has a mentor. Melissa details how she found them and how it worked out. Melissa is also a Property Manager, owner of Athena Property Management Inc servicing Niagara Region, Hamilton and she’s als

Kyle Pearce is a Math teacher and Kindergarten to Grade 12 Math consultant to his local school district in Windsor, co-founded an online learning business for Math professional development. Kyle actively invests in real estate for value and cash flow, stocks and options trades and partners to co-own North Shore Properties that holds 30 units in and around Windsor, Ontario.  Please pay attention to how Kyle and partner Matt divide responsibilities as they have complimentary skills.  Kyle is currently on unpaid leave from teaching to pursue the above business, investing ventures and co-hosting the Invested Teacher Podcast. We get very detailed on Kyle’s most recent acquisition of a 9 plex and the vendor financing and terms. Please enjoy the show!   To Follow Kyle: Podcast: Invested Teacher Podcast - InvestedTeacher.com/apple Web: Invested Teacher Website - InvestedTeacher.com Socials @InvestedTeacher

We have an author, coach, mentor, mom, wife and investor since only 2017 who’s done a lot while keeping her day job. English isn’t even Brooke Shang’s first language as she moved to Canada from Taiwan at age 17. Brooke has done a lot from losing $50,000 on a joint venture in Winnipeg with a now bankrupt partner who drove a Porsche to owning nearly 30 rent to owns, a bunch of duplexes, and focusing more on private lending and building her custom dream home thanks to the profits from tenants buying out the RTO’s and selling other income properties. Brooke is also a leader within the Trust Your Talent Academy like past guests Tim Tsai and Vince Lee.  Brooke’s story is a good one how much one can accomplish in a short period time while keeping the day job and how one’s goals change, e.g. Brooke has hustled and now wants more passive investments.  It all works, one just must decide for themselves what journey they’re on. Please enjoy the show!   To connect with Brooke: Web: www.RealEstateNetworkingQueen.com IG: ht

This week we have Mackenzie Wilson of SingleKey the tenant credit and background check reporting service that recently acquired Naborly. If you haven’t heard of SingleKey… well they are quite popular in the circles I run in and for you new investors, you’re so lucky you don’t have to run credit checks the old way… Mackenzie is a very diligent investor from Calgary, Alberta.  He shares how we went from oil rigs and IT at Telus and left it behind to start an online business in real estate that didn’t go so well but he survived, still owns his three duplexes in Calgary and works at SingleKey as a Director. As you’ll soon tell, Mackenzie is a diligent landlord (one of the most diligent I’ve ever met) and loves to help other landlords in Alberta out as he’s always sharing and educating his peer group of 4,200 Alberta Landlords On today’s show we talk about the difference between commercial and residential in Calgary, Calgary vs. Edmonton.  Of course we talk about tenant screening as it appears to be a passion of M

On to this week’s show! We have something different in that our guest is a successful entrepreneur in the world of Business and not real estate investing, YET. Nick Kindler is the Chapter President of Entrepreneur’s Organization, a private membership of seven figure entrepreneurs that Cherry and I also belong too. As a member of the real estate community, I find learning from entrepreneurs just as helpful as learning from real estate investors to broaden my learning.  I also see all these memberships and masterminds costing $20,000-30,000 or more, I wanted you my 17 listeners to be aware of other masterminds, membership groups and Entrepreneurs Organization is less than $10,000 per year and I’m a big fan. Who better to talk about Entrepreneurship than our very own Chapter President Nick Kindler who also happens to be my client who’s working with team member, Chris “the Captain” Hook to acquire quality investment properties. Nick is here today to share his experience as an EO member, President, his entrepreneu

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Truth About Real Estate, my name is Erwin Szeto, the four time award winning Realtor to investors, host of this podcast, the #81 Business podcast per iTunes, where we focus on bringing you true experts, masters of their craft and we have a great guest for you today in real estate coach and educator Elizabeth Kelly. The term coach has been used lightly these days. I see even folks with 1-2 properties as side hustles call themselves coaches. Elizabeth Kelly has a bit more to her resume than that. Her own property management company hundreds of doors, she was a full time real estate investing educator at Rich Dad Canada having personally taught a couple thousand investors including many of the infuencers and coaches you see today on social media. Today we touch on a couple subjects such as the investment in real estate education and some of the different options out there as there are more than ever but some offer better value than others. Elizabeth shares about her ca

We have Ken Bekendam who is up to many things to generate cash flow and build wealth in real estate.  The best part is Ken is available for hire! One can hire Ken’s company https://legalsecondsuites.com for major renos to your home or investment property including basement apartments and garden suites. Ken and Legal Second Suites has even been in the news representing one of his clients, a mutual friend of ours Alex who happens to be Ukrainian who wants to convert his garage into a garden suite to rent to Ukrainian immigrants but the rich neighbours think the added density of tenants living in a garage will damage the neighbourhood and increase traffic.   Thankfully, with municipalities trending in the right direction to allow for us private investors to create more housing… well I won’t spoil it and let Ken explain to you how the story ends. Rich homeowners vs. rental housing for Ukrainian immigrants…. In today’s show, Ken details what strategy makes up the majority of his portfolio and provides him with the