Laurel: We now have the women's panel and I'm not hosting. I'm just going to introduce the host. Danielle Chaison is a fabulous person. You've seen her before at a lot of our events. She does support The REITE Club and she's one of our ambassadors. Thank you, Danielle. I know you're going to do a great job. She's known for her work in residential redevelopment including converting legal secondary suites. She's got a background in construction. I know you've probably seen some of her presentations. She actually manages the construction, and I would not want to be in one of the trades and one of her jobs.
Seriously, she really cracks the whip. She's an experienced landlord. She is a certified real estate agent. She's a great REITE ambassador. Danielle, come on up. Now, I'm going to introduce our panelists. Jessica Buchta has completed 50 million plus in real estate deals by the age of 30 while working full time as a lawyer in the energy sector. We got some really powerful people up here known as the Airbnb Queen. Jess specializes in luxury condo, cottage rentals, and high end long-term rental properties across Ontario utilizing the BRRRR strategy.
How many of you know the BRRRR strategy? Buy, Renovate, Rent, Refinance, Repeat. She began her real estate investing journey of the fix and flips before moving on to run a wholesaling business, purchasing off market undervalued properties with her husband, Luc whom we're going to hear from this afternoon. Her current focus is purchasing off-market multi-family properties and she's an avid traveler, which is close to my heart.
Sarah Eder, come on up. Sarah is a full-time real estate investor and owner of Sarah Eder investors. I've gotten to know Sarah quite a bit over the last little while because she's been helping us with our social media. Sarah was an Olympic athlete. She's a really cool lady. The last few years she's gone from the corporate world to multi-million dollar investor, all without using any of her own money.
We'd like to hear that she specializes in joint ventures and loves providing value for her partners. Her portfolio consists of large multi-family properties student and more recently, large conversions and developments. She's really passionate about educating other investors. Every time I talk to Sarah, I just go, you said what? Yeah how many properties now? That's amazing. Thank you Sarah for being here.
Next, Sarah Larbi who is one of our founders. She takes the mystery out of a homeownership for people who thought real estate investing was going to be out of reach and Sarah and her spouse, Matt, had no money to rent or to buy properties. They had no money to their name a few short years ago. And through what she's done, they have accumulated many properties. She's been featured in the Toronto star, 10, 10 news talk radio, the Canadian real estate wealth magazine, various podcasts, and come on The REITE Club podcast. She also has her own podcast and she was also an invited speaker at the 2018 Canadian real estate investor forum. Thank you, Sarah.
It's great to have you up, Jen Rector, come on up. Jen and Michael Rector of WProperties, personify the word teamwork by growing an 11 property portfolio. A married couple while still raising two young girls. They started down an investment journey, buying only newly built homes in Milton, and Gwelf; however they've recognized the change in the market and they're focusing their attention on an additional strategy, creating legal secondary suites in Hamilton. Michael and Jen loved the BRRRR philosophy as it creates passive income for their investors through forced appreciation.
We have Susan White Livermore. The millionaire mom, think it, build it, live it. In just 20 months, Susan purchased properties, earning her the newcomer of the year award from the Canadian real estate wealth magazine. That following year in 2012, she won the award for top player from the real estate investment network.
In 2013, she expanded to Calgary. Since 2014 has been rapidly expanding her unique empire, focusing primarily on building legal suites, coaching and speaking. You know what? We've got some powerful real estate investors up here, and Danielle, I'm going to let you take it away.
Danielle Chaison: Thank you very much. Like Laurel said, I am an ambassador for The REITE Club and that's because I truly support them, which it's easy to do when they do something so fantastic, which is to educate all of us. Would you agree with that? Let's give a big hand to The REITE Club for putting on this event for us.
We're going to get started with this fantastic powerhouse panel of women. I'm going to grab my questions because remembering eight questions was really tough for me. I got my cheat sheet. We're going to start off with getting to know them a little bit. When we first started the day, there were a lot of people here who hadn't yet started in real estate who wanted to get started in real estate. We're going to find out how these girls got started. Sarah Eder, if you want to get started, tell us how you got started in real estate. What strategy did you pick and why?
Sarah Eder: I got started in real estate about three years ago. It was a fluke. I was transitioning out of my career as an Olympic athlete and needed a part-time job. I actually got a job at a property management company. They also focused on investments and I thought, wow, this is a really interesting career. I got a lot of education. I decided because we are a long-term buy and hold property management company. I was really passionate about buy and hold. I started off small. I did a student rental in Brantford, Ontario, and then from there just transitioned into smaller buy and hold and multi-families.
Danielle Chaison: Awesome. Sarah Larbi?
Sarah Larbi: I started in 2013 after realizing that I had no assets and even knew what assets and liabilities were. Once we went to see a financial advisor at the bank. I figured out how people become wealthy? Real estate kept coming back over and over. It just seemed like the obvious choice. And then convincing my boyfriend at the time was another challenge. Two years later, we bought our first one. We got started with the cheapest thing that we can find. It was a $129,000 little tiny house. We still actually own it to this day. But we put his sister in there as our first tenant because he was petrified of having bad tenants and a tenant that trashes a place that doesn't pay.
She was the worst one. She trashed the place and she always needed extra time where you learned a lot from that but luckily, we asked her to leave and she left and actually it was on Matt McKeever's YouTube show. We have a great tenant in there and he's paying $1,425, bought that for $129,000. Didn't know what the rent was back in the day. We're like 800 bucks and she was like, sure. Don't do that, look at market rents.
Danielle Chaison: I was going to follow up with a question like, would you rent a family again?
Sarah Larbi: No.
Danielle Chaison: Maybe if you take nothing else from today, that might be that's it. That's all you need. Susan?
Susan: I got started in real estate. I've watched my younger brother of 6 years and sick of heading into the second year of university. He decided he was going to buy a house and I'm thinking to myself, okay, kid, you've got no rent or you've got no job. You've got no credit. You have money. In fact, I think the last time we checked you're about $20,000 in debt.
He didn't know what it was called at the time, but he went out in front of the joint venture partner and sure enough, he got the house without rent or with all those things missing. That property for five years and made a hundred thousand dollars. I remember thinking to myself, okay, this kid can do it. I have really no excuse for why I can't do it. He sold that. We immediately went together and bought student properties behind Georgian College.
Danielle Chaison: The takeaway from that is, you don't need money to get started.
You don't have an excuse. #NoExcuses The REITE Club. Jess?
Jessica: My real estate investing journey started a little late. I remember when I was 18, I tried to get a mortgage, but I was in school. I had absolutely no income coming in and a lot of expenses. I was told absolutely not. I stayed in university for nine years. I was a student for a while. Throughout that whole time, I thought I couldn't qualify for mortgages, I couldn't buy properties. A lesson learned now. There's so many ways to do it. I wish I had known what I do now coming from The REITE Club.
All the other information and the best information I had probably could have started earlier. It started a bit later. It was 2015. I'd finally finished school and I got my first job and I said, great. Now, I can finally qualify for a mortgage. I bought a pre-construction condo that still hasn't even finished now. In 2019 downtown Toronto, in the meantime, I've accumulated 15 doors. It's not even ready for occupancy yet.
Lesson learned on investing in pre-construction, it doesn't happen for like at least five years condos. Pre-construction condos. Yeah. Downtown Toronto. Thanks. That's gone up in value a ton, so that's worked out well. I guess the way I started was I bought this unit cause I finally had a job I could qualify for the mortgage. And I actually started in 2015. I finished school and I said, okay, how can I make some money for real estate investing? Cause I wanted to invest passively, but I needed some money coming in.
I started flipping. My very first flip was 2015 with my husband and we've done like dozens and dozens of flips since. Right now we run a wholesaling company. Our strength is finding off market properties. My kind of specialty that I really focus on is luxury Airbnb cottages. Right now, those are bringing in a ton of income. It's a little more active, but if you have the right systems in place it can almost be considered a bit of a passive investment.
Once you systematize it, have the right people in the right seats to run them for you. And so that's bringing in a lot of active, passive income for me to that. I then use it for investing in a smaller multi-family.
Danielle Chaison: That's awesome. Would you say your limiting beliefs held you back starting in real estate? You thought you needed the perfect opportunity and the perfect environment with the perfect credit score in order to get started, would you call that a limiting belief? Do you guys agree with that? Like why do we always have to wait until we think of the perfect moment? And then you ended up not buying the perfect investment for you essentially, because everything else was perfect. You made the imperfect choice, would you say that's right?
Jessica: Absolutely. I just pulled the trigger. I had been waiting so long. I said, okay, I want to buy something. What can I qualify for? I'm going to go out there and buy something. I've been waiting on the sidelines so long and I talked to one mortgage broker and they said, oh, absolutely not. You need to have income coming in from a full-time job essentially to qualify for a mortgage. I said, okay if I can't qualify for a mortgage, I must not be able to buy real estate.
There's so many other ways to do it. Joint ventures like private financing, so many other ways to invest in real estate that it absolutely was a limiting belief that I didn't know how else to do it. I just look at the traditional route and kind of limited myself with those beliefs.
Danielle Chaison: Thankfully, we all know better. Jen?
Jen: My husband Michael and I got into real estate a little bit by accident. Mike had come home from a seminar one time and he was so excited about this real estate investing idea. I come from a very traditional background of stocks, mutual funds, and I just went, that sounds great whenever doing that. We actually ended up renting out one of his first bachelor pads he had lived in and it was going really well.
We had our first daughter and we sat down with the bank and the bank's okay, you have a kid, you have to buy RRSPs. That's the rule. After we had the presentation, the lady had left and I turned to Mike and I said, aren't we making better returns with the rental? He was like, yeah. And I'm like, wouldn't it be so funny if we buy a three month old baby, a house in Milton? Ha and then we did.
We actually purchased all of the original rental properties as new builds. We would go out, go to the builder, put down your deposit, wait a year to 18 months, close the property and then rent them out. We bought our first, a daughter house. 18 months later, we had our second daughter. We had to buy her house as well.
It became this joke where we were just like, okay, we'll just get one more property or we're like, okay, it's actually not as bad as the media makes it sound. Okay we'll get just one more again. And then 15 units later, we're like not a hobby, but we definitely started out with the new builds because of our lifestyle.
We had newborns, pregnancy. We wanted something very hands off, something that attracted a good tenant profile. But now, obviously within the last year, the market has changed. Pricing has obviously changed for new builds. Nobody wants to wait, how many years? Five years, minimum to close. Now, we're getting into the legal secondary suite conversions we've 4 for this year already on Hampton mountain.
Danielle Chaison: What I'm hearing, do you guys see it or hear it as well? What's important is they all start it in an imperfect situation. They didn't wait. We all do it. We all waited longer than we would've liked, but eventually just got to pull the trigger. The environment, situation is going to be perfect. Even the strategy choose who's going to be perfect. But each one of them said that they went and got educated, they got educated and then they pulled the trigger.
You just need to know a little bit to get started, and then you're going to make a lot of mistakes and that's how you're going to get out there and do it and then move on to the next. The next time it's going to be better. What we're going to talk about, just so that everybody who wants to get into real estate or is already starting out in real estate. We want to make sure that you do it with your eyes wide open.
We're going to talk about the challenges. We want to know what challenges you encountered in real estate. If you want to give the mic to Sarah, we'll start with Sarah Larbi. If you could tell us some of the challenges that you encountered being a real estate investor that you can help all of us be able to see when we get into it.
Sarah Larbi: I think the main one that comes to mind right away is just the financing piece and there is a huge benefit to not going directly to your bank because a lot of new investors just think that the banks are the only options and really they're not, if you work with a mortgage broker, it doesn't cost you money upfront unless they're referring you to a banker or whatnot, or a lender that doesn't pay them. They are going to help you scale.
Right now, I've got nine total properties, 11 doors still qualifying for my own because I had to actually untangle the original mess. I went to TD and they wanted 25% for the second rental. They wanted like 35 for the third rental. And then I decided, okay, I should probably not just go right to the bank. And then for many other reasons as well, if you go to bank shopping and you go from one to the other, they're pulling your credit every single time. It's going to actually ding it.
If you just go to the one person, she's going to actually be able to use that same report that they pulled once, but also they have a lot more connections. Everybody has a certain limit to what they can do with each lender or each lender will look at different things. Keep that top of mind all the time.
I just need to have that person on my team. I think that's the first thing I would say. If you're looking at scaling, if you're looking at getting one property, you just go wherever it doesn't matter. But if you're actually looking at scaling, you need to do it from the start and like a plan. I would say one of the big things obviously is to have a team in place, but your mortgage broker by your side is going to be a huge asset.
Danielle Chaison: That's great feedback for sure. Jess?
Jessica: Something Sarah touched on, that I wanted to expand on a little, is having the right team in place. And that for me was a huge area of struggle that I didn't even really realize at the beginning was an area of struggles. I didn't know what I was missing out on the same things with me going forward. It's knowing what you don't know yet.
For me, the big thing was having the right people in the right seats. I started off with one mortgage broker. They were fine, but then going out, meeting new people, making new connections, you realize, hey, there are people that really specialize in real estate investor focused products. Having a team in place for. My long-term hold. I then learned, okay, for the Airbnb rentals. When I moved into that space, I needed a bit of a different team. I need a maintenance team on site. I need cleaners on site. I need a local handyman who can run over and fix something.
If something breaks at the house at a weird hour, like yesterday, we had a huge power outage. Power was out. Thankfully, I have my cleaning crew on location to bring extra comforters, pillows, whatever anyone that's got. The guests really needed that to get through the night because there was a huge storm.
It's having the people in place really that makes the big difference because I still work a full-time job as a lawyer day by day. And so for me, I was trying to do everything myself. And after a while you realize you really need other people to help you out on this journey because sure you can do it all yourself, but it's really limiting in terms of how many properties you can have, how much effort you can spend on each property.
Once I had a team for one Airbnb, I then bought another area and was right down the street. I had the same team managing both. It's those economies of scale that you create and then going onto my third and fourth, now I know what kind of team I need in place as a lot of it's trial and error.
I had to fire a couple of people in the team, find new ones, but I always say, hire slow fire fast. Another lesson I've learned. For me, it's really been having a strong team to support me so that I can be the best I can and add the highest level of value that I can provide. I'm not a contractor, I can't build things, but I have a really good team of contractors that I rely on.
Danielle Chaison: That's awesome. Susan?
Susan: I think for me, the challenge was recognizing what I was good at and what I wasn't good at. I tried to do my own property management for a lengthy period of time and it was great until I hit that tenant from hell. And this particular tenant not only did we go to the landlord tenant board, but we ended up going to superior court and none of my colleagues had gone to superior court.
I had no idea what I was in for. I went to superior court twice with him, and then after that, it was like I'm too emotionally involved. I ended up bringing in a property manager and I started just with that particular property within six months. I offered this guy money to move out within six months. This guy was moving out and I was fighting him for two years. It was recognizing that stepping away from your business sometimes is a good thing and recognizing what you're good at.
Danielle Chaison: Awesome. Sarah Eder?
Sarah Eder: I would say that my biggest challenge was scaling, capital and financing similar to Jess' story. I was in a lot of debt, my athletic career, as amazing as it was, did not pay the bills very well. I actually went into a ton of debt. It was like a labor of love, more than of profits. By the time I turned 27, I'm tired and with almost nothing to my name, but a lot of debt. When I started to get into real estate, I was turned away by every bank. I had poor credit, too much debt, and almost no income.
I didn't want to give up. I saw freedom through real estate investing. It was a challenge to get started because nobody believed in joint ventures. Nobody in my circle knew what a joint venture was. My family thought I was crazy. This whole idea of a 50, 50 split concept where I was putting no cash into any deals. They were like, you're crazy. Nobody's going to do that. You don't have any properties. You don't even own a principal resident. But I refuse to give up, I had to persevere against a ton of challenges. I had to educate myself. I had to become an expert and really teach myself how to invest in real estate, having owned no properties of my own.
I would say that's definitely a huge challenge. If you're getting started and you have no financing, you don't really have a lot of capital. You have to get over those hurdles if you want to scale. And for me, I just did the best I could. So, really educating myself becomes valuable to my partners. And then eventually once I got over the first couple of properties, it took on a life of its own and it got easier from there, but it's definitely a big challenge.
Jen: We all can agree. There's so many challenges in real estate. I could say working with your husband's because it's not here today. I can say that. Foundation issues, huge challenge, but at the end of the day, the biggest challenge I found with doing real estate was time. Doing real estate is an all encompassing time beast. We can let it take over our lives very easily. There's always properties to look at.
There's always trades. We have to be sourcing. There is always something. Anytime we're doing dishes, we're listening to podcasts. Anytime we're on the computer, we're talking to tenants, we're looking for off market deals. If we allow it, real estate can easily take over your life. I found this in my case that every second was always real estate.
There's sometimes we actually have to step back from real estate and enjoy the fruits of it, whether it's spending time with your kids, whether it's going, I really want this one. Are we going to boat for six months? Who does not want that? But we all have to sometimes take a breath and step back from real estate, whether it's delegating, whether it's getting a partner, whether it's getting a JV partner, anything like that, just to enjoy it. Real estate can take over our lives very easily if we let it. That is a huge challenge. I found it by letting go of it.. Stepping back and joining my children's time with my husband, things like that.
Danielle Chaison: I think that's really important because we need to balance our lives and this real estate becomes a passion for all of us, and we're just so driven and want to be successful. We don't want to fall flat on our face so that we let it take over our lives a little bit. In fact, Jen. Can I go a little bit personal with you? I happen to know Jen and Mike very well. They have a rule now that when they go to bed, there is no real estate in the bedroom. That is a rule and in fact, I hear it's a great rule to have.
Jen: 10:30, you're not allowed to talk about real estate. We're not allowed to talk about real estate in the bathroom because if I have to talk mortgage rates over the shower door again, somebody is going to die. I was like, you need to make friends. Networking is important.
Danielle Chaison: Thanks Jen, cause now he calls me at 10:30.
Jen: I was like, oh look, 10:29 you've got one more minute, honey.
Danielle Chaison: Anyway, there's a lot of challenges. Would you say that the challenges that we experienced can be really broad and vast? Would we agree to that? Every time would you guys agree on the panel that every time you hit a challenge, whether it was dealing with a bad tenant, whether it was dealing with family issues, whether it was trying to get financing or find the right power team, because it's not easy firing people. It is really not easy firing people because then you gotta be the bad guy. But every time would you agree that you grow as an investor? Success comes from failure.
Don't be afraid to fail. The challenges will make you better at what you do and expect them to embrace them. And the biggest issue is what are you going to learn from it? Would you agree, like all of us on the stage when we fail, we go, okay, wait a minute. What can I do differently next time? And that's how you get over your challenges. Two years, you're like, what am I going to do differently? Because what I'm doing right now, isn't working. Yes, embrace them, be ready for them.
We can't go through all the challenges today, but you're going to get them, expect them. And when you're expecting them, then it's not such a surprise when they come and it's okay. I want to know, we talked about, the power team and the financing and how those things are important for our business. But I want to ask you ladies who or what, and one thing that you would attribute that was most powerful in your success? Who's going to go first? Susan?
Susan: Without a doubt. It's been other investors. No question, just connecting with people that can relate to you because you step out in this real world of real estate investing and 98% of the people that you talk to, you don't know what you're talking about, aren't interested. My entire friend group sorta changed when I went into real estate investing full time.
My friends became other investors and they were like, there isn't anything. Eventually, if you hang out with enough seasoned people that someone hasn't gone through, that you can connect with and say, okay, how did you deal with this? How would you do it differently this time? So that was huge for me.
Danielle Chaison: Your network is your net worth. Sarah Eder?
Sarah Eder: Mine is actually very similar to Susan's. I would say I'm still a pretty new investor. I've only been in this for three years and The REITE Club was actually one of the very first networking events I attended regularly. Back in those days, when I was unsure of whether joint ventures were actually a thing. Could I really convince people to do this? And like I said before, my family, my friends, my circle thought I was insane and coming into a room like this was amazing.
I became really close with a lot of investors that had hundreds of doors doing exactly what I wanted to do. It really inspired me and I could bounce ideas off of them when I was struggling to answer my questions. I used to go for coffee with people probably in this room all the time just to pick their brains and say, hey, I'm thinking about this. What do you think? And rather than shoot me down and they give me inspiration, they gave me advice and that really gave me the courage to just keep going, when it seemed really tough.
Danielle Chaison: I don't understand why we take advice from people who haven't done it. Who's done that before? I've done it. We take advice from people investing in real estate, who rent. Does that make any sense to you? We take advice from people who own their own homes. That's great, but they've refinanced their homes over and over again to satisfy debts, bad debts that they keep incurring. Jessica?
Jen: I can't copy everybody. I'm going to say, be very careful who partner you pick whether it's your spouse or your business partner, make sure that your partner is the one that's going to support you, encourage you. I'm so blessed that my husband is the most supportive guy in the world and he sees things in me that I don't see myself. Strive me to be not only a better person, a better business person, but also a better mom. And reminds me sometimes yes, real estate is hard sometimes and we do hit these walls, but he always encourages me to be, you're doing this for the girls.
The girls are looking up to you as a role model. They're looking up to you as there's unfortunately not a lot of women in real estate. I want my daughters to see this. This is what I want them to grow up and achieve. I would say my husband is definitely, probably one of my biggest sports in this.
Danielle Chaison: Amazing. Actually Mike is the same way with her. You know what, actually, you probably don't know this because you never hear what other people say about you. But Mike talks about you all the time to me and he says the same. It's a two way street. You guys got something really fantastic going on. Sarah Larbi?
Sarah Larbi: The biggest thing is just the understanding that there's like one perfect deal. Get that feeling of being uncomfortable and know that enough and that you've networked enough that you can get through it and then just do it. I think that's the thing that, for me, is better than perfect. I heard that, I think at one of the last meetings and I would write. I have something that is good then, like that perfect deal. And if I look back at it and I wouldn't have bought those properties, I would not be where I am today. And they were not perfect, but they're really damn good right now.
And damn good right now in five years from now, if you're looking at a property and you're like, oh, like this is probably like $10,000 in five years from now will not mean really anything. Let's face it. There's going to be a mortgage paid down. There's going to be appreciation. If you pay $10,000 more than you really want you now. So what?
Danielle Chaison: Absolutely. I spent a lot of time. I wasted two years guys because I wanted perfection until one of my coaches told me done is better than perfect. And I had to practice it to believe it. What you need to do is you need to practice the 80 20 rule. If you practice the 80 20 rule, you will never fail. You get 80% of where you need to be, and don't worry about the rest, cause you'll figure out the rest and then get moving because success doesn't come from knowledge. We're here to learn how to succeed, but knowledge comes from implementation. Would you agree?
That's why we're here, but you need to implement it in order to make it work. If you think it needs to be perfect, guess what? You're going to paralyze yourself. It's called paralysis by analysis. Done is better than perfect. Will always get you there. It'll get you unstuck. It worked for me, and worked for my students. Make sure you get that ingrained in your head. Congrats. I'm glad that it works. We got Jess that hasn't answered.
Jessica: I think I'm thinking very much along the same lines of analysis paralysis. An example, my very first property that I bought as a long-term rental hold was in the city of Toronto duplex. It was cash flowing, but 500 bucks a month. I sold it last month. It was a great property, but when I first bought it, I was just looking at cashflow and long-term appreciation and Toronto, and I'm like, okay, this is great. It's a good long-term hold. The value will always be there. It's in the city. But it's appreciated a ton.
I had a lot of equity in that property and I actually sold that very first rental. Yeah, last month it's closing in a couple of days and I'm taking that money and I'm going and investing in two multi-families in Ottawa. And so the big thing for me was if I hadn't made that, if I hadn't pulled the trigger on that first property, it wouldn't have created that value for me to then go and invest in other properties.
That's been a big learning lesson for me is pull the trigger. As long as you run your numbers, the numbers work, go for it. Will it be perfect, potentially not, that's not a perfect property. But I've learned so much in those four or five years since then that I'm now applying all of that and kind of you tweak your tweak, your strategy going forward. That worked then. It's great. Now I have other things I want to work for me, but that allows me to then get into the market and start building equity and getting cash flow for the next project.
Danielle Chaison: That's right cause when you start creating things, when you start making things happen, you will build on that like you're not going to get anywhere if you keep thinking about it. It doesn't need to be perfect. You just have to be right. It has to be okay. It has to make sense. It just doesn't have to be as great as you built it up to be in your mind.
The last question that I wanted to go through since there's a lot of people here who want to get started or getting started, I want everybody to go through. We'll go down the panel. I want you to give yourself advice from before you started. What advice would you give yourself?
Susan: From the multi thousand dollar losses, which I've had a few, if they're not as scary for starters, as you think they are, if they happen on your first one. That's a problem. But for me, my scary ones I lost $35,000 to one property and I was taken by a property manager in Calgary for another 35,000. I'm here to tell you're going to be okay. If you stop at that moment and don't learn anything from it then, okay, you lost the opportunity.
If you keep going and learn from that, I actually felt stronger after both of those losses, because I knew exactly what I had done wrong. Don't be afraid of those falls. I've had them. I probably will continue to have them, but just don't be afraid of the fall.
Danielle Chaison: One of the biggest things is when we get into trouble, we don't ask. My question, I want to follow up with that. Did you ask for help?
Susan: Of course like when something happens, your mind goes into resource mode. How would I handle this? Who's gone through this and who can give me some guidance and reassure me what's going to happen? Within 24 hours with the property manager from Calgary, that took me for $35,000. Within 24 hours, I had a new property manager going to get the keys from the old property manager and had a conversation with all of my tenants out there, which at the time I had 10 it's still do. All because I had a contact out there that said, Hey, you know what? Use this guy. And within 24 hours, my fear went from way down here. I still had lost the money, but I had learned so much.
Danielle Chaison: Nice.
Jen: There's two things I'd probably say to my younger, more well arrested, childless me. Listen to your husband. He's not as crazy as you think, he is in the moment. You don't have to know everything. Even when you think something a hundred percent, you're going to learn, you're actually missing a lot of the pieces, learn or figure out a strategy to probably like 75% and then just do it because everybody's saying you're going to learn so much more by doing it than spending all that time.
Researching, analysis paralysis, all those things. I'm such a perfectionist that I wanted to know everything about it. And realistically, that's never gonna help happen guys. Just figure out your strategy, 75% knowledge on it. And just do it.
Danielle Chaison: Sarah Larbi?
Sarah Larbi: I think for me, when I first started, I was listening to a lot of podcasts, which was awesome. That's where I got a lot of my education, but I come to Canadian specific networking events, I didn't know they existed at the time. I probably would have accelerated my information and my knowledge a lot faster. And then I wouldn't have had to go back and be like, oh, there is no 10 31 exchange in Canada. Like what? And so if you guys don't know what that they are very tax advantaged over there.
We are not as tax advantaged here in comparison, but I would have figured out where the information was. Actually Canadian information ideally comes from but networking is a huge piece because I did not know what any other investors for the longest time. And I was the only person I knew that was investing. And, I'm okay with doing that, but I would have learned a lot more had I created that network of people earlier on.
Sarah Eder: I feel like this is a very common theme amongst everyone, which mine is pretty much going to say to my younger self, just do it. Even though I have a lot of doors to date, I would say 75% of them I purchased this year alone. And that's because I actually had the guts this year to just say, It's fine. I'm just going to go for it. I was putting in offers on properties that I didn't have JV partners lined up for yet, and I funded every single one of them.
If I could go back and tell the first year investor myself to say, hey, it's okay, go out there, put offers in on properties. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just do it and get out there. I could've gone back and told myself to just get started. If right now you're thinking I'm a little scared. I don't know if I should be putting in offers. I don't know if I should be looking at properties, just do it. I've put in offers on so many properties. I've lost a bunch. I've gotten a bunch, but if you're not out there doing it, you're never going to hit, it's like you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. You have to just get out there and start taking shots.
Jessica: I would say to my younger self is go out there, set goals and it sounds cliche, Grant Cardone, but literally that's where I'm at right now is when I first started off, I was like, wow, wouldn't it be great to have one duplex and rent it out and make 500 bucks cash flow a month. That's amazing. Me today, I'd be like, how can I get five in the same area and maximize that growth economies of scale cause you can do it.
I know now that you can do it. And so going back to limiting beliefs is another thing is just getting bigger goals and bigger aspirational targets. If you meet them, great. If you exceed them even better, if you don't meet them, keep working towards it. It's always better to be working towards a bigger, more ambitious goal than meeting really small, tiny goals because that's where real growth happens.
Danielle Chaison: Taking action creates momentum guys, and that's what I'm hearing. That's what I'm hearing on the panel right now. Once you take action and then you just build on that, take more action. Build on that. Take more action. And then it speeds up over time. Does it not? Sarah you've been with 3 years? I've also experienced the same thing with my flips as I go through. I get better and quicker at them.
I want the top three takeaways from this panel. I want to see hands up. Who wants to share a takeaway? Yes, just do it. That's a great takeaway. Yes. What have we got in the back? Make bgger goals, you know why it's okay to go bigger because if you only get halfway there, is that okay? Absolutely. But you'd be happy with half of your goal? Yeah, so, set the bar high. Absolutely. Who else in the back makes mistakes?
Why is it important to make mistakes? Because you learn. Absolutely. Okay, one more bonus. Your network is your net worth. Everybody, repeat after me. Your network is your net worth. And you're in The REITE Club my friends because you are the REITE club. Put your hands together.
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