Dividing and Conquering Tasks for Real Estate Investing Success

Tim Tsai and Rey Salazar

Laurel: Tim Tsai became financially free, twenty-five months after getting his first real estate investing training. Am I correct Tim? You retired at the age of 30. You've built cash-flowing properties in a lot of places in Canada, US and the UK using many strategies and stay here just paying it forward, helping other people get there and doing what they want to do through real estate investing, and through the Trust Your Talent Academy.

Rey, you cut your teeth in the corporate world of sales, winning wars from multinational corporations. There's a good fit, like I could see a really good fit there. After you become an entrepreneur or you leverage your experience teaching and investing to and learning about Robert Kiyosaki's strategies, so good for you. You're a passionate investor and also coach with Rey. Welcome guys. We love the fact that you're customizing your life and you're actually joining us from Hawaii right now.

Tim: Aloha.

Laurel: Just so jealous. Here we go. What's not to love about real estate investing? Let's talk about how you leverage each other's experience? What did you do? Like you've got two different sets of experiences. How did you leverage them?

Tim: I think the first thing that we actually looked at when we saw the acronym here, I think we're very lucky in the sense that our visions of what life should be very much aligned first. From that point on, it was just a matter of figuring out how we're going to get there together and separately all at the same time, if that makes sense. For those couples out there, you already know you have to deal with the daily stresses of being a couple sometimes and you get on each other's nerves and have to work together. Figuring out our relative strengths and weaknesses was one of the first things that we've had to do in order to "understand myself".

Rey: Yes, the website is called, "understand myself". From there, it actually spits out how we can work together, what our strengths and weaknesses are. We actually relied on professionals to let us know how to work together better because as when we first started our journey, we didn't have that. We were just butting heads, bumping up against each other on, this is my territory.

You stay on your side. However, as we got along and as we went through our journey and expanded, we realized, oh, I can do this. However, you're better at that and you're more passionate about that, or you're pretty good about this. However, I love doing this. I'll grow faster at it. That way we did well. We divided everything from tasks to dividing up the world. Tim loves planes. He gets to do the international stuff. I love the dog and my own bed. I get to stay in Canada.

Tim: As a result when we expanded into the US markets and into the UK markets, I was the one spearheading those expansion projects and re focused on staying behind, taking care of stabilizing and continuing to grow our Canadian portfolio. I know we jumped around a little bit. However, it's not our website, by the way, so understanding myself is just one of those tools because I know a lot of us understand the disc profile and the personality type tests. We just could resonate with understanding myself quite a bit. One of the best features for us is the fact that it just tells you as a couple, these are the upsides and downsides and how you can walk around them.

Laurel: Daniel and I, we just butted heads until we figured it out, but honestly, that's what most people do. But you guys went through that process. How long did it take from the beginning until it got to a smoother stage where you weren't crashing all the time?

Tim: I think it probably took us a good minimum 18 months, because we're very lucky in that sense. Like I said, we aligned in our vision, meaning we wanted to free it and we wanted more out of life. We didn't want to just get tied down in Edmonton because right now it's minus 27 there with lots of snow. We're in plus 27 right now wearing shorts. We align on that from right off the bat. What that meant was we got to figure out some extra tools that we didn't have at the time.

We got educated together. That was the challenge because we were all exposed to the same materials, the same teaching, same concept. We had the same mentor. After that, it just felt like we should be doing everything to gather leading up to that point. I think looking back though, that should have been the biggest indicator because a lot of people know now the way we coach and mentor is through this very simple formula.

We like to call Y. Let your Y determine your financial goals, meaning of physical number that we can all understand the universal language that has a dollar sign, and then let that financial goal determine the strategies and markets, and then the properties that you will look into. As a result after butting heads on building processes and systems, our baby strategy for example, is lease options. Commonly known as rent to own something that Alfonso's very familiar with. In the beginning, there's obviously the marketing aspect of it, the leveraging OPM asset aspect of it, and then the negotiating to acquire the properties, all that coming together.

We always had many arguments on how we can speak to our tenant buyers and how we can induce our money partners better and how we manage those expectations and produce reports and all that good stuff. Very quickly we learned that through the SMP process. Why don't we just do this? If we are still focusing on the first two and a half years of our investing career, we focus very much on lease options. However, we were butting heads.

Why don't we say, okay, if we're focusing on the same strategy, then let's divide up different markets or it may be actually in the beginning. The reality is it was deal based. You do one deal. I do another, you do you take on this one? I'll take on the next one. We had that rotation system going and then it got to the point where we were going into more strategies, go into commercials, go into multiunit, apartment buildings and go into private lending, go into fixing.

We started to go, okay, you know what? It doesn't matter what we can now divide based on strategy, a higher level aspect now. If he's focusing on lease options, he can take on BC and Ontario and Alberta. I'm just going to take on a different strategy, even if we're going to be in the same markets.

Rey: The beauty of that system also was because the other person was detected. We can look over each other's work, if you will. Our due diligence, our spreadsheets, and look at it with detached, fresh eyes. Whereas if we were looking at it together, we're very passionate. We're super invested. It's hard to see what could have been missed, what could be improved or what the other person learned on their side of the table, and then make the opportunity better as a whole.

Laurel: I think that's a really good tip. Even people who aren't like couples are living together and working together for just business partners in general, are people who get together for whether it's joint ventures or they're working in other just business partners, period. I think it's a great idea because you're right. If you're together, you can feed each other's passion, but if you come in more not distant, but dispassionate and look at it, just like a fresh pair of eyes, then that person is going to see something that the other didn't and that makes your team even stronger and your decisions even.

It's not like, if you say Rey, you find something you said to Tim. It's not that it's wrong. It's just, I don't understand and that provides the focal point for the conversation. Maybe it's this and this. Maybe you decide that that's not the right thing to do, or it is the right thing to do or less it's the right thing to do with a slight twist, whatever it is. Whatever the answer is.

Tell us what was probably, and you don't have to give details, but just in general. What was one of the things that was like one of the deals that just went sideways on you and because you didn't work, you couldn't work properly together as you were learning.

Tim: In part of dividing up strategies and markets about, like I said, 18 months, two years into our journey, we started working with a partner based out of Calgary. We live in Edmonton. Edmonton is where we call home, even though we're barely there. People like to joke that it's just storage for us at this point.

Rey: Furniture storage. I have my favorite desk and it's in Edmonton.

Tim: However, what happened was that we wanted to expand into a different market. One of the fastest ways to expand is to build partnerships. We have a partnership with another professional investor down in that market. As they were going through some internal changes and challenges, they did not communicate properly every step of the way with us. At that point we got quite effective and efficient at getting OPM.

We were able to go into quite a few properties at one point where we were holding up 111 or 113. One of those two numbers, doors with them in about over the period of three years. We invested and because that was one of the things that we split tasks on. Not both of us all were always looking at what was happening. We're managing that relationship. All of a sudden, as they say, Kaka hit the fan in 2016 and we had to clean up a lot of things when they filed for bankruptcy. At the same time, that was probably one of the biggest blows we've had in our career so far.

From that point on, though, it really taught us even more because we not only managed to recover from that. I think that strengthened our relationship going through it because as we were going through it, there was no, "you did this", "you made that decision", I wasn't there for it. We were very clear. We own up to the decision that we made. That was actually the good thing that kept the very good thing that came out of it.

Laurel: Good for you guys. Real estate investing is not able to, we all know it's pretty simple. It's pretty straight forward. You're buying real estate one way or another. You're buying real estate, that's pretty straightforward, pretty simple, but it's not actually always easy. When you put couples together, it gets a little more complicated. Then you add this and that. The other thing that gets even more complicated and wow, there you go. Sometimes things go off but if you're smart and you work at it, things go really smoothly. Thank you very much. I'm sure we'll have lots of questions for you. That was great. Thank you.