Sarah Larbi: REITE Club Nation. Welcome back to another awesome podcast. I'm Sarah Larbi. I'm here with my co-host The wonderful, the only Laurel Simmons. Hello, how are you?
Laurel Simmons: Hey, Sarah. I'm having a great day. What about you?
Sarah Larbi: It's really good. I'm excited for today's podcast with Sandy MacKay. Sandy's got two plus doors. He's been in business over the last eight years. Super awesome. He's also the host of another really popular Canadian podcast, breakthrough Real Estate Investing, and he's a realtor and just a husband and many more things. So I'm super excited about that. And Laurel, one of the things about the REITE club though, guys that Laurel and I just wanna mention is just make sure that you check us out online. What's online these days? Laurel?
Laurel Simmons: Hey go and check us out at www.thereiteclub.com. You can join for free. It's, we have forums, we have podcasts, we have all kinds of things to go in there. We have our sponsors and people who are offering services. There's all kinds of stuff. You can make connections with people and we're adding more and more all the time. So just go on to thereiteclub.com, sign up. It's totally free. We'd love to see you. We'll say hi. I guarantee if you get on there, join up Sarah and I will say hi.
Sarah Larbi: Awesome. Let's listen to our podcast and guys, thank you for joining our REITE Club Nation online. Thank you Laurel as well for being a great co-host in this podcast. And thank you to Sandy for sharing his insights. Let's do it. Sandy, welcome to the show. How are you?
Sandy Mackay: Thanks. So awesome. I'm excited to be here. Thanks, Sarah.
Sarah Larbi: Absolutely. I'm excited to have you on. I am a big fan of your podcast as well, that you have with Rob prior to this talking about your podcast and how you've had it for the longest time. But, when I first started looking at real estate investing as a Canadian investor and looking for Canadian content, your stuff came up. So thank you for your education to me early on in my real estate investing.
Sandy Mackay: Perfect. Yeah, that's what we did it for. So I'm excited that you've obviously similar. I dunno. We kinda pioneered that for a little bit and then obviously awesome to see others taking over and probably surpassing us in a lot of ways. Congrats Austin to see your success.
Sarah Larbi: Cool. Now, you are a very successful real estate investor. You're also a realtor, but for those that don't know who Sandy McKay is, give us a 30,000 foot view of what you do when it comes to real estate.
Sandy Mackay: We obviously have been a pretty active investor for about eight, nine years now. Before I got in as a realtor, I was in that world for a few years. I've done a whole bunch of stuff, creative wholesale type strategies to fix and flip, join ventures buy and hold, join venture multifamily.
A lot of different stuff in the investor world. Got into the realtor world about six little over six years ago now. So I built up a team in that world. We do a lot of investment business and then kind of transitioned into more residential as well as we built up. Also have a few other businesses in that world with construction team and product management team, and then our like investor.
Business that we do a lot of joint venture capital raising through. So yeah, over the years a lot of strategies have a lot of like partners around and so a lot of complexities, I guess some ways and somewhere around two units overall with not all owned myself, but some ways shape or form ownership me being involved there. So yeah, that's where we're at now. And really a lot of that's been the last two, three years. We've kinda scaled that up a bit on the acquisition side. We've got a wide range of products there.
Laurel Simmons: Do you have a favorite strategy? Is there something that you go back to over and over again?
Sandy Mackay: For sure. The bread and butter model is the joint ventures, buying multifamily, buy, refinance, and rent strategies. So for which I'm sure you've talked about a lot on the show. We've done a lot of those strategies. Yeah, we've done a lot of those in the three and four unit range. That's kind of been the ongoing buying one to two a month of those for a couple years. And then we started adding on some bigger multi-family projects. But again, same strategy, just different scale, different size.
Sarah Larbi: In eight years you've built a portfolio of 200 plus properties. It sounds like you've got a lot of moving parts, a lot of JVs, a construction company, and now you're a realtor as well do you sleep?
Sandy Mackay: I have a, one of the things I would say I'm pretty good at, better than most people, and I'm not, I hate bragging, but I'm pretty good at the team billing side of it in terms of gathering leverage and things like that. So I'm probably more naturally equipped to do that than most people. I don't really wanna work 24/7 by any means.
That said, we don't have any kids, Kate, my wife and I. So we've maybe had a little extra time here and there than some people. And so we have worked really hard over that. But to be honest, right now, I'm probably, I don't work much more than, I guess I don't work. I guess I do, I think about it a lot.
I don't really work more than 50 hours a week, I'd say. It's not too good. I spent a lot of my time on the realtor team side of it. My wife Kate runs our property management team, Adrian, who I think you've had on the show, runs a lot of our investment business day to day at least. And then I have a partner on the construction side who runs that day. So it sounds like a lot, but really I'm just pretty leveraged with it and I don't necessarily spend a lot of time on every component there.
Sarah Larbi: You build your team, you delegate it, and you find it, you find somebody to be able to do it, and you oversee. Is that roughly what you're doing? And I know Laurel has a question, but why did you choose to go from being a real estate investor to a realtor? Cause I know I have that question a lot, right? People that wanna get into investing, they're like, maybe I should get my realtor's license and do this. And there's pros and cons to both, but I'm curious what your reasoning behind it was.
Sandy Mackay: For sure pros and cons of both. I didn't really understand until maybe a few years back where I kinda said I really gravitate more towards the side. Totally not why I stayed in it and grew with it more. Totally different reasons, really. You could, I know you've probably talked about this too, is diving a little deeper on your why in life and why, what's important to you day to day? Why do you really I kinda got a little, to be honest, a little bored on the investment side, like the acquisition side.
It's not really my favorite thing. Obviously I see huge value in doing it and value in terms of wealth building and everything. All the things that we do that I've mentioned there. It's by far our biggest ROI on activities. I just fell in love with the realtor side a lot as I grew with it, and so as I started getting more into it, kinda more looking at it as a really overall business and getting, as we started to scale little bit, getting more involved on real PNLs and looking at margins and all the different components to it and leading people.
It just got more exciting to see people really thrive through that side of it. And you can. You can see results really quick in this, in a sales business, it's one of the highest opportunity or opportunistic sales roles in probably the world where you can go from making not too much to pretty, quite a bit right away with the right guidance, right support.
It was just exciting to see some people who go through that transition and obviously they can, as a realtor being in that business, you can help people invest as well, pick up properties so we can help them in that sense. But, Just exciting to see them grow and become better people and business people on the realtor side.
I kinda got a little more excited about that. I am still honest, just building our team and stuff a lot more versus rinse and repeat. That's s over and over. As much as the money was great and is great still, it's just kinda got a bit boring to be honest.
Laurel Simmons: Do you, I know when you're a realtor you're going to, if someone comes along, wants either buy or sell a property, whatever it is. Unless it's extremely far out on the other fringes of stuff that we all know about. You're probably gonna look at it, but is there a client, a particular client type that you'd like to work with or a particular type of project?
Sandy Mackay: We do a lot of at least 50% and it used to be a higher number, but we used to, we just didn't do as much of the normal residential stuff, or at least 50% of our business is investors.
We do quite a bit of that. And so definitely as a realtor myself, day to day, On the realtor type activities, the investor clients were always my favorite buying multis year. They're honestly the easiest in a sense with real estate in the realtor space. Cause you can rinse and repeat the same as long as you can find, which is another, that's one challenge.
If you can find the product it's kind of the easiest business because you can just do the same thing over and over again versus meeting, husband and wife and everyone wants something different, they're a little more emotional on that part of it, so maybe that's exciting for some people.
The investor business, you can really ramp up pretty quick and it's not as there's no realtors. If you know what you're doing, which is why there's not as many in there cause not as many do know enough about it. But once you niche in there, it's a piece of the business helping build wealth creates emotional transactional.
Laurel Simmons: I would think that with investors you're not dealing with the like you said, the emotional side of it. Investors go in knowing the numbers, because that's why they're doing it. And if you're dealing with someone who's just buying the house that they absolutely have to live in because it's like their dream house and we've all dealt with that kind of person, you're dealing with a whole, it's just a whole rack of other issues. And it's very emotional, whereas. The investor is really, they're good investors. We go, yeah, this works. No, it doesn't. I don't like that, but it doesn't matter whether I like it. It's not for me.
Sandy Mackay: It shouldn't be as emotional to be honest. It's still emotional. They all, not every time, but a lot of investors get emotional still. As much as we tell them, not really as much as we tell 'em not to.
Laurel Simmons: How, What do you get emotional about? Cause I'm kind of surprised. Because my husband and I, investors, we go out and I don't care if I don't like whatever. It's just yeah, it's not for me, it's for somebody else. Stuff to live in. So what, when you say they get emotional, what do you mean?
Sandy Mackay: I would say the more the salary you get as an investor, probably you get a little less emotional. But there's still moments there where you're like, for whatever reason, that property is appealing. And there's a lot of bidding wars right now, for example, when you get in those scenarios and you know it's emotional to the sense of do we really wanna spend another month looking for something again? Or is it worth spending the extra 5, 10, 20 grand, like a marginal amount to just get it? And then you get a little competitive probably. And they get those juices running.
A lot of investors tend to be a little bit competitive and if their friends or other people they know are picking up, they bought two properties last month and you haven't, one in a while of scenarios that maybe where its competitive and emotional.
Sarah Larbi: I think it's also a lot of newer investors, there's certain things that over time you don't care as much, but in the beginning you want the place to be maybe a little bit nicer or you wanna you're not going to live in there, but you wanna, I think that just that the criteria change over time. Like it's just like numbers and it's business. And if so, do the fundamentals make sense? But it takes some time together.
Sandy Mackay: That first, the novice ones too for sure. The, getting them over that hump of you're not living there is a big one. If they haven't, if they've only bought one or never bought any investment properties. There's always this part of them I find almost always, there's a part where they're still seeing themselves there, and so getting 'em over that hump, which usually takes a, just a couple purchases maybe. And they get a little less removed.
Sarah Larbi: Then they just call you, Hey, go look at this property. Let me know if I throw in an offer or not. So like at some point as an investor, you have a good realtor on your side, and I don't personally look at properties anymore. This is if I see something I'll send my realtor to go and take a look at it before. I bother doing it and most of the time I'll just put it in an offer and see what happens.
Sandy Mackay: That's the best, right? That's the best for you. And as a client and us as realtors, it's a more effective use of our time too. So it's great.
Sarah Larbi: Do it on your first one though. This is something that I would recommend as you get comfortable over time and just keep in mind, you've gotta have a backup plan. And most of the time, like I'll do it like conditional inspection or something. I wanted to, I wanna pivot a bit and go back to you scaling up. To 200 plus properties. Is it properties or doors?
Sandy Mackay: Doors. As much as I like to say properties, no, it's not. It's 50 to 60 properties, give or take.
Sarah Larbi: All right. But that's still incredible, right? So scaling that in, your eight or so plus years is amazing for and foremost. So congratulations on that. So what are some things that you've learned along the way? Cause I'm sure there's lots of things that go wrong. There's lots of mistakes that are made. Can you share something to the REITE Club Nation on. How somebody can go about doing what you did and some of the best insights that maybe you learned from it.
Sandy Mackay: Biggest thing on the scaling side, cause we started getting, like a lot of people do, I would say on Money started to get a lot easier to find for us. At the start you're trying to scramble to find that one partner that's gonna help you, either you don't have the money or you don't have the qualifications. That's usually why you'd go start to find JVs For the most we start, we, our second property ever.
We wouldn't have, we didn't have the plans and our first project we ever did was like, scrounging up every dollar cent and credit card money, everything here just to make it happen. And we kinda did an accident on that too and it worked out well, but there was some renovation money that was tough to come by, so we started looking for money pretty much cause we needed it.
Also we made so much sense. And so I think one of the biggest things that we learned now at this point is just. The importance of who you're investing with and what a relationship looks like. Just that they have their qualifications. That's gotta be something. Probably a long time if you're having a buy and hold type strategy at the end of it. We have partners that have been in business for seven, eight years now, and we've had some along the way that we absolutely would never do a deal with again. And really wish I would've never done a deal with them.
We were very way too open on who we were gonna partner with because, like we had a few years into that we started getting people coming to us. And it's just, Attractive to go down that road because they're, it's a lot of money they're giving you. And it's a lot of leverage.
I guess we're still doing all the work, but even now at our point, we have so much leverage on that part. So we're a construction crew. They're doing the same thing over and over again. So we don't even need to have a lot of time spent on that part of it. We don't need to spend much like day to day on the property management cause we have a good team there doing that all.
It became pretty easy to just accept money. Worst move ever is to just accept money from people, that's, meet me once and say, yeah, it sounds good, let's go. But like everyone else, we were gonna look competitive and it sounded good to just be buying deals all the time. And yeah, there was a few in there that we just totally would not wanna work with again.
It really came down to communication styles and things like that, and boundaries and really just expectations, right? We didn't have, we didn't set clear expectations in terms of who's doing what, Dayday or longer term day does this all sort of over time, and I knew that already and I had 10 tons of people tell me that still was too tempting to not go forward. So listen to all that advice, it would probably be another good one there. And listen to people that have been there before you and take their experiences and really think about them a little further before you act on.
Laurel Simmons: I guess that was gonna be my next question, although I think you already partly answered it, was who is the best or who's the best fit? In terms of someone in a joint venture with you. And so you said some, like you managing expectations. So you wanna know, I guess you wanna know what their expectations are and you have to lay your expectations out on the table. What else are you looking for? And a really good partner when you go into something like that.
Sandy Mackay: I think that comes down to, yeah, knowing their expectations and really knowing what ours are because and our standards and everything, right? We didn't probably dive deep enough on that for ourselves. And if you go deeper on yourself, understand now. Set out there to the world. For us, our perfect partners, they're just really busy with something else. They're not staying at home doing nothing. Because often those are the people that start asking a lot more questions down the road and a lot more time to manage them from a client care type of perspective.
Really busy people are in busy professions. Doesn't always have to be that, but they're obviously busy doing other stuff and they just wanna get a better return than they're getting elsewhere. So someone who's got less time to spend on this type of thing, sees the value in it, knows that real estate's a great thing and there's just someone that ultimately they're usually not as, one thing I found is a tough person to deal with.
For me, this isn't necessary for everyone, but for me and us, it's kinda a really engineers and accountants type of people where they're very numbers driven, really wanna know every little detail. That doesn't mean that's not the right person for other people. I find a lot of time for us, we're, I'm not the best at giving details like in the meetings or anything, and we start going too heavy on details.
I'm gonna lose it a little bit. So that's more just a personal one. But I think that might resonate for a lot of people because it's a little easier to manage people that maybe don't need to know every detail. Not that we're hiding stuff, it's just easier to move faster and move on.
Sarah Larbi: It makes sense, right? If you're not analytical and they're very analytical, how you communicate your thoughts into their understanding is going to clash. I can totally see that. And the other thing you mentioned, I think is important to also, first of all, I will say you don't always have to jv if you can do it by yourself, feel free to start by yourself.
That's how I started as well. So there's JV partners that are active and then there are JV partners that are passive. The other thing that I can think of, so you're very active in the business. You're likely gonna be the active partner. You likely always work. And then you're looking for somebody to bring you the financing and the money and essentially be more passive and just get a better return on the money.
I'll tell you, it's important to understand who is who and lay out those expectations. Because if all of a sudden you've got somebody that's supposed to be passive, Is picking out all of the Reno materials and everything like that, that can go south pretty quickly if you've got two active people, but one was not supposed to be as active.
Sandy Mackay: I'll tell you one, one other thing there that we've tweaked now over time that we were doing at the start, we're just like giving them too much information. Like we were, we give them, we'd expect, they wanted to know a lot of things and they always can if they wanna know, but we would just over communicate it in some ways too much like over communicate soft and good, but we would do it too much where they started asking so many things that it is really irrelevant.
Does it really matter for our perfect partner at least? Does it really matter what flooring type we're using? None of that renovation stuff, it matters. What matters is getting them easy. That's really what we wanna, those expectations and those demands, and down in detail on the specific renovation things we're doing.
We've had some people where we've had you we've told, look, you can come learn from us, shadow us. Cause maybe you wanna do it yourself down road. We're open, but we don't, or don't spend time going too deep on that stuff cause we have our systems already in play with that. And that's what they're buying into. So the question though is just kinda silly. It's kinda eliminating our values.
Sarah Larbi: I'm sure you've got a long list of things that you go through. So if somebody does approach you, I'm guessing that's how it's gonna happen right now, you're pretty out there in the public, so people approach you, you are likely not having to go and find, in my opinion, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, but people to lend you money in financing cause, they likely will be approaching you. But what are some of the things that you do, okay, so now they reach out to you and they say, I'm interested in joint ventures with you. Do you meet them? Do you have a phone conversation? Do you write a letter of intent? Like how do you go about that?
Sandy Mackay: Usually we have conversations now, especially 2020 years. Which has been nice in some ways, but usually they end up in our office in some way sitting down. We usually might take 'em out to see a project or two that we have ongoing, just so they get a feel for what we're doing. And then we still reach out for partners, by the way. Not as much as we would normally, but a lot of those come through referrals from other partners.
We don't necessarily reach out cold to people like we have in the past. But yeah, we would take them in, they come into the office after maybe an initial phone call. Qualification process to see if it's a potential fit. Come meet, talk about it. Usually it's one good meeting. It might be an hour or so through details, questions you process, overview.
A lot of times it's, why am I bringing all the money? And that still comes up quite a bit as I'm sure it does with almost everyone. What are you actually getting paid on? What parts of this are you getting paid directly? Maybe outside of this? Because we have all the different companies, they're often asking, where we're really making our money, then we property or get a for it.
Then ultimately to engage and get the process going. We do it, it's usually as a refundable deposit that we put towards the deal, or we'll refund it back after six months. So if we don't find anything in six months, refund it back. And if we do, that's the process. Find something you 'll out. Hey got somethings, whatever questions they have. At that point, obviously then are we gonna proceed or not? And then we get into the deal. Dunno, we can go deeper.
Sarah Larbi: I mean it's interesting and I like that you mentioned too, that you take the $5,000 that's refundable, but it definitely shows that they're not just talking about it, but they're willing to commit something to it. And I think that's the important piece as well, because. You could be doing all this work and figuring out what the JVs need, and then all of a sudden you have the perfect deal for them and they're like, oh, you know what? I'm actually not interested anymore. So like, how do you keep them, maybe it's four or five, six months later. Like how do you keep them still engaged other than the, I think the $5,000 piece that's refundable, I think is really smart. Anything else that you do?
Sandy Mackay: We've had that scenario happen. That's why we've put that into place. We've had that scenario happen on a deal closing like a week from today, and they're bailing on it. And Anything to avoid those types of scenarios. Those obviously put us in a rough spot. So we wanted to avoid those, which is why we input 5,000, which is really not a big amount of money at the end of the day. A lot of our, most of our partners, like our initial qualification from a money standpoint, they need 300,000 to put into it, which is your typical triplex fourplex, and in a Hamilton area project, plus the renovation costs, or at least.
Vast majority of rent costs depending on the deal. So we, that's part of the expectation we set now, which is that we're not gonna follow them all the time about every little deal that comes up. Usually it's, we're ready to go here. This is a good one, let's do it. So we often, that's part of the expectation there, is that, hey, we're not gonna call you about a deal.
Don't be alarmed if you probably hear from us anyways. Hey, just don't, just let you know we're still looking, but you're probably not gonna hear from us every week. Cause five more Trips got listened to this week and that's what we're looking for. You'll probably hear us from us within a month.
Six months is a really long time. We're always gonna find something before that, unless we're looking for bigger stuff. But for that typical bread and butter type deal we do, we're gonna find something within two months at most usually. And so in that time, they're only ex we're calling them about, Hey, this is the property we should look at.
It's because we're buying it. Like it's not very many that we're not gonna go through unless something's totally changed on their end. We're typically finding the deal and just going at it at that point. We don't wanna waste people's time. We don't waste anyone our time or their time, so it's not really worth it a lot to us unless they really have a different expectation and they wanna learn a lot more, which is not our perfect person. So it's not very often we're doing that, but that time to time, that might be the scenario too. So a couple scenarios there, but yeah, you're not hearing from us until you get the deal really.
Laurel Simmons: You said earlier that you started really like bread and butter was the three to four, units, property, and that you're scaling up to what, 8, 10? Like what are you scaling up to and why'd you go there?
Sandy Mackay: We have, so this year, for example, we've done 11 units that just closed recently. We have 15 units. We're hopefully buying a 58 unit right now. It's in the mix. We've had it locked up for a while and now we're just renegotiating some things on it. So we'll see if that comes through or not. Those ones have a lot more things to work out there. So scaling up in terms of size, but the real main reason is it's just, it's a lot easier on the financing side of it. I find, we can qualify for those, so it's not. Another thing to expect from a partner. I find the management side is a lot easier long term.
We have our company being in place there, especially the management part is a lot easier for that and it's so much easier. Just acquire a big chunk at once versus over time, more and more partners, maybe more and more. More and more things to manage in the long term. Whereas if the red opportunity comes up and they're harder to come by, that's why.
We're still doing the smaller ones too. It's harder to come by the big, 58 unit. Maybe if you can find one of those a year, that's pretty good. You're probably not one of those every year coming across those deals that are tougher. So as much as we like them better. Easier from the financing side, they're less maintenance and everything. Long term, less management costs overall, one or two boilers maybe versus kinda 16 units across four properties.
You got four different things, right? Versus maybe just one in that type building. So all those reasons we've targeted, those probably are bigger pictures, they're attractive to us, but then we still, because we have more of a, we really look at these as businesses and they're not just We're not just buying these investment properties and that's it. We have a few more things at play. We do like to have the steady flow of the three, four unit type properties. Because it keeps everything rolling.
Sarah Larbi: Absolutely. Now you're a realtor and an investor, so where do you find these properties? Are they on market, pocket listings, off market? Are you going and buying stuff from wholesalers? Like, how does that all work? Because you're, you're pretty well connected to every part of the industry.
Sandy Mackay: We obviously were everywhere really. But of course, you know what, I always refer to 2017 spring, which is really hot in most areas. One of the hottest times ever as we bought a lot of properties on the market that year in the spring, paying a hundred thousand over asking, on 500,000 thousand dollars purchase.
We buy a lot off market. A lot of our clients buy a lot off market too. So it's always a balancing act. You know how much, we can't buy everything. We find a lot more than we can buy. So that's a good thing. We have enough to go around. But at the same time, a great opportunity comes up or who's, clients always ask that we are buying that or are we giving that to our client who's buying for themselves?
Not partnering, but buying it just as a realtor client, right? That's always a balancing act there. So we do our best to kinda work it around everyone. But we buy a lot on the market ourselves because we give a lot of our off market stuff to clients that aren't partnering with us. So that said I would, I don't really care personally where we buy 'em from if the deal's a deal.
Buying for a hundred thousand over, I think we bought seven or eight in that spring. We bought it in a year or two maybe. That was by far our most active period. And it was just, cause there was quite a bit of inventory at the time and we kinda, at the time it felt like we were going crazy, buying a lot.
Because it was more than we were before. I would, I'm totally glad we bought every property cause we wouldn't have had them in our portfolio now and wouldn't have had the growth permit it that we have. We buy it from anywhere. It doesn't really matter to us. I'd rather be active than be waiting, sitting on the sidelines forever. So wherever the deals come from, we're open to everything and all those places you mentioned we've bought from before and we'll continually look within to find them.
Laurel Simmons: Do you have a specific area? Are you focusing in the Hamilton area or GTA, west or East or Viagra or Northern Ontario, or, I dunno, outside some area that you'd like to look at?
Sandy Mackay: Definitely Hamilton, where we spent a lot of our time over the years. Right now we have properties in Oshawa Berry Vaughn, only because we used to live there and Hamilton. We are looking at other areas. Hamilton is still, I would still say it's my favorite place in sales Ontario, Southwestern Ontario, probably partially because we know it really well.
Then beyond that, it's got great inventory. There's, especially for those three, four properties that we do a lot of, there's great inventory for it comparatively. Cause it's that right size of a city and it's the right price point. But then we're looking at some other areas cause we look, cause we're looking at a lot of these bigger properties now.
Hamilton's got decent inventory, but it doesn't have enough inventory to get really active on that side of it. So we need to be a little flexible. We started looking a little more in Niagara region Waterloo. London. Windsor Ottawa. But we're Ottawa. Toronto Price Point City. So those are some areas we're into, we're looking to get into that we like.
Laurel Simmons: Get into the bigger units, bigger number of units. Are you finding that you are starting now to run into more institutional investors in terms of competition? Or is that, are you not quite in that league yet? Because we all know about some of the teachers federations and there are big pension funds out there, right? That buys up these apartment buildings all over the place. And are you running into any of that?
Sandy Mackay: I think a little bit in Hamilton, there's a little bit of that. We haven't hit that at a huge level probably if we're buying or looking at more like these 58 type unit properties. So probably you're gonna find that more. We haven't found that. Cause we haven't really. We weren't necessarily looking for that. It just kinda came across us and we were intrigued by it. The eight to 20 units in that range, I'd say there's definitely less of that and maybe not even that many at all. So we haven't got a whole lot, but a little bit here and there.
You're noticing more of them, especially in Hamilton find, if you find a lot of the older landlords who are, they've had their properties forever and they're not like an institutional type investor themselves, they're probably not gonna be attracting that type of buyer. So we're not dealing with those, and those are usually our sellers because, they're sick and tired of dealing with it, and there's some motivation there versus just the institutional type landlord who maybe has motivation, but maybe they're just more than happy to sit on it and not let it go for a price that makes any sense.
Sarah Larbi: Those guys that are 70 or 80 and that are getting tired are potentially open to Vtv as well, which could work in your favor. Very cool. So Sandy, the next part of our podcast is our lightning round. So we're gonna ask you four questions. Laurel and I will take turns. You're gonna give us the first answer that comes to mind. Are you ready?
Sandy Mackay: Ready, let's go.
Sarah Larbi: All right. Question number one. What is the best advice that you have ever received from another investor or at a networking event?
Sandy Mackay: The best advice for sure is to really dive deep on what you really wanted life first before you go down any strategy or any sort of, come up with the end first and go back from there versus just going for the shiny object.
Laurel Simmons: I'll start with the end in mind is really what you're saying. Figure out what you want and go for it. Okay. Number two, what is your favorite resource for real estate investing? Whether it's book training, person, event, what is it?
Sandy Mackay: Used to be a podcast for sure on iTunes. I still am great. That's still the best, that's still the best anywhere, any sort of podcast you can find online. There's some great video versions of that too. Now, YouTube's obviously great. Mostly digital stuff. I read a lot of audible books, so I would like to throw that in there too. Audible's really easy to listen to, whether you're traveling or going around day to day. Anywhere we can find great content. Digital world is probably the best right now.
Sarah Larbi: Absolutely. Awesome. Question number three. What is the one attribute that has made you most successful in your opinion?
Sandy Mackay: Abundant mindset and not trying to get a hundred percent of everything, or a hundred percent of very little, but being open to sharing and growing others to help. I would say that, but growing others and focusing on others versus everything, I'm gonna get outta it, but focusing on helping others get their piece of the pie, whatever that might look like. And it all comes back to at the end, as long as you do that.
Laurel Simmons: Absolutely, you're right on that one. So number four, what do you typically do on a Sunday morning?
Sandy Mackay: Sunday mornings changed a lot for me. I used to do a lot of real estate activities. Right now. Definitely not real estate to be honest. I've taken Sundays off most Sundays, so I would say hanging around the house, doing some stuff at home, if I'm lucky. And it's a really good Sunday, probably round.
Sarah Larbi: Awesome. Sandy, where can the REITE Club Nation or listeners reach out if they want to know and learn more about you?
Sandy Mackay: A lot of ways. You can find me on social media a fair amount if you just look me up or Google me that way. If you wanna reach out directly I can throw my phone number and emails out there. 4 6 5 6 7 3 8 6 6 or sandyMcKayrealtynetwork.com.
Sarah Larbi: Amazing. Any final last words of advice for the REITE club nation?
Sandy Mackay: Obviously you gotta take action. All these things are great and great to think about and learn about, but you gotta take action. Stop wasting your time listening to all this stuff and go take some action with it and continually grow. You'll learn more as you go through action taking than just sitting here listening all the time. Gotta implement stuff. Definitely take action. Successful.
Sarah Larbi: Go take action, learn and you're, you guys are doing the right thing by learning. But now apply that learning into actual concrete steps. And Sandy, thank you so much for being on the show. It was a pleasure having you on. Thanks for all your insights.
Sandy Mackay: This is fun. Really appreciate it.
Laurel Simmons: Sandy. Bye. So Sarah. Wow. Like he's, Sandy's just amazing, isn't he? He's got so much energy and he's done so. He's got so many properties and doors and just to listen to him about, he's going from the sort of three and four units up to what, a 58 unit? Unit property. That's a big deal. I think there's a lot of learning in there, and I know we could have talked for an hour, not even come beneath the surface. There's a lot of stuff that goes on with that kind of stuff.
Sarah Larbi: Yeah, absolutely. We talked a little bit about the realtor stuff and the JV stuff, but we could have been talking to him about BRRRRng, the multis. We could have been talking to him about so many other things, but it was really interesting. I will say one takeaway that I may apply myself is as I'm going into the JV world, now that I will not be employed anymore. I have a bit more time and I wanna focus a little bit on that, but it is really smart that he mentioned to do the letter of intent and then at least have a refundable deposit so that it shows.
A little bit of commitment from the other person is because it's tough to find that deal and go out and hustle cause it's not like they're just sitting there waiting for people to buy them. They do require some work to find the right deal and sometimes it takes months to find the right deal.
Laurel Simmons: I think we've all been in, in situations where I know, and certainly Danielle and I have, where we've had an investor back out at the last minute. It's not fun. It really isn't, it's a lot of pressure and a lot of stress. So for him to have that just, put them, put your money on the line and it really does seal the deal in a sense. People are committed then if they're doing that, they're serious.
Sarah Larbi: Yeah, absolutely. And guys, if you enjoy today's podcast, feel free to leave a rating, a review on Apple's podcasts or wherever else you guys are listening to this or YouTube. We are now on YouTube, so if you want to watch us, you can do so on there. And thank you as well REITE Club Nation for tuning in and staying engaged and reaching out to us. Your emails are always appreciated.
If you have any questions or feel free to also check out our calendar of events. You can join some free webinars. We're doing two webinars a month. They're right now at this point in time, they're free. Go join. Go learn about. Different strategies or learn from some of our experts. Partners, lots of great things happening.
Laurel Simmons: Absolutely. And if you have a free moment go on, give us a rating for our podcast. Because the more you know, the more you give us a positive rating, the more we'll be in front of other people. And, one of our goals is just to help people learn about investing, real estate investing, and get out there and do it.
Sarah Larbi: Awesome. Get out there, take action REITE club Nation, thank you so much.
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