How to Mentally Handle a Shift in the Market

Daniel St Jean: Gary Hibbert is an investment realtor ninja at Smart Home Choice. Okay. Gary is a licensed real estate agent who has achieved various realtor awards. He's an educator, an author, a mentor, a coach. Gary has helped hundreds of clients with creating a wealth strategy plan through public speaking, online webinars, and even as its own podcast channel dedicated to inspire and educate anyone willing to change their mindset.

Today is actually gonna tell, talk to us about how to mentally handle and I wrote, I thought she had made typo a shit in the market. Now a shift in the market. All right, so you're gonna talk to us about how to mentally handle a shift in the market. Now, here's the thing, personal comment. Are we recording this?

I can't use any F words. All right. So everything I read here about this guy, It's true. But the reason why I like this guy is cause he's not an, all of this would not make any difference to anybody. He's one of the nicest guy I've ever met. So much pleasure to see you here tonight. Thank you. Take it over.

Gary Hibbert: Wow. What an introduction. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. So you know what, I'm gonna start off with a little bit of a funny story. I was talking to my mortgage agent last week, Daniel Patton from BM Select, and as we're about to wrap up the call, he goes, man, I can't wait to hear your presentation next week.

I'm like, me too. Where am I presenting? I had no idea that I was actually gonna be here tonight. So what I did was I actually just threw a couple slides together, and so if you guys are cool with this, I just wanna just have some fun with this. I want to freestyle, but I do have a message that I want you to get across today with you guys.

I don't know if you guys know who I am. I'm sure there's a few people in the room that do. However, in 2008 is when I first started investing in real estate, okay? And I want you guys, if you guys are at your phones, I want you to do something for me because this is the reason why. I ended up getting into real estate investing.

We are here just by raising your hands, still work at a nine to five job or in the corporate world. Okay? So here's what I want you guys to do. Do you guys and by a raise of hands again, how many of you guys gotta raise last year at your work? Okay, a couple. Beautiful. Okay. Here's a great example. 

I don't know how much you got. Maybe you got 500, maybe you got a thousand dollars. Take that $500 or whatever that raise was, okay, based on what you were making the previous year. So you're gonna take $500 divided by your income, that's gonna give you a number, multiply that by a hundred. And when I did that, when I was working at TD Bank, that worked out to about 1.3%, 1.4%.

I then realized that there was no way I was going to outpace inflation just by that calculation. So I now had no choice. I had to buy real estate and that's when my journey started, 2010. So between 2008, 2010, I bought two investment properties. I was smart enough now to jump into my own real estate investment club.

I started educating people. Think about this. I actually started educating people with only two years of being in the investing game. But here's what I did, and this might help you guys as well, too. Here's what I did. I said, I'm gonna be completely transparent. I'm gonna write a blog every single week, sharing my story of success and failure, and that's exactly what Smart Home Choice was all about.

Every week I shared my story about success and failure and my journey of real estate invested. From there, I started a podcast, and I was talking about this just a little bit earlier. In the hallway there, and I started the podcast because I felt that I knew enough about real estate investment that I can start teaching people wrong.

What I've realized in having that podcast is that podcast has taught me way more than I ever thought that I was actually gonna be able to teach other people. And from there, what it real, what I also learned from it as well. And I do this at the beginning, me and Sarah, we've talked about this numerous times, is about understanding your why and what is your why.

One of the things, if you guys follow me on social media, I'm huge on many retirements and I take July and August off and I take December and January off. And the reason why I do that, because I know how short this ride is. And from there I had enough doors. I didn't need any more doors, but I got caught up in it in the beginning thinking I needed a hundred doors, 200 doors, 500 doors.

Then I stopped. And then I got into private investing. And so we started another business with my wife and a partner, and now we lend our money out. And from there, two years later, there was a broker that saw what we were doing. Myself, Chris, and Quent. And they wanted us to be a part of their club to teach their realtors on how to invest in real estate.

I said, sure. However, because of the podcast, and because I knew what my why was, I was not gonna give up my many retirements, I said, not a problem. However, I am not giving up my many retirements. And guess what? I, they understood my why and they still brought me on. And we took that brokerage from 60 agents to now to what?

140 agents. Okay. And we're growing. So now I want to share with you the red line. Okay. If anybody was at our club a couple weeks ago, Sarah did an incredible presentation there and I briefly talked about it, but I wanna share this cause I think this is important. I think this is the elephant in the room and a lot of people are not talking about this.

Cause a lot of investors over the last couple of years have got themselves into some, we'll say hot water. And so I want you guys, you can put this in your phone, write it down. Very important. Okay? And this is very simple as well, but very important. Number one, what is your income? This is for an investment property or your own home.

What is the income for your home and what is the income for your investment property, number two, what is the expense for your home and what is the expenses for your investment property? Number three, what are the savings that you've got? Or what is your rainy day account for your property, for your home?

What is your reserve fund for your investment property? Number four. Are you in a variable or are you in a fix? Now, if you're in a fix you don't have to do anything. You're fine. You know what your numbers are. If you're in a variable, the number five is what is your red line? And there's a lot of investors over the last, say this year, that have crossed that red line are getting very close to it.

Just like the stock market, you have stock losses, right? So you have to know what your numbers are. I'm not here to tell you whether or not you should be in a variable or fixed. Mortgage experts and wizards right over here. You got another one right over in that corner over there. I'm not here to tell you what to do.

I'm just telling you to run your numbers. Okay. And so one of the things that myself and Chris and Quentin did is we realized this and we saw this, and so we've started doing a webinar every Monday at 12:00 PM and it's called Investment Redlining. And what we do is we're doing case studies for any investor where they're in a situation and they've crossed that red line and they don't know what to do.

We're not gonna tell them what to do, we're just gonna give them solutions. So on Monday, we came up with what? Five different options. Five different options for that investor to do. And that's what we wanna do. So if you got a case study, you're in a situation and listen, I understand, I get it. It may be a little bit embarrassing to talk about it, but we can do this offline. You can send me an email. I'd be more than happy to do a case study for you. Of course. No names, no addresses, right? And that's what we did on Monday.

Where are we? . Oh. That one's gone. Anyways. Imagine there was a road there and it was storm and lightning. Okay? That was supposed to paint an image of fear. Okay? So right now there's a lot of fear in the market, and with that fear is opportunity. Okay? And do you guys remember another time in history when there was a lot of fear in the market back in 2008 when I first started investing in real estate, that same energy, that same feeling.

I can feel it today like it was back in 2008, right? There's a lot of talk right now about whether we're going to a recession or we are in a recession, and the mainstream media and the headlines and all of the fear. You go on Instagram, go on Facebook, go anywhere, and there's fear. Don't make decisions based on fear. That's the worst place to make your decisions, okay? So everything that you do in life is an investment. Whether it is negative or positive, it's an investment. So then what you've gotta do is stop making investments into the negative energy that is out there right now.

You wanna make them into positive energy. And so one of the things that myself, Chris, and Quentin did last week, cause listen, our business has come down a lot as well too, right? So what do we do? Do we just step back into that fear? Be scared, say look, everybody else is going down as well too. So why? Why worry about it? So what we did was we went out to Niagara for three days with our coach in a room full of the best realtors in the GTA to hear what they're doing in this particular market. Some of the best strategies that we're now gonna be implementing in our business and we left there.

We're gonna now hire somebody new. So while people are talking recession, we're talking growth. That's what you want to be doing during these times. We're talking about how we're gonna get some additional market share while people go back into the fear. We're going into growth. This year I picked up a property in Mexico, currently converted into a two unit.

I'm talking. growth right? This is the time to grow. We have a brokerage. We just open up another office in Toronto. We are now going to grow that brokerage while people are stepping back into fear. It's about growth. This is the time to grow, not the time to go back. But here's the thing I want you guys to remember as well, and I think the last two years, Made people think that the market only goes up, and obviously some people have gotten caught in this.

This is a time to go back to fundamentals. Fundamentals are incredibly important, right? Don't get caught up in the hype. Don't get caught up in appreciation all the time. I remember when I used to go to these events and they always talked about appreciation as what? Ising on the cake. But everybody's gotten caught up now that I need appreciation.

That is the only way my investment property is gonna make any sense for me. It's not true. When I started in 2008, I was bored with real estate. 2008, 2009, 2010 is always about boring real estate. Anytime it got over 5% or 6% appreciation, what did we do, Chris? We move markets, don't we?

2017 came, and those Toronto agents came into our market. They were bumping those prices up. We bounce. We're like, we're outta here. I was getting tips from my barber. When your barber gives you a tip, it's time to leave. Went to Peterborough. We were looking at properties in Peterborough that were under 200,000.

The reason why we like Peterborough, is because you had those tertiary markets right around it, so we could expand and so go back to fundamentals. Go back to cash flow. Boring real estate is okay. This is not to get rich quick. You can make it rich for sure. Okay, listen, you want real estate to allow you to make money while you sleep. So think about that. This is what is going to allow you to get to retirement. Whenever retirement is right. Why gamble? Why take chances? Just casinos around here, you can go there and gamble, right?

A lot of people want to play the variable game. Nothing wrong with that, but I can tell you right now that some of my properties were getting very close to the red line, so I fixed them. It might be a little embarrassing to say, but it's fine. Five years from now that market will return. I'll have equity in my property.

I can now take action and work on building on other businesses. All right? And what I'm doing right now as well too, is I'm not focusing anybodys in that. Robert Kiyosaki, Four Quadrant. Okay, you got trade and time for money then you got the entrepreneur where you are working for yourself, working a lot really hard.

Then on the right side, you've got the investor, and then you've got the business owner. And so now what I'm doing is I'm sleeping while my investment properties are making money and I'm building businesses so that now I can now leverage other people's time. This is what I'm doing. You don't have to get caught up in the hype.

It's been a lot of hype in the last two years. Be careful. So here's what I'm gonna say. This is my last slide. And it's all about teamwork, right? Teamwork is incredibly important and I want the best people around me, right? My mortgage team, they've been with me for 10 years now. These are the guys that I go to all the time.

I want an optimist prime beside me, right? That's what I want. My accountant, he's one of the best in the industry. I was able to pull money out of my business, take it out of the country, into a property in Mexico, tax free. That's like a megatron, right? I want people around me that are solid. My contractors, my property managers, my whole entire team is what allows me to grow because they are gonna allow me, they're gonna find those blind spots that I can't see.

There are a lot of things that I can't see, but if I have a strong team around me, they can see those blind spots for me. So I'm gonna leave you with this. Three last things I wanna share, and then and if you guys ever listen to me, I'm really big on the mindset and Jim Rome was one of my mentors in the beginning, and he said this, he said, help as many people get what they want and you can have every and anything you want.
Just that simple quote alone changed my life. Then after that. The other one that I heard, and I think this one's probably even more important, was to make the goal to become a millionaire. Not for the money, but for the person you will become to achieve it. Think about that. So the goal is it, the money is the person that you become, right?

It's the person you become to achieve it. So the person that you become, the person that I've become, and Chris and Quentin and my team, that is the magic. That is what allows you to attract money to you and to be successful in this game of real estate investing because the more problems you solve, right? You're bringing value to the marketplace.

All right, and this is the last thing I'm gonna share with you. Ray Dalio. He had a great talk and he's a businessman, entrepreneur, and what he shared was this. He said, when I started business I started off and I did incredibly well. But then he failed and he went bankrupt, and then he got back up on his feet and he said, the reason why I fail, we didn't have the right team.

He built that team around him. So think about if you go into the jungle and this game of real estate investments is like being in the jungle, and now you have your team beside you that you can, they can see your blind spots. And he said as he was going through that jungle and he's walking through that forest and now he's built that incredible business and he can now actually see the clearing.

He's actually able to get out of it now. And then you realize that he didn't want to actually leave. And what that really means is it's not about the destination, but it's about the journey. And that journey is the people that are on your team and that are around you. That is what this is all about and having fun with this.

All right, so I hope that helps. Thank you very much for having me, guys. I appreciate it.