Mike Rosehart - RPDRS 

Sarah: I have the honor of welcoming our next guest. How many of you guys know Mike Rosehart? Have seen his videos that you're pretty active on all that social media stuff. How many of you guys, this is gonna be the first time that you hear of Mike or that you hear Mike? All right. Interesting.

I'm going to introduce Mike. Mike retired at 24, and he's going to talk about how he retired at 24 and built a $20 million real estate. He is known as Canada's youngest, early retiree, Richard Ivey school of business graduate, YouTube, social media, influencer entrepreneur, and a real estate investor in London, Ontario with an eight figure real estate portfolio of 50 buildings.

Mike is an expert joint venture strategist with a wealth of experience in finding off market private deals, also flipping, renovating, managing the bottom line and focus on cost control and maximized return on investment. Starting from humble beginnings without a dollar to his name. Mike bought his first property at 19 and built his portfolio up to over 17 properties by 24, using the BRRRR real estate snowball method.

Who here's a BRRRR investor? He retired from his day job as a senior analyst in the IT business consulting in 2017 and has been enjoying financial independence ever since. He believes anyone can unlock FIRE. Which you can explain what that stands for. Real estate is one of the best vehicles to expedite the journey to freedom and maximize returns through leverage cheaply. Mike believes the secret to building wealth is simple. Spend less or more, maximize returns on the difference. Let's welcome Mike to the stage.

Mike: Hi everyone, I'm Mike Rosehart. I'm used to being in front of a camera, like on my phone or on my camera on YouTube doing a lot of videos. It's different being in front of an audience like this. Bear with me if I don't come across as good as some of the other presenters. I don't love presenting, but I will do my best to give you guys a presentation. My journey to FIRE, so FIRE stands for Financial Independence and Retiring Early. I found this movement and stumbled upon it before it was really called FIRE. Back when I was at an early retirement extreme around 2009, 2010, I stumbled upon a book called early retirement extreme and it changed my life and opened my mind up in a lot of ways.

My catchphrase on my YouTube channel is there are three levers to unlock your financial future. I come at it from a personal finance approach and I use real estate as one means to accelerate the return. I like real estate because you get way better returns. Thanks to leverage. Then you can get in pretty much any other industry. Spend less, that's your spending, earn more, what's your earning, and then you wanna maximize the difference and that's it. That's the equation to build wealth. It's pretty basic. We are in control of our financial futures. I discovered that concept early on in life.

That's my YouTube channel. I'd appreciate it if you wanted to subscribe to that and check out some of the videos. I got hundreds of videos up there on personal finance and real estate investing. I've been doing that for a while. Documenting some of my journey. Who am I? I'm 26 years old. I am a self-made millionaire, multimillionaire. I'm a graduate from Western University. If anyone knows the Richard Ivey school of business, I did a degree in finance there.

I retired at the age of 24 and then came out of retirement to build, and I'll get on this in a bit, but to build a huge real estate port or relatively large real estate portfolio. I'll get to that as well in a little bit here. That's a picture of me on the left with one of my daughters and that's my wife. She and I had to clean up one of our rental flip. That was actually a flip, not a BRRRR. We bring our kids right to sight and lock them out of playtime.

I have two kids, I got married young. We've been together almost 11 years, high school sweethearts. I have a blog where I give away free Excel tools and stuff like that. I don't sell any courses or anything, but I give a ton of free coaching every Wednesday. I go live on my YouTube channel for about an hour and a half. People ask questions. They tune on. 50 to 60 people tune in and about a thousand catch the replay. It's a pretty good live stream. I enjoy it a lot for me at this point, people ask what's your motivation? And when can we get into that a little bit more depth and a bit here, but it's a lot about doing what you enjoy and doing it. You're meant to be on this earth.

I think for me, that's giving back and that's like, why I'm here today. It's not really to sell anything or to acquire any investors. I've got lots of investors. I got to wait lists and stuff like that. I'm here to share and I want you guys hopefully to benefit and then grow your own real estate portfolios.

If I give you any value at all on my YouTube channel or my Instagram, or just in general, when you eventually make it, you'll give back to. Hope is that we all help each other kind of reach financial independence and build this movement because I'll tell you something on a Tuesday morning when you wake up and all your friends are at work and no one wants to hang out and do anything. It's pretty boring. It'd be better if there's a lot more people who are financially independent.

Humble beginnings. I grew up with a single mom. My brother and I have two stepbrothers as well. Poverty line type income in Sarnia, Ontario. Maybe you guys haven't heard of Sarnia, Ontario. It's a crappy little armpit of Canada. There's a ton of chemical jobs there, but starting is not bad. I don't know if Cory's here somewhere. I left there at 17 and didn't look back. Didn't even go back in the summers, just it was like I'm moving to London and staying in London. I did that. I had a mindset shift.

I went to Western University and in my first year in the dorms at 17, I uncovered this financial independence movement. I always knew that I wanted to be different from other people cause I had always grown up different and most of my friends had well-to-do lives I didn't. I knew that the cornerstone of happiness was freedom and freedom was related to money because every time we got paid, at the first of the month, life was good. I'm like, okay, money. Some sort of happiness. I thought maybe if I climbed a corporate ladder or something like that.

When I got into the Richard Ivey school of business, which is what I did, I worked really hard to get almost a full ride scholarship to Western. I got 95% on average. I went from like a 70% average to 95% average in my last year of high school to accept program and one of the big exchange to

Africa to build my resume up, I did all the things that you're supposed to do to check the boxes to become that like type a, that they wanted to accept into their program because I thought if I get into this program, I'll get the dream job. I'll be able to climb the corporate ladder and become, I don't know some director or VP or something, be successful and happy, but I started to interview some more.

My first year, I sat down with a few professionals who are like partners, big four accounting firms and the consulting firms and some ibanker guys I sat with and they were rich like they were making $700,000 a year, but they weren't happy. A lot of them had divorces. A lot of them are very dissatisfied in their lives. I need a mindset shift that like this endless consumption and grinding for nothing, like just for stuff, wasn't the deepest meaning for life. That there's more to life than that.

I quickly decided, I'm going to become financially independent. Like this guy just found me. Jacob Lund Fisker who wrote the book, "Early Retirement Extreme", no one follows him now. He pushed all of his followings on to Mr. Money Mustache, people followed him. He came afterwards. He's big in the personal finance space. I sat down and was like, what is the equation of building wealth? I'm like I can't control what I'm earning like I'm already working full. I had a full-time job while I was in university full time. I can't earn anymore.

I don't know how to invest any better than anyone else. I was trading some, I was day trading stocks, 18, 19, trying to do all those programs to build wealth, but that really didn't have. If you only have a few thousand dollars and you make even 50%. It's like a couple of hundred bucks thousand dollars. There wasn't a way to build a lot of wealth quickly, but I could control what I was spending. My second year I went and found a really cheap bedroom and rented for $299 a month. All inclusive, cut my spending way down and just actually started saving money while I was in university. I got Richard Ivey school of business program debt-free. It was just very focused on that, but this is another thing I discovered, one of them was there's a passive income spectrum.

What I thought was at the top of the pyramid was actually at the bottom. Everyone's looking for this active management hustle, which is like this guy making for me. I thought it was this guy making 250,000 or more a year on all these assets, his fancy card, this big house. I thought that was it. Like the guy who had the dream job had the dream life. Then I flipped the pyramid on itself and was like, that's actually the bottom like that. A little bit better than the person who has the bad job, but still has the job. They have no freedom. From degrees of freedom, it's actually at the bottom.

In the beginning of our journeys, we bought properties. We manage our own properties. We manage our own renovations. Maybe we would do some of the renovation work ourselves. We're actively hunting for all of these things. We don't have systems. We don't have my second point in a second here is leverage. I discovered there's outsourcing, which is like you bring in property management or you outsource pieces of your business, but you're still managing your business. It's really not the idea that you can make really big money, but if you're not free, then there's passive partnership but just be on the other side of a business as an investor or another side of a joint venture partnership as the investor.

You guys all know Robert Kiyosaki and the cashflow quadrant and stuff like that. And then there's like private lending, which has even more passive and passive partnership because with private lending, the money comes into your account automatically with partnership. You may have to inquire with your partner, how's the property going. We are already collecting rents. There's even just less work for private lending. The ultimate is actually dividends, but the worst. It's the most passive. As you move up, you get a lower return on your money, but it requires a lot less time.

Time and energy are really important, especially when we only have one life to live. We only have so many hours in our life. That's when I discovered the second concept and I applied these two together to build what was at the time, my 17 year old financial plan of how I was gonna retire at 25. There's six things needed to leverage people. Talk about money. You probably hear that one all the time. You can have one house paid off in full, or you can have five houses at 20% down to the same amount of money, but you'd prefer to have five houses because five houses is a lot more cash flow if you run the numbers.

You want to really leverage your properties. You want to use other people's money. You wanna use the bank's money because it's the cheapest. But then in a series of available capital, you would leverage as much as you can. Next is you want to leverage knowledge. Knowledge is really important. If you don't know what you're doing, you go into a situation where you could buy a building. It can still flip.

I bought properties from people who bought great buildings at great prices, but couldn't make it work because they didn't know how to manage the property. Effectively put bad tenants in it, and made poor decisions. That sort of stuff, results and issues as well. I can do a whole segment actually just on this, but I got to go quicker cause I'm running out of time. There's marketing. You want to leverage the fact that like on YouTube, I can talk to thousands of people at once and it's super easy. It's not embarrassing, like being in front of a room and I'm in my office with the camera and I can edit it and make myself the way I want to look. If I awkwardly pause, I can cut that out.

Networking is really important. It's something I wish people asked me my biggest mistake. It's the thing that I wished that I did early on. You're going to see in a second that I didn't even have a joint venture partner until I was at like 15 properties. Like I did the lone wolf thing, and that was a mistake. It took me a lot longer to get where I want it to go time. Y'all leverage your time, be effective and efficient with your time, leverage your time and other people's time as well. And then systems and technology. I loved the presentation this morning on the systems that technology. I dunno where if they're in the room still, but they didn't really good job with that. That's exactly the same sort of stuff I had to bring into my business to build it up.

I did a video actually on some of this, you can check that out on YouTube, if you want the grind. This slide's about my trajectory from 2010, when I first got introduced to this whole concept to in 2012, when I finally bought the first property. Bought my first property in 2012, lived in it, hacked, and rented out rooms to cover my costs. I guess I just came out of second year university, when I bought my first property, scraped together bank financing, used scholarships, and I was working full time in university to qualify for a mortgage with 20% down conventional.

I used actually student lines of credits to actually have the down payment together and all this kind of stuff. It was really creative at the time. I was super proud of myself for thinking I was doing this great thing. Didn't know anyone in the community that was doing this at all. There were no groups that existed at that time that I knew of that took me a couple of years. I graduated at 21. I worked full-time and was considered as an analyst promoted to senior analyst and then a manager trying to grow the career track to get more mortgages.

That was basically my focus, but I bought a bunch of properties one after another, and learned to BRRRR. I learned I could add value to the property, fix it up, et cetera, and so forth. Discovered there was a way with the three ways to make money in real estate. You guys already know we've covered that this morning that I could make really insane returns. I stopped investing in stocks until everything became super frugal.
Lived with my girlfriend at the time, my wife now. Half of her salary, we lived on that and we house hacked in that original house. We first bought property number one. We're living for completely free because we were house hacking, living on half of her salary, saving half of hers and a hundred percent of mine and reinvesting that real estate and every dollar I made rental income. I reinvested back in real estate.

I was full into reinvesting cause I was super frugal and focused on saving while investing smartly. Those two things powered me. That's awesome. That's like I was biking to work instead of driving. I was doing everything I could to reduce costs and probably a bit extreme if like in hindsight a bit is a bit extreme. Around property 15, I had quit my job. A friend of mine reached out and was like, hey, let's buy some properties together. You're crushing it. Like, how did you build a multimillion dollar portfolio by yourself with a lender? I literally just did Atlanta mortgages for everything.

I didn't know anything about private financing. I just thought you would save the money. Go back to the bank, pull 80% of the loan to value. Buy the next property. Save all the rent, keep going and going. I was just buying smart properties, adding a lot of value, having really great cash flow, one in Ontario, like $1,500 a month per property, a positive cash flow. Built up a portfolio. I was able to retire early and I actually sold 11 properties off shortly after I retired. I think real estate is great. It's a great way to build money. That's a great way to build wealth, but I don't really want to be managing my properties.

I hired a property manager, it went terribly. I fired them, hired another property manager. They did a terrible job for them too. I sold 11 properties thinking I was done. I didn't know about joint venture partnership and just said, this is it. I really got hurt. I went five minutes left and basically took the capital over there. If I was going to be done investing in dividends and a buddy of mine came down and said, let's buy some properties together. I was bored. I was gaming a lot and my daughter had just been born. I needed something for a sense of purpose. I was like, oh, let's buy some properties. That'd be fun. I'm pretty good at that.

I can show you how to renovate. I can teach you. He was like my first mentee. I started a mentorship program. It's a free mentorship program. You have to move in and live with me. It's like full-time immersive, but I have two mentees here today that have four properties and three properties in six months already. That's pretty good. Two things I learned during the first 17 deals by myself and building up this like a million dollar portfolio without knowing anything about networking. Do you know anything about private financing? Any of that? I was just doing it. I was really good at convincing banks to lend me money.

I was good at writing the narrative, the cover letter. I would submit each application, like I built a narrative around me. Geometric partnerships is the first thing that I learned. I like to credit Stefan Aarnio. He wrote a book, "Money People Deal". It's a fantastic book. Check it out. It covers what I was thinking of these thoughts already. He solidified in a pyramid that's even better than what I have, but there's basically three components, every real estate transaction, there's money management and the deal.

I got really good at getting the deal and I was pretty good at managing so I could get my costs much lower than most people. I was good at managing, getting dry well for five, six bucks, getting it shipped to the site and managing trades at $15, $20 an hour, getting cheap costs. I get a ton of value. I was good at taking up space. I didn't want a bedroom and bathrooms and adding a lot of value. I like to take challenges. A couple of buddies challenged, it was like, that's cool that you did this like real estate stuff, but could you actually be like 50 properties in a year?

Having a challenge, a buddy and I started this company where it was like property management, full service and construction. We partnered with people and we created these contracts that were new. They were unlike any contracts that we'd seen before. We had lawyers help us build them where we were like Demetric partners, but it was all fee based. Our 50% of the profit was all fee based and our management fee was flat 15% of rents. It was really good for the investor.

They got way better returns than most 50-50 partnerships and stuff like that. We exploded really quick and we grew way faster than I had expected. I did nine deals in one week. At one point it was like, really fast. We got a lot of people working with us and I was getting like 40, 50 texts a day from all the contractors and people working for us and staff. It got crazy quick, but I learned a lot. Maybe I can do a presentation on some of the stuff that I learned later.

The other thing is creative financing. I learned how to structure deals really creatively with private money, and vendors take back deals. I started learning how to get really creative with deals. That's something that changed everything. I realized that money is actually really easy to get. The hard part is to find really good operators and really good deals.

If you can get those two things down, the mind just comes and then I wanted to we're normally out of time. I'm going to get the last couple of slides here. What are your goals? What do you enjoy and what is your why? That's really important. I think getting into your real estate investing journey, a lot of us get into it to make money, to retire early. I think where you'll find the most meaning. If you're going to go to this game, it needs to be at the intersection of mastery, autonomy and purpose.

Mastery being something you're really good at. Autonomy, being you having freedom of how you control your schedule and purpose being you drive meaning from that, for me, that's mentorship. I have a full-time mentorship program with four full-time people living in the bottom of my I've really nice house. And it has a bottom walkout basement basically is what's going to happen. And these guys live with me and they buy properties. I partner with them. I help them to raise capital. I teach them and that for me is really rewarding.

I don't sell any courses or do anything else, but that for me is like the thing that I'm supposed to be doing, I feel like on this planet. And it turns out that real estate is actually dead simple. That's part of why I'm here today is that it's dead simple, like anyone can do it and I'm proof that anyone can indeed do it. I guess I try to leave some value with every presentation.

I know if I deal one in Ontario right now, a private deal for 179,000 ish for a legal duplex, two bedroom, one side to another side parking. If 1% roll $2,000 a month in rent, you can hit me up on Instagram and give you a reason to follow me cause I post stuff like that all the time. I didn't want to put it on.

There you go. That's the value piece. I leave with my presentation and I hope you guys can follow me on Instagram, and on YouTube. I'll go to the back of people, want to chat about strategies or stuff, and I want a business card. I'm probably over my time limit now.

Sarah: Thank you so much Mike.