Professional Insights with our REITE Partners

 

Mel & Dave Dupuis
 
Sarah:
Thank you so much. Our second presenter is Mel and Dave, the investor couple. This power couple acquired over 100 apartments, 24 properties in just a few short years. And 12 of those were purchased with none of their own money. Other people's money and they've actually paid them back even early. So, 11 of the 12 private lenders were paid three years early, which is really cool. They've done this without using any of their own money. They're also the authors of the number one best seller, real estate investing secrets and no BS guide to creating wealth and freedom. And they also have a great mentorship program that teaches people the proven strategies they can implement to achieve success on their own.

Mel and Dave, today, they're going to be talking about how to buy properties in 2021 with none of your own money and using other people's money and no JV partners either, which is really cool. Mel and Dave, welcome, the floor is yours.

Dave: Thanks Sarah.

Mel: Hello everyone. Thank you to the REITE club. Thanks everyone for sticking around and thinking with us tonight. Tonight, we're going to be talking about buying properties, multiple properties, specifically, using that everyone's money and with our joint venture partners and how to do all that. That's what we specialize in. We're going to be sharing our presentation.

Mel: How to buy properties again in 2021, it's around the corner. Let's start talking about 2021 because yes, it can be done even during these difficult times. And we specialize in doing it, using them for our own money. That's what enabled us to scale. So, a little bit quickly about us. Who are we for those of you who are new to us? Dave and I we're from Ontario. We are real estate investors and mentors. We have a best-selling book. As Sarah mentioned, we wanted the 2020 Canadian real estate investing award. And we were continuing to grow a portfolio. We now own over 200 units.

Dave: They're asking us, is now the right time? And literally, we closed a deal yesterday, December 1st. It was a building that had a fire beside it. We've already got deals for January, 2021. Yes, right now is still a good time to buy real estate. We're continuing to buy and we're going to be buying into 2021 as well.

Mel: I want you to have that mindset as well. So, think about yourself here while some people are holding back in fear and not taking action. Others are taking action and getting the results. In 2020 we actually ended up buying over 119 units. And again, we didn't let the pandemic stop us. And these are some of the properties that we purchased this year.

It's absolutely doable. Yes, it's dependent, but this also created, and the reason we're highlighting this is because I want you to realize this also creates a lot of opportunities and we're gonna be showing you the different methods that we buy properties. And we find that during COVID that there were more and more of these opportunities that came our way.

Dave: Especially for off-market deals. And all of these owners were owners that had the building for a while and decided to say, you know what, I'm done. And I don't see that stopping in 2021. So, you'll definitely be able to utilize that in 2021.

Mel: What will you be learning today? The most crucial mindset for successful investors, we're going to talk a little bit about mindset. I know you want to get some good stuff and we will. However, we find that often we only want to crunch numbers, but without the right mindset, you'll never get to where you want to be. So, we will touch on that a little bit. And then of course, we'll get to the good stuff. The blueprint path from zero to hundreds of units, again, a hundred of which was during the crisis based on our examples for you to copy.

Dave: The strategies we utilize to buy it, which is creative financing. We're going to go over a few examples. And in the end, we'll show you how to work with us if you choose to do so or want to do.

Mel: Let's start off with some questions to ask yourself.

Dave: Very serious.

Mel: Do you have properties right now? Yes or no? Simple question. Could you afford to buy one property a month? And feel free to comment because we'll be taking out the comment.

Dave: Be interactive please post yes or no to these questions, because we're going to go back and look after, and please be honest. Do you know where to find it? Yeah, everyone's looking at deals, but where are the good deals and how to find them? Do you know how to determine if it is a good deal? What is a good deal? Anyone can go on realtor.ca and put an offer in, but who knows if it's actually a good deal and do you know how to get financing?
And most importantly, how did you create financing? And w like I said earlier, we'll go over some of those examples.

Mel: Fantastic. And if you answered no to any of these, don't worry because we have certainly been there. We've answered no to these questions many times in the past as well. And we're here to say that, hey, you're not alone. But there's also a way around it as well.

Dave: Be interactive in the chat. We can't see it right now, obviously, but what's been stopping you so far? If you feel comfortable, obviously you don't have to, but what is the reason, why are you not jumping in?

Mel: There's power in identifying this. And just really taking that moment and identifying what has been stopping you. Is it time, maybe you don't have the time you're too busy, kids all that, maybe it's the fear of doing it, the fear of the unknown. Maybe it's money, not having the money. Like how do I know Dave? How do I come up with that 20% down, over and over again,

Dave: Those are the most common of the ones that we do see, is the knowledge, the time, money and fear. Although, fear of all of those. Yeah.

Mel: I can see, there must be some responses, which is awesome because there's power in sharing how we're feeling. Because once we identify what's been stopping us, we can actually address it and start taking action in 2021. So, we absolutely want to make sure we're going to be doing that.

Dave: Another question we get is what's different. What's different about the way you guys do it and why should we do it that way? And Sarah mentioned it we're big on no joint venture partners and there's nothing wrong with joint venture partners. It's just the fact that we have three kids and we don't want to share any of that. We want to give them love.
We're going to share it with the kids, but that's our overall strategy, often legacy. That's why we don't want joint ventures. We want to solve our own problems so we can control them. And technically the kids, they will, one day, tens of millions of dollars in real estate.

Mel: Yes. That's the thing. And we were told that you won't be able to grow quite as quickly. That's also false because, yes we did by the 12 in 12 months. And we continue to grow our portfolio as well.

Dave: Other people's money, we do not use our money. We strive to use OPM all the time to get that infinite return on investment for multi family homes. We have one single family dwelling left. And that was the first one I purchased. So, that's the only one that's left in our portfolio. And instant cash flow, that's what we strive for when purchasing deals.

Mel: Although they are a hundred percent finance deal, so, none of our own money, which means infinite return. Yes, you should be overall. There's some exceptions, but overall, typically you should be aiming for that they used to be getting. I love this triangle. It's so powerful. You might want to jot it down and take a snapshot of it with your phone. You can do this too. To be successful in whichever way you want to go, if you're a joint venture partner. Awesome. That's amazing. But at the end of day, whichever lane you'd want to go if you want to flip, do that where you need all pieces of this triangle and it's very powerful and it's knowledge, action, and resources, and think about it without knowledge.

You're going to make a lot of mistakes without resources. You won't know how to find a deal. You won't have an investor focused accountant or lawyer, all those people, your power team. And without action, you can have all the contexts you want and all the knowledge. But if you don't, do it, you're also not going to achieve success. So, I love this formula. It has certainly helped me through my investing journey. So, when we first started, people thought, hey, you guys got lucky or you guys had it easy, or maybe you grew up in this. No, we have our own story, just like you. We met when we were in our twenties and thirties. I'm a little older.

Dave: I was 25, she was 32.

Mel: We had our own path. When I met Dave, Dave was a full-time firefighter. But before that, we both had it hard. I had a really ill daughter. I got separated in my early days. And I went through a divorce and felt that judgement all the time and all that. I had my own story.

Dave: Same here. I put on a pair of shoes to replicate, my mom's a single mother hairdresser. She went to a teacher's college. So, she was a student while being a single mother. So, again, if we can do it, anyone can, then that's what we want to instill is just the fact. Wherever you started, you can do this.

Mel: If you've been thinking about it, oh I can't, because I don't have context or I grew up poor or I'm a single mom and you know what? We all have our stories. Don't tell yourself lies, because there's absolutely a way through all of that. So, we started off trading time for money. We kept working. I'm taking every shift. We could, we bought a couple properties the traditional way, but then we went on a trip, actually fam vacation, and we read, "Rich Dad Poor Dad" from Robert Kiyosaki.

Actually, we listened through audio and we realized that we were trading. We were doing it all wrong. We were trading our time for money and we're maybe buying one property every year, every second year. And at that pace, I wanted to quit my full-time job. But at that pace, it was impossible. There's just no way we could have ever gone there.

Dave: Why are we telling you this? Because we want you wirelessly. Everyone should read that book, but rule number one, the rich don't work for money. They make money working for them. Again, if you can understand, and if you can learn how to stop trading your time for money and get the money working for you. You're going to be light years ahead.

Mel: As soon as we realized the beauty of leveraging debt wisely and carefully, good debt and buying wisely income producing properties, of course that's when our whole year everything we did changed. And that's when the following year we were able in 12 months and next in 2017. And then the following year, I was able to quit my full-time job and enter the after Dave also quit from his full-time job as a firefighter, leaving behind a pension and all that, but it was doable because of real estate and that's the power of good debt. So, let's talk a little bit deeper into all that now that you have hopefully a little bit more of the mindset and you're throwing these excuses out the window.

Dave: Get into the good stuff.

Mel: One of our strategies is probably our favorite one is owner financing. So, owner financing is when the owner literally becomes part of the bank. Like he or she holds part of the mortgage and it can be done in different ways. The most popular one from our experience has been, I'll start off at the second one. Actually the most powerful one is the second mortgage which would be the VTB.

Let's say you buy property, easy numbers here for tonight because we don't have a lot of time. You buy a property for a hundred thousand dollars. They will hold a VTB, the vendor take-back or it's for $20,000. So, that's how we get into the deal. None of our own money. We go to a financial institution for the first and second mortgage they would hold. They can also have a first mortgage. We've done that as well.

Dave: We're going to have examples. They're going to touch on all three of these.

Mel: We're going to break that down. And then in second, maybe you use promissory notes. You can actually use somebody else's RRSPs as well as fund deals. We've done lots of that. So, there's lots of different ways or some of them, the owner can also hold a hundred percent of the financing.

Dave: Okay, private lending. This is going to be very important to build your portfolio. We secured funds for the first one, so RRSPs for our Canadian friends, 401k for our American friends. And this is just as a heads up. You're going to need to utilize these in the form of a mortgage and the building we're in. Actually, it's not part of our presentation, but the building we're in for example, was the owner who held the first mortgage of 80% loan to value. And the down payment came from a lady from RRSPs second mortgage. Even the cottage, we just bought a hundred percent finance. We use someone's RRSPs.

Mel: Even a single dwelling for those of you who prefer doing single dwellings, the same kind of strategies can be applied. We did it 80% sometimes with RSPs or in this case of this building here, 80% on our finances, 20% RRSPs, we didn't go into a financial institution.

Dave: Isn't that cool? This building hasn't touched a bank. Anyway, that's another example. I sidetracked there. But just keep in mind when you're using secured funds like that, it has to be in the form of a mortgage. It can't be a promissory note or anything like that for the secured funds. Now, the promissory note slash /contractual agreement is exactly that it's a note, it's an agreement.

Mel: That's actually a legal name from a promissory note.

Dave: This is awesome because the more you invest in you and your portfolio, obviously, you're going to show them a particular deal that you're looking at utilizing the funds for, but they're mostly entrusting you. And then the next deal that you're going to be doing, and we use promissory notes or contractual agreements to bridge the gap a lot of the time. Let's say we have a deal. Let's say this deal would have been a little different. It would have been 80%. Owner finance, and let's say they could only do 10% RRSPs. For the second mortgage, that would leave me with a gap of 10%. That's where we would use promissory notes to, yeah, bridge the gap on that down payment to be a hundred percent finance deal.

Mel: That's why it's really creative with the strategies. It's not just one way of doing it. We only did it in one way, we only do owner financing or we only do RRSPs or sometimes it's a combination, as they just explained all three of them. And that's the power of it because if you really want to deal, now you're going to be looking at lots of deals. And are you going to get some nos?

Dave: Yes. Lots of nos.

Mel: Do some deals make no sense? I'd have some finance. Yes, but are the deals out there that make sense? Yes, and do the owners and all that want to do it? Absolutely, and the reason is here note this is a win-win. If all parties involved in a transaction do not win, you should be happy doing the transaction, because you do want to create a long-term relationship with those people, everybody should win. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more as we look at a couple of deals.

Dave: The last one here, mortgages. This could be just anyone, let's say Dave has $50,000 and now it was looking to borrow. I could put a mortgage on the property for that 50,000. Even if it's cash, you could still utilize cash in the form of a mortgage. And the lawyers do all that for you.

Mel: Yes. Let's analyze the deals because we always love doing that of course. This is a seven Plex that we purchased. Now, a couple of things don't pay attention to the purchase price or think that would never fly in my city. This is about the concept that I want you to, again, but I want you to grab it because if it was elsewhere, depreciation would be different and all that. It's all relative. I'm going to work. Keeping members really simple as well for tonight. Just to explain the concept. The purchase price for this one was 430, $9,000.

The financial institution held a mortgage of $329,000. I'm going to stop here for a second because people often say yes, but I tried reaching out to the banks and they don't do this. And all of that, don't go to the big five. They're going to say no aircraft. They're going to say yes. They're going to say no.

Dave: You will have to go to a credit union, mortgage brokers, the lenders, mix, different things like that.

Mel: Are you going to have to pay a little bit more interest? But who cares if the deal makes sense and it's sustainable, it doesn't matter. It enables you to keep the wrong, always think of the bigger picture, especially when using creative financing. The second work in this case, we approached Mr. Owner and we discussed the holding of VTB solar financing, same thing. He held the second mortgage at $109,950. Now, this property is underperforming. Big time, the rents were very low. As tenants switched over.

Dave: A lot of tenants that have been there 12, 15 plus years.

Mel: The tenants switched over some of the units we had to do, some of it was just painting. Some of it we did a little bit more, but if we didn't spend too much, it was more of the basic, painting flooring. It wasn't structural. We got it. We did that. Got it appraised, about two years within two years or so for $790,000. Think about that, "the lift". And the lift is the difference between the purchase price that's here and the purchase price in your appraised value and make no sense. You literally lifted the building. You foresee appreciation up to about $350,200. Then we got a first mortgage at $671,000 and we refinanced it for $231,700.

Dave: $231,700, now again, so, a couple of things here refinance tax-free money. If we had sold it, then yes, we'd be looking at capital gains. We'd be looking at the tax burden here, but refinance is a tax-free event. Now let's look over a couple of the things, because I know it's gonna happen in the questions as well. We did not put how much money we had to put into it, renovation wise. I know that's not in there. We're keeping the example very clean and easy for just overall example purposes. The other thing we also did not include was mortgage paydown on those two or three years, whatever.
Just take that into the bigger picture. And we did bring this to CMHC Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation.

Mel: During COVID, during the crisis. We did the major refinance.

Dave: Exactly. Went through the nuts. They put you through the ringer, like that's AAA financing, right? If you're wondering why the first mortgage is so high, they gave us 85% loan to value. The first deal affects the second deal. The first deal was the second mortgage. Remember we told you we touch on all three examples.

Mel: This is where it is important to make it a win-win. I mentioned that earlier because you never know how that person will help you down the road. Maybe they're going to become a private lender, but listen to this one, how this one gonna work out. It's pretty cool.

Dave: We bought the seven Plex previous and because he held a second mortgage, the portion that he received from the credit union for the first mortgage, he turned around and paid off this building completely. And why is that important to you or to this scenario is because now he was able to hold a first mortgage which helped us. He was the first mortgage, but he was not only the first. He allowed us to buy this one with a hundred percent finance. That's how we're touching on all three examples tonight.

This fiveplex here. We purchased it for $312,080. The same owner. He was a teacher. He didn't have much extra time. It was no longer his passion. Great guy, we still talk to him. I was a private lender with us, but performance. That's why we bought it for $312,080. First mortgage, a hundred percent finance. After some TLC, we get the rents up 10 and change over, make some cosmetic changes to the building, again, the new appraisal. And it's not like we used a little appraiser that we know we use co-leaders intranet.

They're the ones who did the Canada post refinances writer appraisals. They're a nationwide appraiser, so it's not like we had them in our back pocket because I know that's going to come up in the questions as well. Try to get ahead of your questions before you ask them.

Mel: You won't get to pick. If you know somebody got picked. I can do a little trick. I always wanted to be an ethical professional and not moral as well.

Dave: Here, the lift of $267,920 and then the new first mortgage, this was another one through CMHC 85% loan to value, which we got a tax-free wherever they tax-free a refinance of $180,920. So, these two examples touch on all three, right? The first one had a second mortgage from the old. A fully financed deal. He did the down payment, the second building, he held a first mortgage, which also happened to be a hundred percent finance. And that's how you can do it. Whenever an owner, even if they're not going to hold a hundred percent finance.

If they are holding a first, they cannot, or they have to have their mortgage paid off because they think they can have a mortgage with Scotia and then go try and go put another first mortgage that doesn't fly. So, keep that in

Mel: Yes. Now, exit before you enter, if you've been following us, teach people all the time, exit before you enter. Now, this is exciting. You might think, hey, I want to do it this way, but we got to slow down a little bit because you always need to know your exit strategy before you enter a deal. And what's an exit strategy? How are you going to pay back the lender? And you need to know this ahead of time. This is about creating long-term wealth for yourself. Not about just buying properties and then getting stuck.

It's really important to do exactly that Dave and I, we had met with people across Canada. Who lost their portfolio who were doing these kinds of strategies off their portfolio. When we found out what they were doing wrong. And it essentially, it all came down in different ways, but it all came down to their exit strategy. You have to make sure if you're going to do this, you've got to look at your numbers and you absolutely need to make sure that you know how you can pay them back before you enter the deal. If you want to ensure, set yourself up for long-term success.

Dave: One thing that we cannot stress enough, that if you're going to take one thing from the exit strategy, do not touch a scent of private cent or owner financing., If you don't know how you're going to pay it back.

Mel: Yes. Now, what do you need when using creative financing? You need to make sure that you have some things like funds at backup rights, pay for lower fees, deposits, non-payment of rent and all of that. You also need education, and make sure that again, you get educated on it. And speaking of knowledge, of course. As Sarah mentioned, we do have a mentoring program and we never used to mentor people. It was a life changing date event that hopped in a while back. That's when we decided to help other people achieve financial freedom.

That's me. And that's our SUV. Dave and I were in. It was caused by a transport driver. Yeah. In front of Canada's family, people always ask us, why do you guys do this? Where are you giving back to the community? Because we are on a mission to help people because it is doable. There's nothing special about Mel and Dave here. We just took action. And see, these are some of our students. You might recognize Francois of the REITE club from Ottawa and exactly other properties as well that they purchase. Heather purchased three properties in three months and OPM more properties.

If you're looking to reach out to us. You can absolutely do that. We have an aid and mentoring program. We're going to show you how to find deals, how to create a financing manager properties with over 120 videos. It's a live mentorship where we give daily access, you get daily access to us inside of private Facebook groups. You can ask us questions and we also go live every single week. It's a high access level course as well. And you can ask us an unlimited amount of questions as well.

And to reach out to us. Here's our final slide. I know our time, I have two minutes left and we'll wrap it up at speed and get up there. If you are interested in finding out more. We're going to open up the full nights only after the REITE club session.

Absolutely. www.iamreadytoinvest.com. We're giving away a thousand dollars to REITE club members right now. If you're looking to take some action, if you want to get started now, so that way you can set off 2021, are you going to make sure to write that www.iamreadytoinvest.com.
Thank you so much, everyone. We'll stick around.

Sarah: Amazing. Thank you so much.