Raising a Young Family and Still Succeeding in Real Estate Investing

Kaely and Alex Pal

Alex: Thank you guys so much for having us on. What a great idea with awesome speakers.

Daniel: Always a pleasure to have you guys. We've had you for a live. We've always a pleasure to be around you guys. Alex and Kaely Pal are the owners of Pal Property Solutions, a real estate solutions company located in Hamilton. Although you are now talking to us from Grimsby. They specialized in solving complex real estate matters for the sellers, and then you end the investors as well.

In addition, the company buys and redevelops single or multi-family properties throughout Southern Ontario with the goal of rejuvenating neighborhoods, providing safe, reliable housing, and encouraging home ownership. Your mission is to be the best solution for anyone looking for a turnkey approach to investing in real estate. We know the best solutions while those come from a lot of experience working together. So, tell us about that.

Alex: Going off with the model, I see that's been happening with some of the previous speakers and the kind of reflecting on the DiSC. For those of you guys who are listening, obviously we've all done DiSC. It might be worthwhile to look into it. Kaely and I actually have very similar personalities. I'm actually a high i second D and she's actually a high D second. From a leverage standpoint, when I think about it, our points should actually maybe be reversed, but my background is actually in engineering and more specifically project coordination, project management.

Typically, I deal with more of the numbers, making sure it is all jobs. I deal a lot with the construction coordinating with our contractors, putting plans together and just overseeing the entire projects. Whereas Kaely is more in like the people management side of things. She's incredible in sales. She does our property management as well. She manages people's expectations and if you want to hear somebody talk somebody off of a ledge, sometimes I just sit back and hopefully a year of cause it's pretty awesome.

In terms of leveraging each other's experience, I find that's typically what it is like Kaely has an incredible charisma. I find that she's very easy to talk to. Sometimes more staccato, she'll make the initial connection or build the relationship. When it comes down to like the nuts and bolts that's sometimes when I come in

Kaely: You were definitely more detailed. Thank God. To be honest, to step on that, the understanding who your partner is and what kind of makes them tick, I think makes this process a lot easier. Obviously, the majority of our friends in our social circle are all investors. A lot of them are couples and I think that the process of getting started, if someone's out there, maybe considering it, or wanting to get into investing, having your partner on board, or they don't necessarily have to join you on this journey per se, but they will be a big factor in a lot of the decision-making and obviously a support system.

If you have their buy-in, it makes it a lot easier. I've seen it both ways. Some of our friends have couples, or I should say partners that aren't necessarily involved or have really any interest. I just think that life is a lot easier when you have buy-in from your partner and more enjoyable, to be honest. We also work together 24/7.

Alex: Actually, that brings up the next point, how do you manage to work together? We actually have an office in downtown Hamilton and we literally wake up, we'll get the kids ready, take them to daycare and then we'll meet at the office, work all day together. Talk about what we're going to do for dinner. Come back to our cars, come home and then we're at home together. It's good especially when you have mutual respect, you have a mutual vision.

I think that some people might be like, oh, I could never do that but I think that when you're on this entrepreneurial train where you're actually building something for yourself, it can be incredibly impactful to do that with the one person who is completely on board with building that same vision. You can compare it to any other sort of part business partnership, but we also have things like our kids in mind, our family and mine. A lot of our joint venture partners are within our sphere of influence.

These are people that we know, we care about, friends, these kinds of people. These are all things that affect us and we take very good care of them because at the end of the day, we're in this together and it gives that family element, which I think is very important.

Daniel: What's your vision?

Alex: While we have a couple of different visions from our personal vision, it's generational wealth and it's building something that at the end of the day, we can then live our life by design, not by default. I think that's like the said slogan, creating a legacy. We think a lot about generations to come that maybe we haven't even been graced yet with, but to really create an impact. I think that our vision when it comes to that kind of thing. And then of course our business divisions are to help other people do the same thing, the support of the people.

Daniel: Regrets, any regrets?

Kaely: Oh my God, to be honest, Ontario's real estate market has been great. I don't think that there's a lot of people with a ton of regrets, maybe on properties. My regrets typically center on the ones that we haven't worked on. In all honesty. I think of one in particular that I just, oh, grips me to this day. I drive by it all the time. We had it, we ended up letting it go and we should have. If anything, those are the regrets that I have, but like everyone else, every experience that you've had, and we've gone through the gauntlet, poor, thefts, onsite and construction.

We've had projects go way over budget, way over timeline. We've had nightmare tenants, all that good stuff, you have your battle scars that you can reflect on when you're sitting with other people, having a drink at a table and that makes you the investor you are today.

Alex: They do seem to compound, it's not ever just one thing that happens once in a blue moon. It happens in three or four things happen. I think that's another real benefit to having your partner there. You pick each other up, times are crappy, but at the end of the day, as long as the vision is clear and as long as your trajectory is on the same path, I think that you can start to overlook a lot of the little nuanced things that happen between couples. As long as there's some fundamental things like, you respect each other, you listen to each other and you work toward the same thing.

Daniel: One question that I've been dying to ask the other couples. For some reason I want to ask you. You live together, you're married, you work in the same house and you work in real estate. One of the issues that a lot of people don't realize about real estate is that let's say, you are a clothes designer and you are a fashion whatever. When you get in the car and you drive to the country, you don't see clothes everywhere. You don't see things everywhere.
You can spend a whole afternoon not talking about business, but when you're in real estate, every time you get in the car and I don't care if you drive to the beach, you're driving by houses, for sale sign construction. It's so easy to get caught up in the conversation. The first thing you know, you spend the whole afternoon talking about real estate. How do you guys manage that?

Kaely: We talk about it?

Alex: I think that it comes down to the fact that we are both incredibly passionate about real estate. We're fascinated by real estate. I think that there's a lot to be said for the art of making good deals come together and full disclosure. It is challenging to sometimes set it off. You go for a dinner and you can't help, but be like, oh did you end up finishing that or whatever, it does happen. I think that one good thing for us is that we are also very involved with our kids and stuff like that.

It does give us a little bit of that break and more so recently too, like we've identified this as being something that we want to travel more and do other things. Of course, like we have passions in different areas as well. Like Kaely used to train horses and things like that. I've picked up smoking meats, which is cool. These are things that we are independent within ourselves as well as we can share interests amongst each other as well.

Daniel: One thing that might be helpful there is the fact that your office is I'm sure you have stuff at home, but your office is somewhere else because in our case, When I get out of the bedroom in the morning, I turned right and within two feet, I'm in my office and 10 more feet then I'm in Laurel's office.

Kaely: I love that we have an office that's not at our house. You go to work and you work, you just focus there and then you come home.

Daniel: Thank you guys so much for joining us. We have one more guest and then after that, we're going to open it to networking with some people who may have some questions. If you don't mind sticking around a little bit more.