Podcast Transcription
Erwin Szeto [00:00:06] Hello, wealth hackers, and welcome to another episode of The Truth About Real Estate Investing show. My name is Erwin Szeto bring you exactly that. The truth about real estate investing, and we have a doozy in this week’s episode. Something really hardcore. I know for the last few weeks we were less hardcore, but this week is hardcore Real Estate. That is, as we talk to real estate investor specifically, she’s a multifamily expert in Sarah Copeland. Before we get to Sarah, I wanted to wish Happy Birthday to my partner in business and life care team. That’s my wife. She’s a superwoman. How she raises our kids keeps me and my businesses in order. She actually told me once that my accounting bill would be around 10000 a year. Good Lord, and she has her own thriving practice. Quick, funny story about Cherry while she was still working in corporate. We were dating then and she would serve the MLS at work. When bored, she was already interested in investing in real estate before ever meeting me, but at the time she only owned her own property after getting to know my business. We discussed investing in a student rental near Brock University. This is back in 2012, so we were talking about potentially buying an investment property together near Brock University in St. Catharines. My credit wasn’t great at the time, as I was a newer agent for those who don’t know if you’re self-employed. You typically have to have two years average of income as proof of income when you’re qualifying for mortgages, as I was newer. My income wasn’t there yet to get my own mortgage, plus already had a few of the mortgages anyway. Cherry was going to be on both title and mortgage for this property without me anyway, so I called her while she was at work. One day after I found a house in our target location next to the only major mall in St. Catharines that doubled as both a mall major employer has a great food court. It also doubles as a major public transit hub, with busses pretty much from all over the city that come there and take you to places like the university, including an express bus. We paid the owner exactly what she was asking for. When discussing when we were negotiating purchasing the price, a funny thing is I thought we overpaid you anyways. We weren’t in a great position to negotiate because she was already having discussions with listing the property with a realtor over location and condition of the property was a plus. Any investor in my shoes would want the exact same house because the projected annual rents would be over one percent over the near post renovation value of the house. Again, Cherry never saw the house, and she didn’t see it until after we took possession and she was happy with our purchase, of course. The funny part was it wasn’t until years after while we were reminiscing about the property, you know we were joking about, we’re now married, of course. At the time, we were then married and how she trusted me to buy a property that I’ve seen. And I was just her boyfriend at the time, and I don’t think we’ve been dating for over a year at that point. She wasn’t concerned. Her contingency plan was if things don’t work out between us, she technically owned the house, and she’s right. So seven years ago, back in 2012, no different than our lives. There were bumps along the way. That basement flooded years ago. If you guys remember when all the Toronto flooded, Calgary flooded just like a month before that, when the river that runs through Calgary overflowed in Toronto. I remember seeing images on the news how there was a water snake inside to go train so back whenever it was that bad flood. The flood was probably four or five years ago now that our basement flooded as well. Thank goodness for our insurance. They covered everything. It only cost us about a thousand bucks for our deductible. We had a student who snowboard off of our roof. It was a bungalow, so it’s not that hard to get up on the roof, but I don’t know what he was thinking. Sometimes kids are crazy. This kid was on ODSP. Nonetheless, that’s disability. This kid was on disability. If you’d managed to snowboard off my roof, you wonder how he got on disability. But otherwise, it’s been an excellent investment. The property has more than doubled in value. It provides us a very good amount of cash flow. The rents have gone up and the whole time even known we’ve had zero vacancy the whole time. Knock on wood, knock on wood. If you buy smart things, good things happen again. Happy birthday to my wealth, hacker wife to infinity and beyond. Together on the subject of real estate, a kind gentleman who left a five star review in iTunes asked me this. My commute is two hours and I’m taking courses to become a licensed Real Estate professional audiobooks, which you recommend. So my answer? My two cents. There’s a book called If you’re not first, you’re last my grand. What I believe is for people wanting to become reality professionals, which is a licensed real estate agent. Most of your good at whatever it is you already do. So what have you studied in school, whatever your current career is? For most, though, they haven’t done any sort of sales training. So again, this book, if you’re not first, you’re last is mainly a sales book by Grant Cardone, and it actually forms the teachings of the sales training that’s available in Cardon University that sells for a lot of money. Hence, you can tell there’s a lot of value in that book. I generally find we can all improve our sales skills. Sales is not what most people think it is. The vast majority of salespeople out there don’t take the profession as serious as folks. You and I would do. It’s really no different than how an amateur investor versus in real estate versus how professional does. Right, right. If you’ve ever been a secret shopper, as you remember being a tenant, so many of you have been tenants before. Think of how your landlord ran that business versus how you would run it. Think about all the times you’ve been inside a rental property, your friend’s rental property, or looking at houses for sale or existing rental properties versus if you’ve seen anything in my client’s own, you know it’s there’s a big difference. Professionals invest more time and effort and money and capital into their properties to attract the best tenants who pay the best rents. Knowing that tenants all want something as clean and safe, investing more also means time and effort in marketing and screening tenants. If you read about tenant nightmare stories in the news, you’ll note that the landlord never ran a credit check on a person or a neighborly report. You all know the Hoops must jump through to get a mortgage. Wouldn’t it be advisable to screen tenants? Similarly, as a bad tenant is very expensive and you’re trusting them with a half a million dollar asset? Usually some of them, some of you are buying even more expensive properties. If you’re looking to get started on becoming a wealth hacker, someone on the most efficient path to building wealth. Let us know. We offer property tours, so you will see actual properties that we invest in ourselves and also some of our own properties and our clients properties. And we offer these tours and pretty much every town in and around the GTA where there’s good opportunity. We actually have upcoming tours in Brantford and Collingwood. We have the Wealth Hacker Conference on November 9th, a master class in the most efficient paths to success in small business, real estate and stock options. Go to wealth hacker dossier from our details. My discount code is I am a wealth hacker. That’s all one word. No spaces, and it’s not case sensitive for those who are very serious about their exercise. We have our membership group called Erwin short for Infinity Wealth Investment Work. We are a close knit group that meets monthly to share best practices on investing in real estate, staying up on the latest strategies we meet quarterly as well for a Mastermind Island style. That’s what I call it. We do something fun together. Then we mastermind over our meal, and this usually takes at least more than half a day. So far this summer, we did at Niagara Wine by tour and then a separate event on powerboats, on two powerboats, on a lake up north. Both were followed by lunch and everyone had amazing time networking with likeminded people and coming away with actionable advice for details on Erwin. You can go to infinity. Well, that’s here again. That’s infinity. Well, that’s you. Hunt this week’s guests. My friend, who is a member of my own mastermind group, my mastermind group includes folks who’ve been on past guest on the show. You can tell that are pretty successful folks such as REIN Carr and Susan White. Anyways, Sarah Copeland of Tech Properties, you can check her out on Tag Properties Dossier Sarah Series, a successful multifamily real estate investor, and she’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. In this interview, she took our virtual meeting from her cottage afforded to her by her real estate businesses not only the money to afford it, but also the lifestyle where she currently only works about 15 hours a week actively on her business anyway. Sarah invests mostly where she lives in Cobourg, Ontario, and she owns several small multifamily properties. She also invests, you know, within half an hour or so of Cobourg. Sarah shares how she got started and how her then boyfriend, now husband, had to help her renovate her house if he wanted to see her. Yay! Free labor. She shares how she sources properties off market, often buying the properties no one else wants for the best value add strategies. Sarah actually owns a property management business to operate her own business, and also that’s where a lot of her leads come from off market deals. She says some crazy stories of police raiding one of her rental properties, her cap rates, and she shares how she structures her financially, her joint venture, her joint venture agreements with her partners. That’s all I’m opening because a lot of people don’t share this information, and that’s what we’re trying to get from interviewing guests on this podcast. So give us a listen. If you’re interested in investing in wealthy families, all right.
Erwin Szeto [00:09:01] Enjoy how many of your properties you buy on American personal market.
Sarah Coupland [00:09:05] Most of our multiples have been on market.
Erwin Szeto [00:09:07] Oh, interesting.
Sarah Coupland [00:09:09] So there well, there was one. The 12 plex that we bought was kind of off market. It had been on the market and then it was off market. And so I reached out a couple of years after initially going to see it to see if it was still for sale. And it just happened to be that they had this little data that are willing to still sell it for the same price that they were looking at years before.
Erwin Szeto [00:09:26] So that was a couple of years after it was delisted. Yeah, wow.
Sarah Coupland [00:09:31] Yeah, oh no. In the sorry. And then I bought a six plex off market high cycle through my properties and think what I was going to market.
Erwin Szeto [00:09:37] I know it’s hard. Susan was the best that she had no idea what the property showed. So you’re in the company?
Sarah Coupland [00:09:44] Yeah, I wholesale an off market deal. I didn’t buy that one. I’ve wholesale more than I’ve actually bought off market. I think so.
Erwin Szeto [00:09:52] That’s a good question, because I don’t think we’ve asked that many times. How do you go about making a decision to wholesale versus to keep yourself?
Sarah Coupland [00:09:59] It kind of depends on what we have going on at the time. So. There was this one property that I really, really, really loved, and it was in Trenton and it was a 14 unit complex that was a complete disaster. And the price was right and it was like on the water and it had these four duplex cottage style units. And then it had had a larger multi-unit building as well and actually took a few joint venture partners through it. And at the same time, I took my husband and some of my Renault team through it, and they were all thinking that I was absolutely crazy for wanting to buy a car because it was really, really rough. She was a friend of mine. Yeah, like, it was a great deal. The price reflected; I can’t even remember what the price was right now. I have to pull it up. But after renovation value, like the majority of the units, the 14 units were vacant. I think three were occupied. So you could just go in and start doing the Renault, and it was a big, big job. I believe the person I wholesale it to was still working on it a year and a half later. But the forced depreciation that’s going to come from it, from actually going through and renewing it and increasing the rent. It’s a fabulous property. And at that point, I took a couple of potential JV partners through. And that’s the thing. When you’re working with JD, sometimes they don’t see the same sort of vision. Like, I see these really rundown decrepit buildings and I think, Wow, this is a great opportunity, and I know that my wife can handle it, and I know that we have the skills and expertise to be able to carry out that kind of rental. But multiple times I have taken JVs through these multi-unit properties that are these big projects and they don’t like them, and it kind of it seems too risky for them. So what I try to do now is do those big, scary kind of projects on our own and position ourselves so that we can do them on our own versus trying to find jobs for them because not everybody has the same sort of I don’t see it as too risky, but other people see it as riskier than perhaps what I do. And then at that particular time as well, I could have kept trying to work the deal on our own. But at the same time, we had an opportunity. I saw a presentation. I can’t remember who it was, but they did a presentation on your return on lifestyle versus return on investment. And I thought, OK, I could put my own money into this project and we could just buy it on our own, which my husband was like, I don’t want any part of it because it’s a lot of work, and he could see himself just being there forever. Or I could take the return on lifestyle. So I actually bought this place where I am right now. We bought our cottage instead, so I wholesale that deal to somebody who also has a renovation team and can kind of handle that sort of a project. And so I still I made money on that deal and I wholesale it. And then I took my money instead and I bought my cottage, so I took the return on lifestyle. So that kind of was the deciding factor on that one. Sometimes I am not necessarily in a position to close quickly or I have multiple opportunities on the go at a time. And so I kind of pick and choose what is sort of more suitable for me and then I’ll wholesale like I wholesale. The six plex, one of my clients, was selling so quite often I get wholesale deals or I get private deals that come to me through my property management company where my clients are actually looking to sell. And so they come to me first because I always say, Hey, if you’re going to sell me and then if I don’t purchase, then I’ll wholesale that off. And usually, if I have something else on the go or if it’s like, really quick, I’ll all wholesale it to an investor who can perhaps put their stuff together quicker than I can because I’m not always up to date on my taxes or so on that kind of stuff.
Erwin Szeto [00:13:30] So I’m sure some listeners are thinking this how can they get ahold of you if you want to be persistent acquiring a wholesale?
Sarah Coupland [00:13:38] I would say my email, my phone service. I don’t I don’t have an investing website up yet, and I know I’m kind of slacking on that project. Yeah. So my property management website is just Typekit properties. So PR LP that’s, you
Erwin Szeto [00:13:58] know, who are driving will have your own website. Sarah, can you show us for your place?
Sarah Coupland [00:14:05] Sir, although I didn’t prepare to show it to you, maybe not as tidy as I would want it to be, but
Erwin Szeto [00:14:12] this just shows the view
Sarah Coupland [00:14:13] this is that is really the
Erwin Szeto [00:14:17] view, OK, there’s a large
Sarah Coupland [00:14:18] rotation around so you can see so this is your living room and you see it. I can’t. I can’t see what you can
Erwin Szeto [00:14:26] do about it.
Sarah Coupland [00:14:29] Okay, because I show you my ceiling. OK, so this is my living room, the main floor. It’s huge. It’s huge. It’s basically house. So this is our dining area, large TV room. I don’t see we play cards or we’ll eat dinner here, but we spend most of our time outside of the living room. I’ll take you outside. It actually has been thunder storming all day and you take my keyboard off because this has totally thrown me off.
Erwin Szeto [00:14:54] It’s a nice weather for anyone who’s listening. This is all for YouTube as well through anywhere.
Sarah Coupland [00:15:00] Yes. So this is my favorite part. So and so this is our little sunset dock. So we swim out here or unicorn got left over by the storm. But so we have two hundred and forty feet of water from this task. So lucky this way, we do it.
Erwin Szeto [00:15:17] So instead of instead of buying that place, find that 14 Plex, you bought this instead? It did.
Sarah Coupland [00:15:25] Yeah, so I bought this place instead. So we’re basically spending the whole summer here, and I work from here remotely in the mornings, usually each day. And then we hang out in the office all day. We have company up every weekend. So this is the other side of our property and we have a little beach down here. So my daughter’s coming down. We’ve got like sand toys and my husband has a goose deterrence, a water sprayer thing on it. Also, we got geese up on our property. This is a
Erwin Szeto [00:15:54] first on the show where it’s been sprayed with water
Sarah Coupland [00:16:01] by the citrus. So there’s my boat house. It got a little beat up over the winter. The ice floe kind of pushed it in. There’s wing jet ski or jet ski and then a little beach waterfront. So and then there’s our cottage from here. We have a two car garage here, two, which is pretty cool, so we turned it into a games room, so it’s got two darts and ping pong and a whole bunch of other stuff in there. It’s pretty cool.
Erwin Szeto [00:16:25] People are laughing on stream
Sarah Coupland [00:16:28] because I got sprayed by the sprinklers.
Erwin Szeto [00:16:31] These are the trees that I Real Estate massive. Massive because I’ve been recommended for similar grow vegetables in their garden. You have a motion detector for your hose, right?
Sarah Coupland [00:16:45] Yeah. So we got there was one morning I woke up here and we had about 30 geese on our property because they there really aren’t a ton of grassy cottages. I guess it’s a lot of cliffs or a lot of like forested area. So they all they come up on our beach and then they were like spread out over the whole place, like 30 of them. And I was like, Oh my gosh, there’s so many things. It was so cool. And then I walked out in our whole yard, was covered with use poo, and it was disgusting and it just seemed to clean it all up. So now we’re trying different two different ways to actually get rid of them.
Erwin Szeto [00:17:20] So that’s exciting to thing with the landlord application, with the landlord to give access of dog poop on our property and do the same thing. It’s a health problem. The problem is it doesn’t it doesn’t it doesn’t differentiate between humans and dogs, so we’d be closing your tenant faster. So maybe bad idea
Sarah Coupland [00:17:42] or yourself if you show up at the property and forget that it’s there.
Erwin Szeto [00:17:48] This is funny. So I actually love that you brought that up because I’ve been using what I call a return on grief. You set your timer, return and lifestyle. Very, very similar things. I think when I was more like more in the moment, there wasn’t that big, bigger something, but supposedly some of those are similar. I think a lot of investors forget that the lost in the spreadsheet and the opportunity to mute, forgive for the commute, they always got into the Real Estate. So we would have this. We could stop commuting Erwin with that property for you, supporting, you know, valuable to our friends.
Sarah Coupland [00:18:20] It was about an hour and we typically do that 20 minutes of where I live. I don’t have a single property that I have to drive further than 20 minutes where, except for this place, we rent this. Lease it on Airbnb. But we have people up here who take care of stuff, so I don’t actually ever have to drive here unless I’m going to stay here. So, yeah, twenty minutes like I invest in Port Hope, Cobourg, Coburn, all of my properties are really super close and you can hold the car together in 20 minutes. I don’t want to have to commute super far, although I am starting to look at possibly purchasing multi units in other areas that are a little bit further away. But I think I would only buy multi units out of my area because then I would have to live in super, who would be on site, who could be my person there. So I don’t actually ever have to go there except for maybe occasionally.
Erwin Szeto [00:19:05] But for those who don’t know what are the economics of a super building size, do you start?
Sarah Coupland [00:19:11] And so we do things a little bit differently with the super so
Erwin Szeto [00:19:17] motion and all over the map. I’ve seen supersonic boom the building.
Sarah Coupland [00:19:20] Yeah, yeah. And so I don’t I don’t necessarily like the traditional form of superintendent, and I kind of ran into this when because I had a number of clients who had larger buildings, who had superintendents and so great their hallways were cleaned and they had somebody on site. But Supers are not necessarily going to be good tenant relations people. Right? So what I was finding again and again, these people were coming to me looking for, OK, hey, I’ve got this problem. I’ve got this issue. Can you help me or my super is picking terrible tenant, but we need help. So they didn’t necessarily need full property management for my property management company, but they needed some help because they had a bit of a bit of pain going around their tenant relations sort of stuff. So what I figured is I’m like, well, the traditional form of super where they do everything I think is not realistic because if they’re great at maintenance, integrated cleaning, they’re probably not experienced in tenant selection and having good relations with your tenants as well. So the way that I’ve kind of structured it with my buildings and also with the buildings that we do full management on is that our supers are only responsible for hands on stuff. So like my 12 Plex, for example, are super there. We pay him a lump sum a month that we don’t give them any sort of discounted rent because we want to make sure that they’re paid for what they actually do separately. And he’s responsible for cleaning all of the common areas. He cleans our laundromat. He use the lint on the dryers. His phone number is on the wall in the laundromat. So if there’s any issues people call him, they don’t call me or a property management company. He delivers notices for us, social apartments, smoke alarm checks, but he doesn’t actually do anything with our tenants. Our property management company handles all of the tenant relations stuff so that our screening process is being carried out the way that we want, and we’re selecting good tenants that fit with our profile. So I’ve rolled that out with the other larger buildings that we manage over time. I’ve been able to sort of convince the owners that, you know what, you don’t necessarily need to pay all of this money for a super like. We had somebody with a twenty four unit building and they were giving their supers five hundred dollars a month rents, and then they were also paying them on top of that. And so that actually equated to, I think they were making about a thousand dollars a month supers, and they weren’t necessarily doing a super fabulous job. So we switched it over now where there’s somebody in that building who gets 300 bucks a month for doing all of the cleaning and being kind of like a person on site. And then we take care of everything else. So it sort of helps. It sort of helps it flow a little bit better because we’re managing that, we’re managing the super to make sure that everything is done appropriately. But we’re also doing what we do best, which is tenant relations. So it kind of works. It really nicely. Interesting. But like, I don’t have superpowers in my six Plex’s like we have a cleaner on staff who is in there every week or every other week. So she kind of keeps an eye on the building and then our office takes care of all the tenant stuff. The 12 Plex, it’s 20 minutes away and so I hate driving. So for 12 Plex and especially it has a laundromat as well. So we have a super there and he does all the cleaning and everything. But yeah, I’d say anything, probably eight. Or bigger, maybe have somebody who’s kind of on site for you.
Erwin Szeto [00:22:33] Fascinating stuff about in the first effort of how you broke for all super. You’ve really narrowed their focus rather than most supers I’ve seen. They usually have a very broad job.
Sarah Coupland [00:22:44] Yeah, yeah. And ours, it’s very it’s like you just do this and we take care of all of the relations sort of stuff, because then you run into like superintendents like conflict and relationship issues and you’ve got somebody living in the building who’s telling other people what to do and sometimes they portrait, then you want to make sure that everybody is doing what they need to be doing. But at the same time, there’s a certain level of customer service that we still like to provide, right? So keep everybody doing what they’re good at and it all works out really smoothly, isn’t working really well that
Erwin Szeto [00:23:14] way, everyone else working in a building to buy. And I met the super issues a small, elderly Eastern European woman like they never turned face in her accent. And she was very short with people. And when people called her the super Nazi, so your client relations person?
Sarah Coupland [00:23:35] Yeah, not somebody that you want to, especially if you’ve got really good tenants like she might be a good person. If you have like if you’re buying a building and you have tenants who are not necessarily the profile that you want, maybe having Sandy short her, it’s OK to deal with people like that. But not everybody who would be a good super is necessarily good relations
Erwin Szeto [00:23:53] to reality shit. So she touched repeated back here and people are fast and call people out of their therapy, whatever wearing muddy shoes, right? So a lot of these walls are carpeted, for example. So that’s something that deserves to be called.
Sarah Coupland [00:24:05] If we have my one super, he kind of goes above and beyond a little bit and he’ll go and knock on people’s doors and be like, and I’m like. And then we get complaints. It’s like, so-and-so is harassing us about this, and I’m like, Well, you shouldn’t be doing that. But at the same time, he should come through less than our office should be. Calling them right at our office will contact them as opposed to him having to deal with it. But I think he can’t help himself. Sometimes he’s like, Oh, you’re not doing that, you should be. And he goes and knocks on the door. Let us handle that.
Erwin Szeto [00:24:30] All of those people on my team, people have a sense of right and wrong. Strong sense of REIN.
Sarah Coupland [00:24:36] Oh no, it’s wonderful having him because he reports everything to us, but sometimes he feels he should take things in his own hands because we want to keep the peace
Erwin Szeto [00:24:44] as often with the fucking managers, typically just like right and wrong. Yeah. So what’s the need you do? You must sorry. Where do you live
Sarah Coupland [00:24:53] in this city? I live in Cobourg. I live in Cobourg. So we’re about an hour and a half two hours east of Toronto in the little village in Northumberland. So it covers a little town, beautiful beach river, eighteen thousand people. I grew up there is just little, so I invest in Cobourg. Port Hope is the town just west of us. And then Colburn is two towns east of us. So it’s very small town investing. And I think that because of the size of where we live, we’ve had to get really creative with what we do like. We don’t just stick to one strategy we do. We look at a variety of different opportunities. If I just waited for my One strategy to have properties available and then I might be waiting a while. So we’re kind of positioned with our learning and what we do to be able to take advantage of various different opportunities as they come up because we’re in a small town. So it’s not like we have our pick of our pick of investment properties.
Erwin Szeto [00:25:48] REIN for another side of it is that you seem to be able to do more transactions than most investors are for transacting in much bigger cities. It seems to be. Maybe it’s just because there’s more eyes on the bigger cities, more chasing the same thing versus, like I said, you’re able to uncover deals which are much higher frequency.
Sarah Coupland [00:26:07] Yeah, and it’s actually interesting, and I think that you’re right about that. My friend Michael, he actually pulled a report of investment properties that had sold and this was a few years ago. And to see who’s buying, who’s buying property in this area and my name was the only name that showed up on Earth. So there are not a ton of investors in my area who are just buying stuff up. I’m my biggest client, so my property management company, we were professional investors and I think that small town there’s not as many opportunities per se, but there’s fewer people taking advantage of them like that 12 plex that I was talking about that I bought. And actually, I’m going to look at it as brought in as a consultant for people from Toronto who were looking to purchase it. And I was brought in as a property management consultant. At that point, I wasn’t buying Multi, so I wasn’t really interested in it myself at the time, and it sat on the market. I think for, oh gosh, probably a couple of years anyways. And then nothing happened. They pulled it off the market. And then a couple of years later, when I contacted them, it was still there because I think investing in this little village of grass or of Colburn its population, I think like five or six thousand people like it’s teeny. And I think that it scared people because, you know, some of the big organizations are like, Here are the top 10 best places to invest and you need transportation and you need this and you need that. So a small. A town like that is not necessarily something that a lot of big investors will recommend, but we’ve done really well with it. We picked up a 12 Plex four five, maybe five and I got him to throw in the laundromat. I said, I’ll give you the asking price, but I want the laundromat. And he was like, OK, cool. About two hours. And now, in two and a half years, we renovated six or seven of the nine residential units and have updated our laundromat. And I just had it appraised for one point one, two million and we bought it two and a half years ago. So the opportunities are there in the smaller towns. I think that maybe they’re just not as scary as people think, like we’ve done very well with it at cash flows, tenant profiles a little bit different, but you go into it kind of expecting it
Erwin Szeto [00:28:14] and just thinking out loud. But with the small towns, the cost of labor can start well. Definitely, the cost of materials with trucking is not. That will be the same as anywhere else. So the replacement cost of your buildings are so extremely high. They’re just going to build it. Felt like so much of that cost you. Plus land, right? I have no idea. Yeah, I really think everyone wants to get into that now. So when you have pretty high barriers of entry and while people are still coming to the area to live properly, could.
Sarah Coupland [00:28:40] Yeah, like we the price that if you look at say, I don’t know, like what you’re in. Hamilton What would a 12 flats and Hamilton Profits
Erwin Szeto [00:28:47] 12 like be 50 million? Sorry. It could be a lot of easily be an underground unit. Easily. Yeah, it’s a bigger units. How big of a two bedroom?
Sarah Coupland [00:28:56] Most of them are two bedrooms.
Erwin Szeto [00:28:58] Yeah, so that could easily be 150 units easily. It’s really nice. Way more 200 a unit. And then you doing cap rates. Are you a buyer in tough races for your acquisition process? Yeah. Do you live near here?
Sarah Coupland [00:29:12] We’re usually getting between five and seven.
Erwin Szeto [00:29:15] Wow. That’s still quite low for a small city here. Four or five did it with lies actually where we’re into it? What lies have you seen in advertising efforts? Well, they
Sarah Coupland [00:29:30] don’t include all of this stuff, right? So I’ve got like my spreadsheet and it’s like, OK, like they don’t include snow removal. Garbage removal, don’t
Erwin Szeto [00:29:38] have no, you don’t
Sarah Coupland [00:29:39] have those don’t happen.
Erwin Szeto [00:29:41] I’ll take care of that.
Sarah Coupland [00:29:44] Yeah. So people can put the numbers, however, however they like, right? And it’s and that’s why we have to ask for a lot of supporting documentation when we’re purchasing because like, I want to know exactly what you’re paying for everything. And then we also factor in kind of through our experience. All right. So you’re putting down say you’ve got Joe blow down the street, cutting your grass, you put an X amount, well, I’m going to probably have my company that’s doing it. They do all of our properties. So I go and I change it up and I put in my own costs as well. If somebody has some kid cutting the grass versus if you’re going to use a professional company, it’s a little bit different. So knowing what the actual cost of things are versus what they’re giving you is really important too.
Erwin Szeto [00:30:24] Where did you get your spreadsheet? You saw yours and resources. I took less when they’re when they’re taking on any sort of something this big versus a uterus.
Sarah Coupland [00:30:34] Yeah. So I have various different spreadsheets that I’ve kind of created over time. So well, because it’s all different, it all depends, right? So I have spreadsheets for buy and hold rental properties, and then I have spreadsheets basically. Like, if we’re going to do a rental, we’re going to convert something and then do a rental. What does it look like if we sell it? What does it look like if we keep it? What does it look like if we bring in a JV partner? So usually when I analyze a deal, I start with my main spreadsheet where I am put everything and then I copy it like a whack at times and I go through all the different sort of scenarios. And then that’s sort of how you’d ask before. Like, how do I decide if this is something I keep or if I wholesale? I have a minimum return on my money that I need before I put anything of my own into it. If it’s a very complicated sort of deal, then we’ll try and keep it ourselves. But again, it has to be worth our while. So it works out like my return, my return on our own money invested. And then we kind of go from there as to what does it look like if we bring in partners, which is it look like if we sell it or refi it or whatever? So for my Maltese, it’s honestly a very, very simple spreadsheet. Well, and then we look at projected rents versus what the rents are because there’s upside like when you’re buying multi-unit properties, you don’t buy for cashflow today. And that’s maybe one of the biggest tips that I could give people. You’re probably not going to cashflow. So like the 12 flex that we bought, it was about two and a half years ago. We haven’t taken a single penny out of that building and we didn’t expect to when we bought it because it didn’t have a number of repairs like we’ve had to replace all the windows in this old century place. So even though the value has gone up considerably, we’ve also put a ton of money into it. We haven’t had to pay for any of our own pockets because our cash flow is all gone to that and we’ve been doing the renovations as money comes in and we pay for it out of the proceeds of the property. But I know, like you hear some people even like with duplexes, they’re looking for like two fifty to five hundred a month in cash flow. You don’t buy a multi-unit initially for cash flow. Typically, if you don’t like don’t bank on getting anything, so we keep a reserve of ten thousand, so we keep a reserve of ten thousand because you don’t know what’s going to come up and then anything over that we put back into the building once the building is fully and completely where we want it to be. We would normally refi and then we can pull out money. And that’s kind of how we would get paid is through pulling out equity, which is great cause you don’t pay tax when you call it equity. So that’s kind of where you get your flow of money for multi units is when you actually do the refi. We’re not refinancing right now. I’m actually buying my partner out of that one because he’s decided that he wants to move along. So we’re technically refining and then I’m going to own it completely. So, yeah, you don’t buy them for cash flow, but you’re looking at the upside. So for example, if your rents are under market, which often they are like if you’re getting a good deal on a multi and any time I buy a house, I want to be getting a good deal and really be paying this, or I wanna be buying something that nobody else wants to buy because it is in bad condition or it needs a lot of work because that’s where we make most of our that’s where we make most of our money is on when we buy the deal and then we force the appreciation and we increase the rents as that happens.
Erwin Szeto [00:33:44] And just to clarify that because I find a lot of beginners that are missing that point on making money when you buy, you once bought a property that no fees Erwin team didn’t want you, let alone the market. Yeah. All right. So I understand, folks, when you make money in the buy, often it is the property that folks cannot finance. Nobody wants to touch it. You just spoke this because, well, like a whole lot of the worst, the worst things in time, people will say, we’re not touching this and then that is usually where the value is. Yeah.
Sarah Coupland [00:34:18] Yeah. So you’re getting a deal, but you’re also you’re getting a deal to solve other people’s problems. Right? So your tables are back. Yeah. Like I had a triplex that we bought a couple of years ago. It was on the market forever. And so I went to look at it and it was crazy, like there were tenants in it. And the reason I hasn’t sold is the tenant profile was so terrible, like nobody had paid rent in forever. This one tenant had mental health issues and had literally. I should show you a picture sometime. Erwin is kind of crazy, but like the entire set of walls in the living room, various different forms of Sharpie and pen, and you just had like crazy writing all over it. So like, the entire wall was discovered and he kept a hammer hung in the wall, and when he got frustrated or upset or whatever, he’d just take the hammer and pound it the walls. So there’s like all these holes and all the drywall. And any time somebody would go to look at it, he would just stand there and scream at them. And so nobody wanted to buy it. And the current owners, they weren’t in a position. They didn’t know how the LTV works. They didn’t know how to file proper forms. They really didn’t know how to deal with the situation. And so I went to them. I said, Look, I’ll buy it. Here’s my price. I’ll give you free property management to help get your tenants out if you accept my price and we’ll close when the tenants are out. And it took us, I think, five months to evict and get the tenants out, and then I was able to take on the property, but nobody else was going to buy that property right to sit down and find, Okay, what? What’s your challenge here and how can I help you solve that? And I’ll do that if you give me this price that I want, and it kind of works it that way.
Erwin Szeto [00:35:52] So your solution offered a lot of value.
Sarah Coupland [00:35:55] Yeah, yeah. So they were willing to drop their price for my help.
Erwin Szeto [00:35:59] So listeners, I want you to understand this part. So here’s the big university property has in the last on a Friday or Saturday, and there’s like five other offers of May think, Oh, we’re going to have to buy. So we get an offer like $40000. And you’re asking sort of folks, No, that’s not quite. It’s five offers and is two pretty serious stuff talking about that sort of stuff.
Sarah Coupland [00:36:23] No, I’m literally talking about the properties nobody wants to like. So for me, I love those properties.
Erwin Szeto [00:36:29] Well, that’s what the value I had is. Yeah, my architect was with took pictures and videos of one of my last property sold to his mom in the. And mom said, If you ever buy a property like this, I will not help you with it. That’s where the money is. Mom won’t help you.
Sarah Coupland [00:36:50] Well, and I think you have to be careful if I run in that into that was just my venture partner as well. Like, I had a seven plex I bought last year and my JV partners backed out. And it wasn’t even it wasn’t even a big, well, it was a big brand. We’re tearing apart a four bedroom unit, but my JV partners lined up and I learned my lesson. I didn’t get any money upfront and I didn’t get a signature on anything up front. I just kind of up to this point in my career. I just kind of take people at their word and I had these JV partners and they were lined up. And yes, they wanted to go ahead on the seven Plex. And so I invited them to come to the inspection. And I shouldn’t have done that because then I think the gentleman was on board and his wife. Came along and I don’t know that she was a very savvy investor. And the after the inspection, they were like, OK, and then I got an email. You know what? We just don’t think that this is the right property for us. And I’m like, Oh. And so my
Erwin Szeto [00:37:44] answer is no, it’s a no.
Sarah Coupland [00:37:46] Yeah, not out the level experience. Yeah. So we actually ended up scrounging at the last minute and having to pull all of our own money. So I did like, I had to put every penny that I had and then sell. And then I borrowed on my lines of credit to close on the property because my partner backed it and I didn’t actually have anything in writing with them. So I’ve learned my lesson going forward. I need to make sure that they understand what’s going on and how it in writing.
Erwin Szeto [00:38:08] That’s the great lesson for anyone who’s listening when you’re showing partners. In my case, it’s often clients. I remember showing this one client five great properties with his wife. And then we didn’t. We didn’t offer any of them. Then the feedback was his wife could not see herself living in any of the properties. Understand that you’re never going to never going to understand is that they’re very wealthy. He’s a successful doctor. Where they live does not look like our investment properties. Think of your nicest investment property. It’s not like we were a doctrine that there was no. Yeah.
Sarah Coupland [00:38:45] So, yeah, you have your own expectations of it, right? If you really have to look at who your tenant profile is going to be and then also have a vision for it, like I look at something and I see the vision of what it could be. And it’s hard for people to get past what things look like before we go in and get them and renovate them. And I can show them like our before and after the things that we’ve done. But sometimes it’s hard for people to really kind of see what I see when I look at something and it and it scares them a little bit thinking, Oh, you’re going to buy this, I’m going to buy this because the price is perfect and we can make it wonderful
Erwin Szeto [00:39:23] if anyone doesn’t believe me. Go show someone like state or state funds from. And I think we do have a lot more vegetarians. As your business is your business end to end. So you you’re getting leads from your from your property management business and then you have a product management business. So you’re saving less with less pocket right pocket as you make money from your farming business. But still, your money is most people are hiring that out and also your renovation folks or your employees as well.
Sarah Coupland [00:39:55] Yes, I have a full rental company and they do all of the work on our properties. And then if I have availability to help my client, so we’ve done a number of unit renovations for my clients as well because I don’t always have a project on the go or we might have a couple of months here or there in between or at one point I had three different crews on the go at three different properties. We do renovations for our clients also.
Erwin Szeto [00:40:20] Yeah, my point is that you think this is like true professional investing where you have savings all through the life cycle of your investments? No, you’re talking to your partners and also for your clients as well, because you’ve got all in-house, which brings your monthly payments as much overhead for the simple, like a general contractor.
Sarah Coupland [00:40:44] Yeah, yeah, I know we see this former
Erwin Szeto [00:40:46] manager or so like for anyone who just wants to be professional, that’s what it looks like. But this is how you get cost savings and how you get higher margins. So how many tells people more often is that you have to have a serious conversation with yourself if you want to be like Sarah?
Sarah Coupland [00:41:05] But it wasn’t like, and right now, it’s really easy for me. So there was a point, probably two or three years ago where it wasn’t easy, like I was my only employee in the property management company, and I was working like 60 70 hours a week and I was going crazy. I was my, I was my accountant, my bookkeeper, the property manager, the on call person like I did everything and I went them all in a wife and a mom, and I was going crazy and I was getting burned out. And then so I started hiring staff and it took me a long time to find the right stuff and then take all the processes that were in my head and I’d never put down on paper and get that together. And now the property management company is working really awesome. Like, I’ve been up here at the cottage for just over a week now and I’ve had a couple of text messages and I’ve had a conference call with my staff. And aside from that, I’m not really doing terribly much with the property management company because they can take care of it and they deal with it like renovation company is getting to be very much along the same lines. We had some very consistent staff there. They know exactly what I want to do. We’re renovating this apartment. So you’re going to do it exactly the way you did the last one. Right. So we’re going to use the same tile, the same floor. My vision is the same. It’s different. When we get into bigger renovations, we’re taking it walls and we’re moving stuff around and whatever. And then I’m a little bit more involved because when I do the scope and I kind of do the planning, and I tend to work with our designer and architect. But aside from that, if it’s a simple, hey, these tenants are moving it, we’re going to spruce this place up. They can just go to it. And I don’t necessarily have to be too involved because I’ve already put all of that work in in the beginning, right? I’ve already developed the plan for kind of how everything goes and what we do and how we do it.
Erwin Szeto [00:42:48] So it’s taken years to put together.
Sarah Coupland [00:42:51] Yeah, like how I started is I couldn’t afford to buy a house, so my father needed a spouse or another set of income, so I bought a duplex. It is one hundred and forty thousand and it was disgusting and terrible and gross for this whole thing, completely apart. So in that process, my dad, I met my husband while we were doing that process and my dad taught us how to tile and do plumbing and drywall and all that kind of stuff. So for the first, I would say five or six years, Jamie and I did all the work ourselves, so I was a financial advisor at the bank and I’d worked like eight to five and he’d work nine to six and we’d grab Wendy’s and we’d go meet at the apartments and we would basically renovate into midnight, one o’clock in the morning and get up and do it all over again. We’d renovate on the weekends and we had no life at all ever when we were doing our renovation projects. But that’s how we built the base for us to be able to continue doing what we were doing. So we just kept buying those nasty properties nobody wanted and putting in a ton of sweat equity. And then after we had our daughter and I started my property management company, I said, That’s it. I’m not doing drywall or tiling and I’m not doing any of the renovation work anymore. We need to start hiring people. And so we took on a big flip project which actually ended up keeping us my own house because I really loved it. And we hired a whole team at that point and we had the same guys with us. Since then, that was in, that was in 2013, and we’ve had all the same rental staff since then, and I’ve hired a couple of people along the way.
Erwin Szeto [00:44:24] But I’m going to show you first, this sounds like it was your husband. Yeah.
Sarah Coupland [00:44:30] Well, I basically said I was like, OK, I bought the property and then I closed, I think two months after we started dating and then I said, OK, well, if you want to keep dating, we basically need to bring work suits and show up here because otherwise we’re not going to see me for like six months of free labor. Yeah, so free labor. And so he was there to help with the renovations. And yeah. So what was your next guest? I think he would have been my. I am sorry. Long time, actually. Yes. And my dad, so like my dad, he was kind of free labor as he was just kind of hoping he wouldn’t take payment. So in other words, my husband actually said they both just kind of work for free. My first higher would have been with my property management company. I hired. I hired somebody, a virtual assistant, to kind of help me out fielding phone calls and doing bookkeeping. So that was I started the property management company in 2013. So shortly after that I would have hired somebody who was really good. Actually, she was local and she lived in Bowmanville or Curtis. She was a recommendation from a client of mine, somebody who was already using her, and she was wonderful. She was really, really wonderful. But she was vey for a number of different people. And as my business grew and as I kind of needed more help, she didn’t have the capacity within her schedule to be able to take on more. So at that point, then I ended up hiring somebody in my office, which was in my house. So I started having staff come into my house because I work from home. That that had four challenges in itself is when people are coming in at eight o’clock, I have to be at Misamis Work having to set an example and people coming in. And we operated the property management office out of my house up until about a year and a half ago. So when tenants started just randomly walking in my house at any time of the day, it was like, OK, that’s it. We need to actually have an office. It is not for these.
Erwin Szeto [00:46:27] Your daughters are going to get to Mars. How do you structure splits with which one venture firm is just a firm? Plans are different. It’s way more capital. For example, yeah,
Sarah Coupland [00:46:38] we still do 50 50. Well, honor my first. My first J.B. deal that I did was on a private sale, six Plex. And that’s when I actually ran into an issue with financing on my own. So I brought in clients of mine, actually. We’ve been kind of chatting. They said, Hey, well, if you ever need, if you ever need somebody on a deal, let us know because we’ve got some money. And the bank didn’t like me just on my own because I was self-employed and whatever. Still with them, we did a 50 50 split. We each put in 50 percent of the money. And then my property management company manages it and gets paid so that when we get 50 50 and I put in half of the money, and other than that, most of the deals that we’ve done are right down the middle. And usually our JV partners are also making money on the buy, right? So they’re getting a huge appreciation as we push up the project and turn people over and whatnot. So our 12 Plex, for example, my partner came in and he qualified for the financing. He brought in the capital. He actually brought in a slush fund to cover the first set of renovations as well. And I did the renovations on a couple of the units for vacant. And yes, we split everything 50-50 on that. So yeah, typically it would depend on how it would how the properties go. Like, if it was a turnkey multi-unit that didn’t really need anything that would probably look a little bit different considering for two and a half years, I busted my butt getting the value of the building up 50 50, I think, was quite fair considering he was just bringing in the money, but it would look different on depending on the deal, REIN interest.
Erwin Szeto [00:48:22] And where are you going to for lending?
Sarah Coupland [00:48:24] Has that changed over time? It depends. I’ve done a lot of lending with CIBC. I’m actually doing a commercial blanket mortgage right now with CIBC. I’ve never worked with a commercial department before, once you get to values over a million dollars. You go to commercial and it’s very different. They just look at the properties and I’m kind of an insignificant piece of the puzzle, even though I have to guarantee it. So I’m buying my partner out of the 12 section. At the same time, we’re blanketing a mortgage on my seven flex I bought last year, and we’re doing that for CIBC last year. Every mortgage that I did was private money through a broker. Very expensive. They charge a lot, but it was quick. And when my when my partner backed out of that seven flex, I didn’t really have time to go through because it can take months and months and months to get financing on a multi. There’s a ton of stuff involved with it, right? So when you don’t have very much time and you have really are working, financing is the best way to go. Like, we’re paying 10 percent on our first mortgage on that property, which is a lot of money a month in interest that I pay. But at that point in time, it was either I don’t close on the property and get sued or I get creative and I find a way. So we’re refinancing that right now, but it’s still worked out. We’re still we’ve increased the value enough to cover the interest that we’ve paid on that 10 percent over the last year or so. Yes, I use very different mortgage brokers. We use private money as well. So we have private money lenders who lend direct to us. I feel like we’re a fairly stable investment for people who want to get a higher return than their devices or mutual funds. We have people who want us. There are a few things and we’re professional, right? Like, This is what you do for a living and we have quite a bit of equity and net worth behind us. And we’ve never lost money on a deal. So I think people feel quite comfortable lending their funds to us. Mm-Hmm. So always looking for more private money lenders as well. Yeah, we do a lot through that, especially we’re doing flips or third big projects that may work. We’ll do private money.
Erwin Szeto [00:50:26] Can you give the listener a range of what we can afford? But Rangers are her for lending the interest rate and also any benefits lender fees.
Sarah Coupland [00:50:37] OK, well, I can tell you that the mortgage that we put together super quickly last year, we did it through a broker and the fees were ridiculous. Like the little ridiculous. I think we paid seventeen thousand dollars in that. So my, my, my broker, I think he got two percent. So he got I think about ten thousand and then the lender got it, I think seventeen thousand twenty seven thousand dollars in fees to close on that mortgage. And then it’s a 10 percent, two percent interest on. They lent me six hundred thousand about that. It’s like our mortgage is like forty six hundred a month. So that was at 10 percent. That’s the highest one we’ve actually ever had. I’ll borrow it 10 percent on a short term basis. Five other lenders who have lent us their recipes and we pay seven or eight percent on those and they’re on more stable properties. It’s like, Hey, I’ve got this cash flowing duplex. I have equity. We’ll put an RC mortgage there because it’s a stable completed already, OK property. And if it’s our suite, we’ll just put it at like a five year term and then we’ll just keep using your money for various projects. If we’re actually borrowing on a slip or borrowing on something, that is what people would say risky like a bank won’t finance this property, so we have to go private. It might be a bit of a higher rate just due to the risk involved. So closer to around 10
Erwin Szeto [00:52:11] for the studios. So just for listeners, perfect, but I usually see is what the bank will lend if you have interest or significant vacancy issues and the banks are not like mixed use this, I see that a lot.
Sarah Coupland [00:52:26] Yeah, and like even our cottage, so this place, we had to get a private mortgage on this. We’re paying eight and a half percent on this property because the schedule banks didn’t like our self-employed income at that point in time, and I don’t know that I had my taxes done. I’m always behind on my taxes, so it’s kind of leaving didn’t want to lend to us and then we go to the banks and it’s like, Okay, you know what you have, you’ll qualify with a b banks. But then the banks didn’t like where the property was or that we were renting it on Airbnb. So we actually had I disclose, I fully disclose everybody were renting it on Airbnb because I thought I try and do everything as honestly as possible. And if I don’t, if I don’t mislead or lie or anything like that or not disclose, then I don’t have to cover my butt, right? Like, everything’s out there. And so we had ridiculous insurance and nobody would lend to us. So we ended up going with a private lender at eight and a half percent. But now we’re refinancing and paying that out, and it’s going to be with our regular bank and it’s gonna be OK.
Erwin Szeto [00:53:31] So how is you. Experience been with everything be digitized,
Sarah Coupland [00:53:35] meaning it’s awesome like we get. We’ve never had any issues, we’ve had no damage to the Lever Place then yeah, we’ve had no damage. We and we just have it so people can automatically book. We don’t even screen and turn people away. It’s just, do you want to come? Yeah, just come in. Yeah, we’ve been. It’s been pretty good, though. We get a lot of families and people seem to really like it. We have repeat guests coming back. We actually looked out over the winter. We had a solar panel installation company. Rents from they were here from September until April, four nights a week. So we had like constant income over the winter as well, which I wasn’t anticipating.
Erwin Szeto [00:54:19] Wow, that’s awesome.
Sarah Coupland [00:54:21] Yeah, four nights a week it and then we could still rented it on the weekend or come up on the weekend, which was pretty awesome, either here Monday to Monday to Friday, basically.
Erwin Szeto [00:54:29] What are your rates? We are mainly rates range from.
Sarah Coupland [00:54:33] In the winter, I had it at one hundred and thirty five a night, which is yeah, and it’s, I don’t know, one thirty five and then our summer rates are three hundred a night.
Erwin Szeto [00:54:42] So you on the weekend?
Sarah Coupland [00:54:44] Yeah, I know I can. I could increase it like and I made a mistake this year. I didn’t I. I thought I’d change my Airbnb settings as a newbie, a newbie mistake. I’m like, Nobody’s booking like, why don’t we have any bookings for the summer? And people kept telling me we went on to look at your place and there’s nothing available. And I’m like, It’s so available because I didn’t block off our space and I was like, Oh, wait and see what reservations fall in the first place? And then I went on and I had it restricted to you could only check in on a Sunday, and it could only be for seven days. And it was I had all these weird restrictions as soon as I took them off, it booked that booked up, booked up really quickly at three hundred and I am like, OK, I could probably put my weekend rate higher next year. This year for the summer, I will trust me
Erwin Szeto [00:55:26] because they’re running out of time. You faced some furious lately.
Sarah Coupland [00:55:30] Yes, I have.
Erwin Szeto [00:55:33] OK, so let me guess so. We shot zombies in Victoria early, which is terrifying. You’re awesome and needed a bit of a walk on a walk that was almost twelve hundred feet up in the air. That’s shooting the space. Zombie was harder. Scarier, you
Sarah Coupland [00:55:52] see? Oh, it was like seeing it. I actually felt kind of. I felt pretty safe on top of the sea and tower. Like they checked you so many times that like, there’s no way you can fall, right? So it was high and it was exhilarating, but it wasn’t terrifying. The virtual reality zombie shooting was probably the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life. I fight. Yeah, it was last spring, and I want to go do it again like it was. It was so much fun. But I just remember, like, I don’t think I uttered a single word for the first half hour because I was just like zombies.
Erwin Szeto [00:56:33] Think you finished second to ensure?
Sarah Coupland [00:56:36] I feel on,
Erwin Szeto [00:56:38] I don’t know, zombies translate into violence to zombies.
Sarah Coupland [00:56:44] It was good for us.
Erwin Szeto [00:56:46] I’m sure you had a really funny story that you shared back in how we do remember, but here they go to ridiculous stories where.
Sarah Coupland [00:56:55] I have so many. What one are you referring to
Erwin Szeto [00:57:00] is you just break down the door when your houses.
Sarah Coupland [00:57:03] Oh no, I did have a SWAT team there, like a breath of the drug bust. Yeah, yeah, I had. They didn’t break down the door for me, but I had a SWAT team.
Erwin Szeto [00:57:16] It’s not perfect.
Sarah Coupland [00:57:18] This is what I know I don’t want to be. I think it’s unlocked. Maybe. Oh yeah. And one of my tenants call me this. So I actually had a really fabulous tenant. He lived in this place and then he lost his job, and then he started hanging out with some shady people and my tenant downstairs, a single mom, two kids, just like there’s a lot of people coming and going. And I kind of talked him about it, and he just said his friends were kind of hanging out. And then she called me one day and she’s like, Sarah, she’s like, I don’t want to leave you, but like, there are people with guns and they’re all around the property. And I do. Yeah, and I’m like, guns. And yeah, she’s like, they had like the car’s out front. Like guys with guns. And they were just like advancing on the property. I guess my tenant friend was selling heroin out of my unit, and that’s where all the people were coming and going all the time. And so dude was like, face down, arrested on my front lawn and her and her kids are freaking out. And yeah, that was actually incidentally enough. That’s the same unit that our prostitute had lived in as well. So we’ve actually had some choice. We’ve had the worst tenants in that one unit actually over the years. But yeah, let’s keep it interesting.
Erwin Szeto [00:58:29] Usually, Airbnb,
Sarah Coupland [00:58:32] who knows what I’ll get that? I don’t know. I just we have good tenants in there right now. So I’m like, finally, we bought that one in 10 years ago. That was our second purchase in two thousand nine. Most of the bad tenants come from my being inexperienced. At that point, I had no idea how to choose or what to do, and I trusted that everybody was honest and I was so naive, so very, very naive, and I gave people lots of opportunities and chances. And oh, I can’t call your references because whatever reason I heard all of them and I fell for them. And oh, I can’t call you your references because you were in jail and you don’t have any anyway, you learn, right? I don’t run into many of those situations anymore,
Erwin Szeto [00:59:12] and therefore you get less than when you can focus on you. Focus credit, you see gaps in people’s history. You gotta ask for your job history or you’re in it. You don’t know what else there to do is ask, Where are you?
Sarah Coupland [00:59:25] Where were you? What did you do? And if ever people say, Oh, you can’t call my landlord because they’re probably lying? So I always call the landlord anyway. I can’t call the when. You can’t call my landlord because we had relations and now he’s harassing me, and I don’t want him to know where I’m going or where I’m going to be. And I was like, Oh my gosh, sure. Of course, I’m not going to call it. And that ended up being the lady who was the prostitute and she’d been in jail. So she just randomly put people on her application and said that you can’t call them because she had some really good reason.
Erwin Szeto [00:59:56] So I can folks follow along with you because
Sarah Coupland [01:00:01] I’m not like super social media, but I’m on Facebook and I actually am on Instagram under my personal name. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t even know how you can find me on there, but to tag properties, that is my website and then under my personal name, I think on Instagram and Facebook. And by the end of the summer, I’m going to have an actual investor website
Erwin Szeto [01:00:21] Hamilton election for the money for.
Sarah Coupland [01:00:26] I hope so. I thought right now I’ve got more deals than we can do. And so I’m looking for partners and money, and so I hope so.
Erwin Szeto [01:00:34] OK, just formalities.
Sarah Coupland [01:00:36] I got a couple of a couple of duplexes and one multi for sure. I actually have some other Maltese I’m interested in, but I haven’t done analysis on them yet. And then we’re looking to start doing some duplex conversions in Cobourg starting in the fall too. So I’m looking to really kind of expand our portfolio and expand our renovation company as well to take that on. So we are looking for purchase. We want to make money
Erwin Szeto [01:01:03] because if we still manage to be a super awesome.
Sarah Coupland [01:01:07] Yeah. And I only I only work 15 hours a week. So system systems, it’s all about systems, right? So I do I do the stuff that only I can do, and I delegate and empower people to do the rest of it.
Erwin Szeto [01:01:18] So awesome. Awesome. So again, for doing this thing, time I got to do this. All right. Thank you, guys. All right. Do you have questions
Erwin Szeto [01:01:34] on wealth hacking, the source path to financial success or questions on investing in houses, duplexes, business suites, courthouses, triplexes, syndicated mortgages, private equities, public equities sandwich leases leased owns some studio rentals, Airbnb, wholesaling offer deals, mid-term rentals, house construction. I’ll admit it when I don’t know the answer, but will dollar frame for an answer? If so, if you have a question, we don’t have any fancy means to receive questions. So if you enjoy the show and want to leave a fashion review on iTunes, go ahead and type in your question. It’ll definitely make its way to me, and I’ll answer your question on a future episode of this podcast. If the questions are really good, I may even bite you on the show, which is how two of our guests have been on the show before. I’m actually friends with one of them now. Anyways, I’m also grateful for all your positive comments and fans of the show. It is my view that life would be a little bit better if we could all make and save a bit more money at the end of the month. And if you make a lot more than your family and community would benefit, even more, and nothing will make me happier the next time my name is Erwin and I am a wild hacker bringing you the truth about real estate investing for Canadians.