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Podcast Transcription
[00:00:00] Scott Dillingham: Welcome to the wisdom lifestyle money show. I’m your host. Scott Dillingham. The goal of the show is to show you how you can grow personally, financially, have a larger net worth and leverage your largest asset to help develop you into the person you want to. I take you through all the steps I did coming from nothing being told, I was nobody and that I was never going to accomplish anything.
Getting kicked out of high school to owning a multi-million dollar real estate portfolio, and my own company, you’ll meet our partners, you’ll , meet our friends and you’ll quickly discover how you can improve your life.
So listen in and enjoy the show.
Welcome back to the show today. I’m really excited for you guys to meet Quentin D’Souza. He is a multi award-winning real estate investor.
He’s a multiple book author, and he’s the owner of a portfolio of at least 80 million worth of real estate across Canada and the U S so welcome Quintin.
[00:00:58] Quentin D’Souza: Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me. Yeah,
[00:01:01] Scott Dillingham: no problem. I’m excited. How are things out
[00:01:03] Quentin D’Souza: your way? Things are going great. Always working on the portfolio, just expanding my network and creating some great relationships.
[00:01:12] Scott Dillingham: No, that’s awesome. And I see you online. I see you on other people’s podcasts and it looks like this comes so naturally to you, but how did you know having a portfolio this size? How did it happen? Like where did you start to do.
[00:01:26] Quentin D’Souza: I started with one property and then I ended up really enjoying the process and just understanding different components of the business and scaled and grew it, I started in 2004.
Really, it was. 2008, where I bought multiple properties. So we had three to four properties a year. I was using the strategy that was I was buying properties that needed work. I would fix them up then I would refinance it and then rent it out. Long-term so that was it’s called, it was it’s rebranded the burrow strategy, but I’ve been doing it while before it was rebranded.
[00:02:07] Scott Dillingham: And that’s how I started to actually doing that same strategy, but you’re right. It was not called burn.
[00:02:13] Quentin D’Souza: Yeah and it was great. It was good for building a portfolio of cash flowing assets. I would take on partners who were a part of the, that process. And some of those people that I started with are still people who I partner with today.
And it’s been great in 2000 and. 13. I had enough income from my portfolio to quit my job. I was a a public school teacher and I actually have a master’s in education and I was going down the principal route. And at that point I had to make a decision whether I wanted to continue what I was doing or focus on real estate full-time.
And so I. Left teaching in 2014, with all my qualifications and to the chagrin of my mom and a focused on real estate full time. And that was yeah, back in 2014 when I did that. And, have it never looked back since I was 40 at the time.
[00:03:14] Scott Dillingham: No, that’s incredible. Good for you. Do you find this?
Cause this is what I find. And I have a lot of investors that have this fear of starting to invest, but I find the more properties you own, the easier it becomes. Do you find the same thing?
[00:03:27] Quentin D’Souza: Certainly the first after the first three properties, it was more of a game than it was a a difficulty it was, it’s just positioning.
Finding the right property, getting the funds together and being able to finance the property to get those three F’s. And, you can put yourself into a great position and you don’t always have to bring all three in order to get a deal done. It’s something that I wish I learned sooner, but and then once you get started and get going, it certainly becomes easier.
In fact, I find that doing the larger apartment buildings now are much easier for me to do than it is to focus on a lot of smaller properties.
[00:04:08] Scott Dillingham: Yeah. You have the economies of scale now, right? And you can have a live in superintendent depending on the size of your projects. And it’s takes away some of the hands-on things that a normal single family home investor might have to do.
[00:04:20] Quentin D’Souza: Yeah, for sure. Some of the 40 and 50 unit buildings, the we don’t necessarily have onsite supers, but what we’re doing is we have a a part of our property management company who’s in that area and focuses on. The buildings that are there. So we have a team that that helps to do that management, but yes, it certainly is a lot easier and I’m much more efficient.
And also it’s just easier dealing with the numbers of people that we do when it’s at this scale. You can have, we have we use a third party for our, to do all our finances, like we use Okay. An accounting firm who does all our financials at the end of the year.
And we have a bookkeeping company that does our monthly bookkeeping Jew. It gives us, it gives somebody else an oversight of what we’re doing and but it also just makes it easier to do because of the number of units we have. We have that scale and it’s much different than.
It would be if it were a larger like reach or something like that, where we would have. There the model is a lot different. There would be a lot more fees involved than a lot lower return. It’s just a different way of doing things. I worked directly with people and we get things done together.
So it’s a, it’s definitely a a different way of doing it, but the scale makes certainly makes it a lot easier and it’s a lot less confusing and, you’re not dealing. Hundreds of dollars you’re dealing with, tens of thousands of dollars, which is really just adding another zero onto whatever it is that you’re dealing with.
But it certainly helps for on the scale side of things and having the appropriate people that can help you do what you need to get done.
[00:06:00] Scott Dillingham: No that’s awesome. And I’m curious, I, I have a personal curious question for you cause I see it a lot doing financing. Are you someone that prefers to get a corporation per property or do you have, one that has multiple properties?
[00:06:15] Quentin D’Souza: Typically the way that I structure a deal and it depends on the size of the property, but I will have one corporation per property. It’s much easier on the financing side. When it comes to keeping your books clean, because it’s really the one property that holds the one asset. And that’s what I found works for me, but then the owners of that asset would usually be separate corporations and they own shares in the company that owns the building.
So it’s just a little bit more sophisticated. It’s great for. Transparency, but from a tax, you have to talk of course, to your own accountant, but from a tax situation, it’s really just passing through one corporation onto the others. So there, there’s not much tax benefit from it, but it’s definitely something that’s easier from a financing and an organizational perspective.
[00:07:10] Scott Dillingham: Absolutely. And bringing in partners, or if a partner wants to leave and you’re going to bring in a different partner it’s so much cleaner when you isolate them. So that is actually what I do suggest investors do when they have a large portfolio. I think it makes perfect sense. So great. I was just curious how you structured that.
No, that’s awesome. Doing all these properties have you ever had any sort of issue properties and if you did, how did you get past those issues?
[00:07:36] Quentin D’Souza: Yeah. There’s issues every day that comes up with properties. There’s always issues, but the key is to create processes and systems to be able to handle all of those issues.
We had a roof leak last night, and we had a property, our property management. I was able to get on site at two in the morning in order to help address the situation. And then today, they are working with the contractors in order to get the work done and put, so having all the processes and systems in place is.
It’s something that we do that we offer. And having dealt with a lot of situations, I’ve written two books on property management and filling vacancies and, I’m a very systems oriented person. So putting those systems in place and making them available a standard operating procedures just makes it run more like a business than anything else.
[00:08:30] Scott Dillingham: Yeah, no, I agree. I love it. I believe in every business, whether it’s real estate or not, you always have to have a strong foundation and good systems and it really creates a much more successful enterprise. So I love that. Now we do have to take a quick pause but when we come back Quinton’s going to dive into some of his bigger projects and one that’s actually upcoming.