Table of Contents
This content is provided in partnership with Georges El Masri and the Well Off Podcast.
Podcast Transcription
Georges El Masri
Welcome to the Well Off podcast. I’m your host, George El Masri. And as always, the goal is to motivate, inspire and share success principles. In this episode, I was lucky enough to sit down with Quintin D’Souza, who’s really well known in the investment community. He’s an Ontario certified teacher and holds two university degrees, including a master’s in education. Pretty impressive. If you ask me. He’s a specialist in buy, fix, refinance. And if you want to learn more about that strategy, he’s got a book called The ultimate wealth strategy. I just recently read it great book highly recommended. And he’s also well known for doing quite a few joint venture partnerships, he runs the Durham Rei meeting, which is east of Toronto. If you are interested in learning more about how to invest and you want to surround yourself with like-minded people, it’s a great club to attend. So highly recommend it as well, you’re going to find out how he gave up a six-figure teacher salary to dedicate himself more towards his real estate investments, there’s quite a bit to learn, and I hope you’ll enjoy. I’m here with Quinn Sousa. I just met Quinn for the first time he’s got Durham Rei, which is an educational program for investors. And I just recently found out that he was a teacher for 18 years, and he’s got a Master’s of education. From my understanding and my research, you went to U of T to get your bachelor’s degree, your undergrad? Wow, yes. Did you go to York for your master’s? Yeah. And I guess you don’t need to do these programs anymore. But you have an interest in helping people and motivating others to get into investing. Is that correct?
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah, I left my teaching profession in 2014. But I still love to educate. And I think just in line with, my own values, so it makes me feel good. I do it because I enjoy it for sure.
Georges El Masri
Yeah. Aside from that your father, you have got two boys. Yep. one I think is 11 years old. Wow, you
Quentin D’Souza
aren’t good. 11 and 14. So while they’re turning 11, and 14 out of high school next year for my oldest boy. So that’s kind of new, gonna be a new experience to kind of dive into with him. So it’s gonna get is G one or G two, and then it’s all over for them from there.
Georges El Masri
Awesome. And aside from that, you’ve got three books. Yeah, if you want to tell us a little bit about them. Sure. This
Quentin D’Souza
is the ultimate wild strategy book. It’s about the buy, fix refinance, and rent strategy. I wrote it with some good friends, Jeff Woods, and Andrew Brennan, if you’re interested in the strategy that I’ve used for the last 10 years, it’s a great illustration of it, the filling vacancy toolbox, which goes through the process of how to fill a vacancy in Ontario, what to do due diligence, it really is a book that answers a lot of people’s questions on how to do it. And then the property management toolbox, which is kind of like the day to day of how to manage a property, whether it’s, you know, one property or 50 units, you know, it goes through that process. So, the books are a way for me to help educate people so that they can go and take action because that’s what I want to see them do. Right? One of our mantras here is being an action taker, not just educating yourself, but going out and doing something. Right. It allowed me to answer a lot of questions in a short amount of time. So somebody can go back and they can refer to it. It really is. I’ve gotten a lot of great compliments on those books. So the practical,
Georges El Masri
yeah, for sure. I just read the ultimate wealth strategy, Coco. And I just like the way it was written. It’s different from typical investment books because you’re kind of telling the story of a couple and how most people probably feel when they’re going through the process of investing for the first time. So I really enjoyed that.
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah, you know, like jack, the mentary book is Jeff, Andrew and Quincy Yeah, first letters. Right. So who else
Georges El Masri
clever Mike’s just to go back with regards to your kids got to start there? Do you have any hopes for them to get into investing? And also did you begin investing to maybe give them a better future and pass on some of these properties?
Quentin D’Souza
Well, I think the way that I started into real estate is I explored a lot of other ventures first, so stocks, different types of businesses. And I just found that real estate was an easy solution for me to do real estate investing while I was a professional, so it gave me the opportunity to kind of slowly move my way into it. You know, yeah, I always hope to pass on, you know, what I can for my kids, but, but it’s more than just the idea of giving them something, it’s now that I can teach them something. And in something that is more than just, you know, giving them a million dollars, it’s more like giving them the ability to make millions of dollars, and, you know, being able to teach them that it’s something that I would never have been able to do if I didn’t go on this journey myself. You know, I was I, I took my youngest son to the cottage, and on the way up, my oldest son had a baseball tournament and my wife was down with him. And so you know, I put on like, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, the audiobook, and you know, we listen to it and talk about it on the way there on the way back. And, you know, to me, like, those sorts of opportunities are great, you know, not everybody’s going to do that and take that time to do it. But I think, you know, talking about it with our young people is the only way for them to learn about it. Right. And I think we, we don’t do that enough. In our society, we kind of hide the money talk. I mean, my parents never talked about money, I don’t know about yours from going up. And so it was always this strange kind of thing, talking about putting money aside, you know, being able to invest it, what are assets? What are the liabilities? You know, how do people grow their money? What do people invest in? What is it an investment, right, those things, we, we really do need to talk about that with our kin?
So,
Quentin D’Souza
I mean, for me, I think the big thing that I’m going to pass on is something that can never be taken away from them is the ability to make as much as they want. Right. And I think that’s a powerful tool. And if more people just educated themselves in doing it, they can change a lot in their lives from sharing to share.
Georges El Masri
And when did you start talking to your kids about investing and about money?
Quentin D’Souza
You know, when I started to do it, I started to talk about it, I talked about it with my wife who’s tired of me talking about it. And you know, so I talk about it with my kids. So I mean, it’s a journey, I’m just open about what I’m doing. And you know, sharing some of my trials and tribulations like, you know, it’s not all roses and unicorns, right, there are days when you have to get involved, and you have tough times with tenants. And, and they hear about that, and then they hear about, you know, oh, well, we’re able to, you know, go to Turk’s and Caicos. Actually, Paul, you know, we’re renting his place in the Turks and Caicos, right. And, you know, like, things like that we can go as a family and have a great time. But it’s the results, the fruits of the labour of, you know, all those times with the tenants and struggling with financing, getting putting it all together, and then having the machine continuing to work itself, right. So, you know, all of that kind of comes into play, it comes together. So,
Georges El Masri
yeah. And while doing a bit of research, I found out that at one point, you had a six-figure income. Yes. So I’m assuming that was through teaching. Yeah. And then you decided to give that up to get more involved in real estate investing? Can you talk a bit about that?
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah. So in Ontario, public workers who earn over 100,000, on the sunshine list, even as a teacher, I was always trying to do more and more I would work on some projects, I would, you know, I was on the path. I took my principal qualifications to go down that road. So I was doing a lot of extras I did summer school, not principal work, but coordinator type of work to boost my income up. So I was doing quite well, I, you know, I was definitely over six figures. And I continue to do that. But for me, what I, the future I saw was being, unfortunately, principles in our game age, our middle managers more than anything else, at least, that’s why I see them, they can affect change in the school, which is still a powerful thing. And they do affect the lives of kids. So I think that’s a great thing. But I found that a lot of what happens in school, the school system is top-down. And I didn’t want to be at the bottom of a top-down, you know, relationship, I want to be the top. And I want to be able to affect change in my life, my family’s life and other people’s lives. So running a business and being an entrepreneur is really, you know, what, what I thought I could I could you and you know, giving up the security of the golden handcuffs of the pension, that income. And, you know, just taking control and being able to do that for me, and for my family, I think I really have to thank my wife for you know, believing in me being able to go down that path, because that’s a big, big change, right? The way that I see our finances, and what we’ve done since that time, there’s no comparison, it was the best move I ever made. I mean, I’ve joined different groups that have helped me along the way too. So I’m a part of the entrepreneur’s organization. And they have a very high threshold to be part of those groups. And you know, I’m just privileged to have such a great group of people that I’m within calling them forum groups, and it’s kind of like a mastermind situation, but it’s a little different and being accepted into groups like Tiger 21, right. Like, I’m not there yet, because I’m not at the point where I am just in a defensive position. But I know that those types of groups help you to get to where you want to go and you That’s why places like Rock Star and Durham Rei are great places to go. Because it’s a stepping stone to help you to push you in the right direction, having people doing what you’re doing and seeing them do helps you to do, right pushes you out of your comfort zone. Because that’s where, you know, all the magic happens, right? If you want to do anything worth it, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, right, you can do some pretty amazing things. I never liked to go up on my roof and put up Christmas lights, I used to call my sister in law over now this is gonna be she’s a firefighter. She’s awesome. So as my brother in law, they’re firefighters, right. But I call them over to put up Christmas lights, you know, not like going up on heights was in the Philippines last month, and I jumped off a 35-foot cliff. Right. And if that’s not facing, you know, your fears, I don’t know what it’s like that was a physical fear that I had, and took some time to get to that point. Yeah, lots of small jobs, you know, and everybody has the small things that they can do that helps to push them to that big jump, whatever it is in their life. So I mean, I’m happy I did that for myself. If anybody can do it, too, right? They just have to take those small jumps first.
Georges El Masri
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned something before we got started that if you were interested in doing a 10-kilometre running event, for example, and you get there and you see that there are children, they’re seniors, there are all sorts of people doing it, it’ll encourage you and give you confidence that you can do it as well, which is the same as being a part of a group of investors like Durham, Rei or Rockstar events.
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah, like I mean, what you want to do is, you want to put yourself in those types of positions, or you do something uncomfortable, and you push yourself to the point. So uncomfortable would be like, if you’re if you want to work out, like every week, right? And that’s one of your goals for all I do quarterly goals. But you know, let’s say it’s whatever goals you have, you want to do that. So you sign up for like, one of those like boot camps, like the 90-day boot camps, and you go and you just overcome it. And that’s one way to do it to write to get into that, that sort of mind. And then that way, you’re there, you know, you’re committed to doing it. Right. So there are lots of ways to kind of push yourself
Georges El Masri
for sure, for sure. So when you gave up your teaching job that the security of that, did you have a couple of properties at that point? Or were you just jumping in brand new, nothing in your portfolio? Oh, no way
Quentin D’Souza
I hadn’t, I hadn’t been I hadn’t invested for 15 years, but for 10 years is been where I’ve kind of focused on real estate. And I probably could have left maybe a year or two years earlier than I did. But um, I was very conservative of you know what I was doing. And I was very purposeful about it. So when I left, I would say that my cash flow was about $5,000 a month that was from I had a portfolio of properties, I’m probably around 18 to 20s, I’m not sure. To be honest. Like it was a while ago. But I mean, I’ve grown a lot since then. And I continue to do you know, four to five properties a year, I spent two years in there from 2014 to 16, I was doing a lot of flips, I do a dozen flips, right. And I mean, if I look back at all those properties that I flipped, if I would have held them, I probably would have made another million on them. So I mean it but in retrospect, that’s that what could have happened, but by getting the funds from all of those flips, I was able to use that to leverage into other projects. So it took those funds and I was able to purchase some buildings, some other duplexes, you know, I was able to do a lot with those funds, and I continued to do that.
Georges El Masri
Right. And I know you’re big on the buy, fix refinance rent strategy. Yeah. In combination with building up your cash flow. Yeah, I’ve heard from different people, because I’m not where you’re at at this point. But I’ve heard from a lot of people that the cash flow that you earn from these properties, you often can’t account for it as income because you have to reinvest it, repair the property and the upkeep and all that what’s your take on that? Well,
Quentin D’Souza
you should always have a maintenance and repair budget in your you know, the way that you build your portfolio is you have your hard costs, right? So you have your and this is after the refi, you have to keep this in mind that it’s not before the refi. It’s after the refi. So mortgage insurance taxes. Those are all the heart costs that you want to include in your numbers. And then afterwards, you want to include your vacancy repairs and maintenance into the interior numbers as well. And so you can include those numbers into your cash flow and make sure that the property is still cash flows after that. I mean, any it depends on the age of the building. The beautiful thing about the strategy is that you’re doing the renovations to bring up the quality of the product, right. And so you are effectively eliminating some of those repairs and maintenance costs. So it’s lower after you’ve done the strategy, but you always have to consider that. And I always buy for cash flow, I don’t care what anybody tells me, for me, I buy for cash flow because if I don’t care whether the market goes down 25 or 30%, it’s not gonna affect me at all, I can hold those properties for 30 years, fine. As long as I’ve done, you know, stress testing of my portfolio, I look at interest rates, look at the 10-year rate, plug that into what my current mortgage rate is. And I’m able to decide, okay, this property can support itself over the long term. And if I ever get worried, I can throw it into a 10 year, and you know, I still have the property and my cash flows locked in for that time. And, I get my rent increases, right? When we got that period of the climber, if they turn over between tenants, I’ll be able to raise it even more. Right,
Georges El Masri
right. And when these properties that you own, are you keeping a reserve? So are you say, putting two or three months of expenses, in a separate bank account, just just in case things go south?
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah. So as you grow your portfolio, what you’ll find is that you can, you can do different things, when you have one or two or three properties, yeah, for sure you take three months, I usually do three months of hard costs into an account. But as you grow as you get, like 20, or 30, or 50 properties, like the scale becomes a little different, you can put that money together into a different account. And, you know, you can kind of scale it differently, as long as you have the funds there, right. Because to earn money, it can’t be sitting in a bank account, you have to be able to like you take those dollars, and we send them out, and you get them to go get you some more dollars and come back. And you want to make sure that you know you’re balancing yourself, you want to have the cash, but you also want to be able to take, if you have 20 properties and you have $3,000 a month, let’s say that’s $60,000 a month sitting in a bank account for really, you know, 3% to 5%, of where you’re going to need those funds. So it’s better to be able to take those funds and use them for what you need to and then group it a little differently. But definitely when you’re starting three months, makes a lot of sense for sure.
Georges El Masri
Yeah. And so for maybe some of the people who don’t understand what we’re talking about when we say buy fixed refinance, do you think you can just very quickly explain it?
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah, yeah. So I’ll give you an example with a deal that I just did. So I bought a property in November for 300,000. So detached two-storey house in Oshawa, it had a basement one-bedroom basement apartment in it, it was in really poor condition like 20 cats were living in it smelled bad, the leaks in the roof, leaks everywhere and basement. There was leaking from the kitchen on the main floor into the basement. Lots of lots of work. So the fixed part of it is you’re investing money into the project. And what you want to do is make sure that your purchase price and your fixed price is a lot lower than what the after repair value is. So in this case, I bought it for 300. I put 110 into it. Again, new kitchens, new bathrooms, legalized that basement apartment made sure that I had the declaration pre 91, that it existed from the owner made sure to go through the legalization process, did everything from you know, the floors to the roof, everything in between siding, new driveway, and the property refinanced at 610,000. So if you think of it, I have 300. And I have 110. Now because I’m I have a large portfolio of properties, I’m getting commercial mortgages. So I’m putting 25% down instead of 20. So I’ve got a 75% loan to value. So on 610, my mortgage is 457, somewhere around there, right? I have 410 into it, which means that I got paid about $50,000 to own the house, right? And I have about a $300 a month cash flow on that property now and everything is renovated to you know, right up to that’s practically you know, new house the way that you see it right. Now, I didn’t change any of the structures or anything like that. But I did enough so that that property is going to be good for the next few years anyway. And I have an infinite return. Like how do you calculate return when you have no money? Right? And you get cash flow, everyone? Yeah, right. Now that’s a home run. You can go into our Schwab pick up a property for 450, maybe put 70,000 into the basement apartment refi 555, seven, right. And then you’re still lowering your initial investment and you’re getting a higher ROI. Like that’s what you want to do, right? You make money when you buy your property, right and you buy it, right? You invest money into the fixing of it, and then you refinance it and the difference is how you push the value up. And adding a secondary suite is a really easy way to push up the value quickly. Right? Other ways are the houses distressed in some way like this has, in particular, had that cat pee smell was on the market for 19 days like that anybody could have bought it, not just me, anybody could have bought it. But, you know, there was something about it that nobody wanted. I knew how to solve the problems. And then that’s how I was able to take advantage of the value. Right,
Georges El Masri
right. And is that type of deal with something typical for you now to get into? Or are you more focused on say, smaller, single-family homes, where you may not get the refinance value to cover all of the initial investment?
Quentin D’Souza
So that would be like a home run? Right? So usually, it’s, you know, I can refi, maybe five to 10%. Out of my total downpayment. Yeah. So the return is still, you know, you’re talking about an over 50% return anyways. And I’ll typically work with joint venture partners, and that’s what I’ll be doing with them, right. So I’ll take a joint venture partner, they’ll put the downpayment down and they’ll qualify for the mortgage, and then they’ll get great returns for the next 17 years, right. I did three duplex conversions over the last year. And usually, we get back at least 5% off of the total dollar renovation money plus a little bit more. Yeah, right. And so you get cash flow on the right. I’ve also done small buildings. So I have a six-unit, where I’m working with a property manager, she’s awesome. She’s turned over four of the six units, raise the cash flow $2,000 a month, which is a building because we’re dealing with cap rates, right? It increased the value of the building by $400,000. And that enables me to pull out more money. Yeah. Right. And so that’s the, so I will pull out almost all of my initial investment in that six-unit building. Yeah. After a year. Yeah. So do that in the stock market. Yeah. Like, you know, real estate is just, you know, people don’t understand that after the ROI that you can get, you know, after-tax ROI is huge, right. And people always, you know, look at, they don’t even consider taxes. But it’s an important thing to consider you have a good, you know, you should have good quality accountants and lawyers on your team know, advising you properly, and then you have to understand it yourself. So for example, if you looked at inflation, and you looked at from 2008 to 2018, inflation has gone up, I think it’s about 18%. And then if you look at wages, so wages used to be about $20 an hour average, now it’s about $25 an hour. So that’s about 25%. There’s been some increase in wages, so 7% real, but then let’s look at realistic. So real estate in 2008 was like a duplex, or sorry, single-family home detached home in Oshawa, was about 200 and 218,000. Let’s say 220. The average detached house in Oshawa goes for 550. Now, 10 years later, that’s a 140% increase. Yeah, how can somebody who gets 7% more, you want to have those hard assets in your portfolio, because that’s where wealth is being created. If you’re not investing outside of your job, you’re gonna lose savers don’t make money. But that same person who put $100,000 in, in their bank account, probably ended up over the last 10 years with, you know, maybe $102,000 $103,000 like nothing. So those lost money because inflation is 18%. So the value of their hundred thousand dollars is more like $82,000. And they may have made two and they’ve lost a team. What do you think?
Georges El Masri
I want to put it in the bank? Yeah. Does it make sense? Obviously, you believe in investing in real estate? Yeah. What percent would you say of your portfolio consists of real estate investments? And do you have other investments? Like do you invest in stocks and maybe bonds or other forms of investments?
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah, so that’s a good question. Actually. I think that if you asked a financial planner, then they give you this vs answer about having a balanced portfolio, and, you know, risk assessments and I think financial planners’ job is to, I’m probably going to make a whole bunch of people. A financial planner’s job is to not lose your money. That’s what their job is. If you think about it, their job is not to lose your money in it, but it’s not to grow your wealth. If you want to grow your wealth, you need to do something different that can’t have this balanced portfolio of stuff. You have to put your eggs in a basket and watch the basket-like Warren Buffett says his thing is stocks, I think if you want to roll something thing like, do well in it, you have to commit a majority of your assets to that thing. If at some point you want to start defending that wealth, then you could invest in other things. So I mean, if you’re gonna invest in real estate, invest in real estate, put 80 to 100% in there. And then as you got to a point where you can take some of the funds out and put it another thing, so yes, I have hard assets like gold and silver, I have ownership in a company and not the company that I run, but I’ve bought private equity into companies. I’ve done different types of investing, you know, puts in calls invest in different things. But I would still say that I would have the majority still 80% of my wealth comes from real estate. Yeah, just think about, we had this great presentation A while back on risk. And if you think about what your bank is willing to give you money-wise, and what they think of risk. So let’s say you went to go start your own business, and it costs $100,000. How much money do you think a bank is going to give you? First-time business owner? How much you can begin to do?
Georges El Masri
Like, if it’s 100,000 that you’re looking to borrow? Yeah, how much will the bank give you? 15,000? Yeah, maybe
Quentin D’Souza
1520? Like this, like maybe one fifth? Yeah, right. Now, let’s say you have a stock portfolio, and you want to borrow against your stock portfolio? How much do you think via $100,000? in stocks? How much loan Do you think they would give you think you could get like 50 50%? Let’s say 50,000? Yeah, now, you’re going to want to buy a house, you’re going to put What 20%? down to own 100% of a house, the bank is going to give you 80%? What does that tell you about the risk that they see the house versus the business versus even the stock portfolio? Yeah, for sure. Even if you looked at it that way, from a risk assessment perspective, there is a lot of benefits to investing in real estate, I think that you need to have real estate in your portfolio, whether it becomes a small part of a bigger part, it depends on how far you want to grow. But you should always have cash flowing real estate, it shouldn’t be equity, speculation play, right, you need to make sure that the property can carry itself. And that requires you to do some work like you’re gonna have to dig to be able to do that. The idea is not to buy a condo and put 50% down. Yeah, right, you want to be able to leverage your money to make the most of it. So being able to find those assets that when you put 20% down or 25% down, you’re able to get a good monthly return from it. Right. And that means that you have to work a little bit, find those areas, talk to people, sometimes it blows my mind that people want to buy a $500,000 asset but can’t buy a $40 book to learn about it. Yeah, or spend a couple of hundred dollars on education just a little bit could save you a lot if you just learn about it before you go out and buy that $500,000 condo, spend the time understand it. Like we’re talking about now even spending the time to listen and learn about how to decide what is a cashflow positive property, some people will include mortgage paid down and call it positive or put 50% down and call it positive. To me, it’s not the way that I would look at it. I’m trying to maximize my return. And I’m also trying to look at how I can best have my dollars that are going out there and get more dollars and bring them by
Georges El Masri
now for those that live say like in Toronto or Mississauga Oakville and they’re not able to find cash flowing properties is 20% down, do you suggest that they go out of the city out of their area and look for properties out somewhere like in Hamilton or somewhere out here? For example? You know,
Quentin D’Souza
I think there’s, I think what you need to do is find places first you need to talk to other investors in the area and find out what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s not about just picking a property off the MLS. Sometimes it means that you have to be a little creative. So let’s say you’re working in downtown Toronto. And what it means for you in downtown Toronto to be able to cash flow is to take a single-family home, invest in topping it up putting three $400,000 into it, and then making it into a triplex and you’re looking at the highest and best use of a particular piece of land. And by doing that now you’ve cash flowed in Mississauga, Toronto. Yeah, the problem is just can’t go and pick it off the MLS and cash flow. If you go into like St. Catharines or you go into the Ashwani clearing chain or for the east, it’s easier to just pick it off the MLS and be able to be cashflow positive, but it’s becoming harder and harder to do. Yeah. So you need to know what works in your area and invest the time to learn. And then by doing that, you’re going to be able to do well with real estate. But if you just buy something and hold on to it and pray. That’s it. Not the way to do it, right? So it depends. You can make it work in different areas, but you have to understand strategies are a lot of strategies out there, buy, fix, refinance, and rent is just one of them. Yeah. And the more that you can add to your toolbox, the more that you can learn, and working with experience, realtors, mortgage brokers hiring a coach, I have a business coach that I work with. He’s great. He’s in Vancouver, and I talked to him once a month. And it’s been awesome and helping me but from like a time management achievement, kind of getting over fear and awesome guy, hiring those people and having them on your team can help you to make that right decision and looking for the realtor that has a proper mortgage broker that understands rental property, and then can, especially on the finance side, look at it from a portfolio perspective, not just the individual, not just the next deal, but works with you. And let’s say your goal is to buy five properties. Okay. This is how we’re going to buy five properties, right? It’s a different perspective. Yeah. And there are great people out there that can help you to do that. Sure.
Georges El Masri
there are two main categories of investing there is the equity investing and then cashflow investing. I’ve heard that you can’t go into an investment expecting to succeed in both, you have to pick one and stick with it and focus on that strategy. Would you agree with that?
Quentin D’Souza
No. That’s really like I’ve been getting both equity and cash flow for decades. Again, it’s knowing that what investment works in what area? Yeah, right. If you did that, that single-family home up to a triplex in Toronto, it might work. They’re great people out there that are investing in Orillia. And they’re adding sweet to the bottom there. They’re doing well. And they’re getting appreciation, juice, your equity, and they’re getting cash flow. There are people in Oshawa, there are people in Hamilton, you can get both. And I think that you need to kind of, especially in Ontario, you can do that. You just have to be more careful about how you’re investing. I think that’s black and white. It’s making it easier than like, it’s just kind of simplifying, which is fine. But I think you can get both. And if you aren’t getting both, and you’re not working hard enough, you’ve taken the easy path. You’re bought like a mutual fund, which sucks anyway because you got to pay all these fees. Yeah.
Georges El Masri
Yeah, here’s the next one. You could go back 15 years, what advice would you give yourself?
Quentin D’Souza
You know, it’s funny. There’s a real estate investor in our group here who’s like, he’s 22. And he’s got nothing. He’s about 22? I don’t know, around there. He’s got four properties, four or five. And then he asked him, like, what would you have done four years ago? And you said I would have bought more property? Yeah. Right. Like, it’s the same thing as what you would have done 1015 years ago, I think that dwelling on the past is kind of it’s a hard, hard game because everything that that you could have done before is different than what you can do now. But what I probably would have done is invested more time in taking some time and looking around at what other investors are doing and going harder, faster. I think that would have been more beneficial for me, I’m quite happy with where I am now. I’ve got no complaints. But of course, you know, I’d love to buy more property 15 years ago, spending some time in educating myself, and perhaps hiring a coach sooner would probably have helped propel my journey a little bit faster. The more time that you can spend educating yourself and taking action at the same time, the faster you’ll propel yourself forward. So definitely something that I wish I probably did more of 15 years ago.
Georges El Masri
That’s great. And who’s your coach, by the way, you mentioned twice.
Quentin D’Souza
My coach is out on the West Coast. He’s got his coaching program. I prefer not to have no privacy, although real estate investors are going to
Georges El Masri
Right, right. But
Quentin D’Souza
he’s a great guy. And I like I don’t mind referring him to a couple. Yeah, sure. There’s a lot of people that have been mentors and coaches to like, I would say that even Tom and Nick, you know, in their way have been mentors. To me. I’ve had developers that are mentors to me, I’ve had house flippers that are friends and mentors to me. And the people that Jeremiah, I can be mentors, right. They’re different people in there who do different things that can help you. And I think it’s important that you have those people in your life and you talk to them, and they and they help to push you forward. I have a great joint venture partner that keeps pushing me forward to buildings, and I’d love to do that with him, right? All these people can be mentors and coaches in life and it’s just finding the ones that kind of work for you.
Georges El Masri
That’s great. I’m sure you had to seek out your mentors. Even if they didn’t just come to you. You always have to make an effort to find them, right.
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it can even be like books can be right Like the, there are lots of different ways that you can pull information that helps to propel you forward. What you want to do is you want to take the information, internalize it, but then take an x-ray, right? There’s no use and learning something, if you don’t use it, it’s a waste of grains. And if you’re not going to use it, then forget about it and then move on to something that you’re going to take action on. But without being a little bit uncomfortable in the stomach and doing something a little different. You’re not growing, right. So that’s why I like to continue that kind of pushing.
Georges El Masri
That’s great. The final segment here is the Brandon five. I asked you random questions. And you just answer just like quickfire questions? Yeah. The first one would be Who’s your favourite athlete?
Quentin D’Souza
Ooh, favourite athlete? No,
Georges El Masri
not much of a sports fan.
Quentin D’Souza
No, no, no. I mean, I like baseball. Yeah, I like hockey. Marner. Mitch Marner. Okay. Yeah, I like, you know, I like Mitch Marner came out to my son’s baseball team. And he’s just a good guy. He brought the memorial cup out to the kids’ team. They took pictures with them. Mitch Marner is just a he’s an athlete, who is just a great person. And I think that that speaks volumes for who he is and what he does for Toronto, for
Georges El Masri
sure. Yeah, the world needs more of that. Yep. What’s your best childhood memory?
Quentin D’Souza
My best childhood memory. I had my own lawn care business. I was going to dropping off flyers to people’s houses and then mowing lawns, and there’d be all this stuff going on in the house. It was always exciting and interesting. And kind of doing that besides business when I was 13 was pretty cool. Yeah. So I like doing that. And I had a little I’d have a job. I worked at a hotel. And then on the other days that I wasn’t working, I would do this business. So it was pretty cool.
Georges El Masri
That’s almost your son’s age. Now. Do you think we’ll get into stuff like that soon?
Quentin D’Souza
Well, you know, my oldest son is umpiring baseball. So he gets paid like 30 bucks a game and he does three or four games a week. So for him, let’s Yeah, he’s got some Yeah, he’s got some stuff on going is using something he loves, which is baseball to do it, which is, I encourage anybody to do right. If you if you’re doing what you love, it’s not a job and race.
Georges El Masri
Yeah, next question would be what’s the most influential book for you?
Quentin D’Souza
I’ve got a lot of really influential book books that I’ve I’ve read over the years, I mean, Rich Dad, Poor Dad is kind of like a classic. The one that I’ve read most recently that I liked was wealth can’t wait. And I can’t remember the name of the author off the top of my head. But it was great because one of the things that we all need to do more often is do a net worth analysis, take a look at our net worth every year, at least twice a year, you should be doing a net worth analysis. So you can know is your wealth growing? Or is it shrinking? It really goes that into that book. And there’s a lot of different points to it. But I just read that last month. So that’s my new favourite book. Favourite book. Yeah, yeah. And
Georges El Masri
finally, what’s the one thing that you can eat every day?
Quentin D’Souza
Like, every day? Well, I can eat a salad every day, like a good chicken Caesar salad, not even Caesar just a chicken salad. I’m liking those a lot. Now. So cool to do that every day for
Georges El Masri
Sure. It’s a healthy choice. Most people would probably say pizza or something?
Quentin D’Souza
Yeah, it would, if you would ask me a few months ago would have been pizza. But you know, I’m focused, I’ve lost 50 pounds in the last four months. So I’ve been working towards that on all my other goals, you know, quarterly goals. And my first quarter was 25 pounds, the next quarter is 25, and so on until I get to my goal. So I’ve kind of refocused a little bit. And it’s not all about money, right? It’s all about the quality of life. And so diet is part of my quality of life. And so his education, his quality of life,
Georges El Masri
there’s been a ton of good stuff in here, really appreciate the time, before we end things was there anything you wanted to discuss in terms of services you might offer or ways that people can contact you,
Quentin D’Souza
you can check out Durham rei.ca if you’re interested in learning more about the club, and I’ve got coaching and stuff on there. But I think the big message is that if you want to improve your current situation, you need to do something different. And if all you’re doing is the same thing, you’re gonna get the same results. If you want to be or do something different, you have to change. And the only way to change is to get out there and take action right away. Right? And that’s how you’ll pull yourself up and do what you want to do.
Georges El Masri
So yeah, I’ve heard you say that throughout the podcast, and even before we started about taking action in your ear, right? Because you can get all this information if you do nothing with it. It’s as though you’ve never learned it so it doesn’t matter. Yes, again. Thank you very much. free time. Really appreciate it.
Quentin D’Souza
All right, sounds good Georges.