Podcast Transcription

Erwin Szeto [00:00:06] Hello, my fellow hackers. For anyone watching on YouTube, you can see I’m asking my officers to stop using my new office as an excuse because I have left the thing. Thank you. Everyone has reached out and asking about my sensors. He seems 100%. It’s now been eight days since he left hospital and he’s finished his antibiotics. So today is the first day that he’s been allowed to do everything he normally does. You know, go follow. Young boys tend to do so. He’ll go for a long bike rides and go and run around the splash pad and stuff like that. His visit to the dentist was fun as his front tooth is now toast by shaving to the front teeth. They’re now toast. They’re still there, but they’re no longer alive. I could have just said to leave them because they’re not bothering him, but I got to monitor them and I think they follow a couple of years that this also found a cavity while poking around. Thank goodness we bought our own benefits plan for our family and also for a few of our employees to soften the financial blow. I know many of you out there who are self-employed don’t have benefits. We go through our local chamber of commerce. I’m member of the Hamilton Chamber. So we are able to purchase essentially a group plan because we are a Hamilton Chamber member. So the benefits plan is indeed a great plan to spread among the tens of thousands of employees, among chamber members. It’s actually deemed one of the best things about being for the most popular things about being a member of the Hamilton chamber. And then so that way that diversified over those tens of thousands of employees. So our cost is somewhere around $20 a month and we will make good use of that. It’s funny because when I said that the pharmacist, the pharmacist handed me the bill. I prepared and said, Oh, it’s awesome. Like 11 bucks. I’m not sure she took that as a positive or negative. So I clarify and say, Well, I pay for my benefits. So it’s nice to be doing. I hope to be getting benefit out of using my benefits. So we’re getting our money’s worth between this emergency dentist visit, the upcoming cavity repair, regular dentist service maintenance, a private room at the hospital that we have to use. And Bruce fell down and now we’re getting some massage therapy as well. So in recommended to massage therapists, we invited them into the office and they’ve been coming in weekly so far. This will be the third week to massage the staff. Oh, that sounds great. Let’s move on. Hopefully you’re all out there taking care of yourselves and enjoying the returns you’re making from your real estate and stock acting. Never forget life is short, so do not forget to enjoy the fruits of your labor. I’ve spoken to many of you this week. Yet another real estate nor real estate investor. He’s only been investing for a few years. Nice to know that fair. He’s been investing for quite maybe eight years or so. Is a good friend of mine and his real estate’s fully tenanted. It’s all over. He’s got some stuff in North York. You got some stuff in studio rentals and say. Everyone paying your rent and he’s cash flowing. And also he is a stockbroker averaging $20 per week. Have a wild guess if your cash flows more from his real estate investments or his stock acting. Yet again, another example of real estate investing for wealth creation, stock tracking for cash flow. Speaking of cash flow and stock acting, here’s a quick note on Terry. Nice. Very nice. She trader versus he trader. Two weeks ago, I missed the update from last week. A I knew that I just forgot to write it up and to share it. Cherry beat me by a whopping $40 American. But a win is a win. She beat me, and then we combined for over a thousand us. And then this week I won. So I believe this course. Somewhere around 16 six. I might be. Understated. She could be beating me by 18 to 6 anyway. She’s beating me by a significant margin. I’m not sure the lesson is here, but ladies, you can stock act just as well as the men or better than the men. I actually spoke to a single mom of two this week who had taken the original course and the new and improved 2.0 version of the stock hacker Cami and her weekly average is 20 $500 a week. I really wish more single parents out there would have the same tools to be able to do the same. The lesson for the men? I don’t know. Maybe you can get lucky like me and have your partner earn you. I personally have no problem with my wife making more money than me. I’ll make sure you pay for a next round of golf and we’re going out taking your friend out for dinner tonight. And I said that she’s buying because she had a four figure day today and for letting one wind a bit more detail. She had a dip in the money call option on Apple for those know stock acting or stock options. If you’re interested in learning more about stock acting, I’ll be hosting another demonstration over Zoom. We almost broke the system last time as we had over 500 people register, but the capacity for webinars will be 500. We will not be making the recording available for privacy reasons, so make sure you’re there on September 10th at 8 p.m. Eastern time. I’ll have several family and friends on the call as well on the webinar because I honestly do get asked to give demos several times a week. But unfortunately these are COBR times. I’m busy between investing in business and I’m protective of the time I’m supposed to be in the gym. This is a. Golfing Raptors playoffs and family time. Of course. The length, the zoom. A webinar is ridiculously long to just go to the website which is decently long pre WW dot truth about Real Estate Investing Dossier to find a link there. I’ve also posted a link in my social media bio, my Instagram or Facebook, and if you’re on my email list and you’re doing email about it as well, it’s totally free. It’s much better than the one I give to my kid cousin at Thanksgiving last year, and he’s averaging over $1,000 per week in cash flow or about a 20% return on investment in 2025. He is a musician by trade, so he’s a smart guy, but he’s not like a rocket scientist. Honestly, anyone can do this stuff. So we’re talking about cash flow. And speaking of cash flow, we have someone who’s very good at generating it and his name is Ryan Carr of RW Carr Investments as this week’s guest talking about the highest and best use of and because he actually enjoys being creative in real estate, it’s pretty cool. He found like the perfect location for himself where he shares how he groups his real estate investments into buy renovating hold. It’s like one bucket, and he has another bucket for short term renovations, developments and flips, and then he has another bucket for a longer term projects, including a waterfront 14 unit multifamily he renovated that went hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget. How did it work out? You have to listen to find out. Plus, this is the first time on this show for anyone to talk to on the subject and about the subject of the passing of Stephan Arnaud. Ryan was one of his clients, was a coaching client of Stefan and a friend. So we’ll talk about that as well. Rest in peace, Stefan. I think most of you already know Ryan. He’s been on this podcast more than anyone else because he’s a smart guy. He’s always got a great stories as well, and he’s always up to something big. Whether it’s writing articles about how to increase cash flow by renting out sheds, vertical splitting of duplexes. Many of you are familiar with basement apartments, so Ryan will add this to the property. If it makes sense for a property, he will do a vertical split as and there’ll be a vertical wall that divides the property down the middle. It’s a vertical wall versus most people do a duplex toehold or horizontal duplex basement on the basement floor and then the main floor. He’s done tiny homes and he’s done small Maltese, and the list goes on and on. He also shares the story, how he bought his cottage off market. So I think some of you will be interested in that as well. If you don’t know Ryan, you soon will because he’s always at the big things and he’s up to bigger things that I’m sworn to secrecy about. But here is an interview that we can share. I give you Ryan Carr. Ryan! What’s keeping you busy these days?

Ryan Carr [00:07:43] Man! Good to see you. Thanks for having me on.

Erwin Szeto [00:07:45] Thanks for making the time because I know I’m frickin busier and you’ll have the time to do it. We had a cancelation today.

Ryan Carr [00:07:50] We did. We did. When the time opens up on the schedule. You got to take advantage, right?

Erwin Szeto [00:07:54] Yeah, I jumped on it. It was like I’ve been meaning to head to John because I know you’re. You’ve been up to stuff and you’re always up to stuff. You’re still. That’s scaling. Sorry I cut you off, but can you please say what’s keeping you busy these days?

Ryan Carr [00:08:08] Just continue you and I’ll take all the compliments you got, so. Yeah, a lot. So we’re. We’re pretty busy. We’ve got some houses being built right now. We got some new built duplex, vertical splits on the go. I’ve got some land planning and land assembly projects underway. I want to do some small infill, low rise apartment buildings. We’ve got some rural properties that we’re working on writing a book like it’s, it’s busy, man. Things are going well. Really good.

Erwin Szeto [00:08:33] Because start off there. I love Tim terrorist. But the book the title for Our Workweek, you’re doing a four hour work week, right?

Ryan Carr [00:08:40] Oh, oh, yeah, sure.

Erwin Szeto [00:08:43] Now, what are your what is your hours?

Ryan Carr [00:08:45] Okay, so I work a lot. So right now I’m subscribing to the program that I’m over, indexing on the front end so I can reap the benefits on the back. And I think a lot of people do this, especially a lot of entrepreneurs early on in their career. They will work harder than smarter, I guess is the best way to put it so that they can do and reap some of those benefits on the back end. So for me, I mean, I’m doing that. I would typically put in a 12 to 15 hour workday every day, at least six days a week, which is to a lot of people insane. But I’ve seen the portfolio grow. I’ve seen what we’ve been able to achieve in the last number of years, and at some point that will absolutely taper off and that will absolutely come down to be more efficient. Right now, I’m still generally active in the business, so it does take my time. But yeah, at some point we’re going to scale that back and change the way that we do things. But for an ounce, it’s 12 to 15 hours down payment.

Erwin Szeto [00:09:35] When do you think you scale back? What does it look like?

Ryan Carr [00:09:39] I’m trying to quantify that. And it’s funny you ask because I was thinking about that. I can see two weeks ago I had a lot on the go and I had a day that was just like super crazy. And I’m like, well, you know, sometimes you just get these. You just get these moments like when you get married or when you have kids and you know, your perspective is changed. I’m starting to have a perspective shift now. So I’ve been doing it full time since 2014. Real estate. On and off since 2012. And I’m starting to have this perspective shift on, okay, the portfolio is built. Things are self-sustaining. How does that look moving forward? So I think it’ll be a little bit clearer in the next six months as to how specifically that will play out. Do we scale up to scale down? Things will change, but I don’t know how that’s going to change that. So it’s yet to be seen.

Erwin Szeto [00:10:20] You know, like what your quote unquote retirement looks like. Picture that.

Ryan Carr [00:10:24] I don’t I don’t I try to work my way over like 1 to 5 years. A 10 to 15 year plan I just think is too far out for me. It’s really hard. Like, theoretically, could I sell everything right now and retire and live really comfortably? Yeah, I guess I could. A lot of real estate investors could do that. I’m no different. I absolutely could, but I think I’d be bored. So I’ve got I’ve got this like I’ve got these two poles that are always fighting each other. I really enjoy what I do. I love to find deals. I love to do not the physical construction, but aspects of the planning and design and things like this where I’m planning. I love to do that. So if I just sold it all and said, okay, I’m retired now, I would give it two months and I’d probably be back doing the same thing. So that’s the that’s the fight that I have every day.

Erwin Szeto [00:11:09] I’ve heard that many times from people who actually are like in their fifties and sixties are like crazy successful. If I do get bought, they did try to like I moved to Florida.

Ryan Carr [00:11:19] Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:11:20] Came back two months later. Starting something new.

Ryan Carr [00:11:23] Yeah, for sure. Like how many? I read the thing. Like how many cigars can you smoke and how much wine can you drink? And I mean, at the end of the day, it’s the people that you’re sharing those experiences with that really matter. But you got to find something that’s fulfilling for you. And being creative is one of those things.

Erwin Szeto [00:11:38] One of the Carnegies, I forget one day dealer, Andrew. The story I read was that their quote unquote retirement was they had a.

Ryan Carr [00:11:45] Large.

Erwin Szeto [00:11:46] Cottage property and they would work 6 to 12, six in the morning to 12 every day. And because they had a vacation property that was sizable, they would invite friends and family to come to them. So then his workday ended at noon and then he joined his guests and family at 12. And the rest of the day was off.

Ryan Carr [00:12:05] Ooh, I like that and I like that. That’s really good. That where you get a bit of both, you get some humility and a good lifestyle, but you also get to do some of the things you love. A business. That’s great.

Erwin Szeto [00:12:14] It’s a good segue way to give it a second because this hit home was a destination. People come.

Ryan Carr [00:12:20] Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:12:21] Who says no to that?

Ryan Carr [00:12:23] That’s right.

Erwin Szeto [00:12:24] Right. That’s actually a good Segway. Very little early into my talk about so soon. But it’s a good Segway, too. You just bought a cottage?

Ryan Carr [00:12:30] I did. I did. So about a month back. Two months back, my wife, I’d picked up a piece of property out in Prince Edward County. And you mentioned about going to a destination. Well, this particular parcel is right on Lake Ontario. It’s a really, really beautiful piece of land. It’s got a little house on it and a garage. And it’s a bit of a fixer upper, which is obviously exactly what we look for. And it’s in wine country. So Prince Edward County is very similar to like a Napa Valley or Mega Falls or things like this. In terms of in terms of wine, it’s the up and comer. Right. So at some point, this will be the destination and the hot ticket and we’re hoping to capitalize on that for sure.

Erwin Szeto [00:13:09] I don’t know how up and coming it is. It’s sandbagged.

Ryan Carr [00:13:12] So it’s coming in one of them.

Erwin Szeto [00:13:15] Isn’t that like one of the top beaches in Ontario?

Ryan Carr [00:13:19] It absolutely is. It absolutely is. So for the people that know about it, I mean, it’s an amazing spot to be. And it’s very, very popular, very heavy on the touristy side. But I think in the next 5 to 10 years, it’s just going to double and explode.

Erwin Szeto [00:13:31] It’s actually one of the arguments for cottage investments is whether or not people think global warming is real. It sure does seem that things are getting warmer. Now, just, you know, there’s this whole our whole neighbors that are like 300 million people south of us. It’s going to get hot there.

Ryan Carr [00:13:47] Yep.

Erwin Szeto [00:13:48] So imagine some of them will well come up, you know, what’s the borders open? I’m talking.

Ryan Carr [00:13:51] Term. That’s true.

Erwin Szeto [00:13:53] Not talking about next week, but, you know, the next. In our lifetime, I think things will be considerably warmer, but yeah. Will be broken.

Ryan Carr [00:14:00] But if we see an iceberg floating through Lake Ontario, we know that it’s coming. Right.

Erwin Szeto [00:14:05] So talk to the story how you got it, because it’s actually it’s actually a great example of a bigger strategy that you like to tell people. So where did you find the property? The MLS also brought it to you. Where you door knocking. But what.

Ryan Carr [00:14:19] Happened? This was online. This was on Kijiji. So one of one of my long time pastimes is to look for properties anywhere that I can find them. Usually there are three yellow letter campaigns or some far off where they just come. They just show up. But this one happened to be Ikeji. So my wife actually found it. And we’ve got a property or a couple of projects going on out that way already. So she calls me and she goes, Hey, where, where are you guys right now? And I have to be in the truck with one of my employees. And we were heading out to look at one of the deals that we are doing. And she goes, Where are you guys right now? I said, Well, you know, we’re not too far away from this location. And she goes, Well, you’re pretty close to a waterfront property that I just found on Kijiji. She found it like on page nine. Like way deep.

Erwin Szeto [00:15:03] And some things they’re not reposting. They’re not. No, they’re not. They’re not paying for top bad nothing.

Ryan Carr [00:15:09] Nothing like this. No, this is deep. This was deep. And we’ve been looking for college probably for a bit. And so she finds this property and she’s like, This is perfect. You’ve got to go check it out. She’s like, Do you have a purchase agreement with you? And I’m like, Yeah, of course. I never leave home without a purchase agreement. I like the phone key as well. And a purchase agreement. That’s the that’s the standard.

Erwin Szeto [00:15:29] In math.

Ryan Carr [00:15:29] These days. And yeah, so she goes, give this guy a call. Here’s a phone number. See if they say, go check it out. So we happen to be about 10 minutes away. I asked the seller where he was located and he happened to be pretty close to us. So we tagged up and right there on the spot, I said, hey, if you guys are ready to do it, it was a retiring couple that was selling. And I said, if you guys are ready to do it, we could do this thing right here. He goes, Yeah, that sounds great. And we did it right there on the driveway. It was awesome.

Erwin Szeto [00:15:57] Did you ask the story? What’s the story here?

Ryan Carr [00:15:59] Always, always ask that story. Mr.. Mr.. Seller. What’s the story here? What’s going on with this place? Right.

Erwin Szeto [00:16:06] Listeners, hopefully you wrote that down or you burnt that to your memory. What’s the story with the property? What was the story with the property.

Ryan Carr [00:16:14] In this case? The owner had owned it since I think it was the early 1994, something like that. And they had lived in the property, they had rented the property, they lived in the property again. And then finally they had moved out. And this particular individual owned a couple of properties locally. So this wasn’t the only one that he was selling. And the overarching principle here was that he was looking to retire. So they were looking for something clean, quick deal. It didn’t have to fix that. There’s a little bit of like dated finishes and you know, it needed shingles and stuff like this inside. But overall, the place was pretty clean and I looked at the land, the land value just so happened to be where I wanted it to be short term and long term. And it was also out of the floodplain, which is a rarity when you’re buying along the periphery of some of these lakes. So because we were high and dry and it had all of the checkboxes and the prices were right, I said, hey, let’s do it. Mr..

Erwin Szeto [00:17:04] OPERATOR Yeah. You mentioned that they could go as a, as a hobby of yours. Before we were caught recording, you said you were on do like even longer ago, even before you’re doing properties, right?

Ryan Carr [00:17:16] Yeah, I was 100% so before the whole Gary Bee craze came in by going garage selling, I was flipping on Kijiji as a kid all the way up to today. I think that a large portion of my skills came from doing some of those hand-to-hand combat when I was younger. Because when you’re buying something, let’s just use a bicycle as an example. When you’re buying a bicycle, uncle, you’re effectively going out. Somebody put something for sale. You’re negotiating for that product. You’re meaning the seller, you’re the buyer, you’re transacting, right? You’re taking it back. You’re maybe adding value in some manner, fixing it up, painting it, whatever, and then you’re selling it back to the market and ideally what would be a profit. So all of the same principles apply for Kijiji flipping as they do for real estate. And I think this is it. This is a huge way, especially for some of the younger listeners who are looking to get into the market but don’t have a ton of money. This is a great way to get good at your skills and start trading properties or sorry, not properties, but the products that they’re comfortable with. Right, right.

Erwin Szeto [00:18:13] Yeah, sure. Mine’s like a friend of mine worked at Canadian Tire.

Ryan Carr [00:18:16] And.

Erwin Szeto [00:18:17] They would always be throwing perfectly, almost, almost perfectly good product out, like returns or some minor defect with the property. Just so much stuff is made in China, for example. It’s cheaper for them just to send a new product for sending it back. So it’s up in the bin.

Ryan Carr [00:18:32] Yes.

Erwin Szeto [00:18:33] So then if you’re a smart if you can if you decent with your hands, you can probably fix it. Or you can take, for example, if they throw two bikes, you probably have enough parts to make one good bike out of.

Ryan Carr [00:18:43] It and make one. That’s right.

Erwin Szeto [00:18:44] With free materials.

Ryan Carr [00:18:46] That’s right. That’s right. There used to be a TV show called The Liquidator, and I would watch this thing like all the time. This guy was a he was from Vancouver, B.C. And this guy was just like a hustler grinder. He’d run around town and he’d be buying, like, old restaurants that are that are that have gone bankrupt. And he’d buy all the stoves inside and sell them, or all the fridges and cider he’d go buy like a whole sked worth of tomato sauce, call up some wholesaler that he’s never met and say, Hey, man, look, I got I got, like, 14 skids of tomato sauce at once at my warehouse. What do you want for it? And he would sell it that way, you know, make five points, ten points, 20 points on the deal and never have to touch it. So that was that was his way of doing it. And watching that show was so inspirational. Every time I’d watch it, I’m just like, Oh my God, I got to go buy something. Just come off. They’re like, so fired up. So. So how old were you at this time? I was probably like maybe 15, 16 or something like that for the liquidator.

Erwin Szeto [00:19:39] Is this the Lord?

Ryan Carr [00:19:41] Oh, the liquidator was like within the last five, six, seven years. Okay. So yeah, you can catch some clips on YouTube and it was on 0ln at one point in 2012.

Erwin Szeto [00:19:52] Rob Four Seasons. Jeff Schwartz.

Ryan Carr [00:19:54] Josh Schwartz. That’s the guy’s name. Fascinated. Yeah, great show.

Erwin Szeto [00:19:59] Can’t like to get that for my kids.

Ryan Carr [00:20:01] So good. It’s so good.

Erwin Szeto [00:20:03] It’s funny. Like, what’s in front of you becomes part of you. I mean, like, my kids are quoting Warren Buffett. Let’s find out what’s hilarious.

Ryan Carr [00:20:11] That’s the cartoon show that he has.

Erwin Szeto [00:20:14] And it’s all it’s not even it’s not well animated or anything, but. Yeah, that’s all we let the kids watch. Really?

Ryan Carr [00:20:20] That’s good. That’s good. Instill it early and it just becomes second nature. Yeah. Yeah, that’s great.

Erwin Szeto [00:20:25] People are like, well, worried about, like, what the let the kids watch and kids why love TV? That’s awesome. Now, the other cool thing about the story of the college is, for example, my own my own investing. I don’t, um, invest outside of my zones. Right? I have areas I have teams best in. But the college, for example, is out of your regular area. It used to be more out of your area. You share shared the listener, like what your strategy is with the properties outside of your area. Because the Prince Edward County is about most your properties are in Oshawa.

Ryan Carr [00:20:58] In the Durham area. Durham area. This would be about an hour and 15 minutes away from me. Right. Right.

Erwin Szeto [00:21:04] So it’s not like an it’s not an ideal commute for your staff to be spending two and a half hours on the road each day.

Ryan Carr [00:21:10] It’s not.

Erwin Szeto [00:21:11] So you show how do you mobilize your local team to be on site an hour and a half away?

Ryan Carr [00:21:17] Yeah. So I typically run between one and three crews, one or two crews locally and then an auxiliary crew in a submarket that my full time guys wouldn’t normally be. And in this case, because my auxiliary crew is busy on some other properties that we’re working on, we happen to have a slot in the schedule where I said to my own t four staff, I said, Boy, what do you want to do? Do you want to pick up a project locally or do you want to go and do a cottage property and maybe live up by the beach thought about and they said, hey, we want to go work on the beach. So we got them a trailer and we bought a yard. And the property about a yard, like one of those big canvas tents. And because living it like living in a renovation stuff, right? So we’re renovating inside the house and then we’ve got the garage for all the material storage and then the guys are living in a rented, like a rented. I don’t know what the term is, but like a Winnebago kind of thing, like an RV trailer that’s got like heat and a C and a stove. And so it’s fully self-sustaining. And then, yeah, they basically walk across the driveway to work every day, do the thing, have a swim at lunch, make burgers and watch the sunset. It’s great. Are they enjoying themselves? They are very much so. It’s a different spin. I mean, doing cookie cutter rental properties is one way to do it, right? Doing flipping is another way to do it because you’ve got different elements of design. But I mean, this is this is completely different because everything about it is like nothing that we would typically do in the city. You know, out here we’re going beach vibe, coastal, some different tiles, lots of lights, things like this. So it’s an it’s a fun way to do a project for sure.

Erwin Szeto [00:22:50] You share what is it costing you for to be able to mobilize your team like that? Because I know you. I know you’re a numbers guy.

Ryan Carr [00:22:57] Yeah, I’m a numbers guy.

Erwin Szeto [00:22:58] You’re the RV. You’re paying for their meals, right?

Ryan Carr [00:23:03] Yes. So I gave them we’ll start with meals. Initially, I started thinking like, should I give them a per diem? Should I buy them beer? Should I pick up the burgers? Like, what do we do? You know, this is kind of new territory for me. So I just said like, Hey, you guys have my visa. You just go buy what you need and I’ll cover it, right? And yeah, like, just give them carte blanche. I mean, I just found that it’s a really good way to look out for people. They’ll eat what they want to eat, and they can drink what they want to drink and they can buy it whenever they feel it’s needed. And I find that’s a that’s a good way to do it. So that was that was the food side of it. In terms of the living accommodations. The living accommodations, I would kind of consider them to be expensive. I think to rent the RV is like a thousand bucks for the week. So, you know, you’re doing a project for a month. There’s four grand sitting right there. So what we’re trying to do right now, because we are still going to rental, is we’re trying to schedule the timeline such that we can always have functioning water, bathroom, shower, things like this, and maybe one or two of the three bedrooms that are relatively clean to stay in. So if we can tighten up the one month of trailer rental into two and a half weeks, we can save a little bit there. And it helps with it just helps with the natural progress to see the guys working their way through kitchen and stuff like that. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, pretty cool.

Erwin Szeto [00:24:17] And for those I had to google your they didn’t know what that was why you are t turkish apparently.

Ryan Carr [00:24:24] Yeah. It’s a big beige canvas tent. And in this case, ours is 16 feet across. So it’s pretty big. And then it goes up into a pyramid point, almost like a circus tent us and you can sleep a bunch of people in there like my wife and I sleep in there when we go or if we have friends, we can sleep there. And then the guys have their own space, especially during combat. It’s good to have their own space. So they’re in their own bubble, but they’re fully air conditioned and plumbed and all that stuff. So it’s proper. It’s a good setup. All right.

Erwin Szeto [00:24:51] So we covered mobilizing your team. The again, I think that’s important for people. I think a lot of people are struggling with cash flow when they’re in their current situations, in their different neighborhoods that they invest in. So I think it’s a good story to share. So let’s take a step back. You’ve been known for many things, and I think it actually ties in well with what’s the title of your book? We’ll get into your book in a bit. What’s title of it?

Ryan Carr [00:25:14] Yeah, it’s called The Highest and Best Use. It’s all about real estate and how to find opportunity where other people aren’t able to find it.

Erwin Szeto [00:25:20] Right. And your path really leads into that. Well, because for anyone who’s like read stuff that you put out there or follow your story, you know, you were like the shed guy you’re renting or dead for people who don’t know how much did it cost? You put in the shed, but what did you rent them for?

Ryan Carr [00:25:37] Yeah, I did an article in Canada Real Estate Wealth. I forget the specific number that it cost to put up a shed, but let’s just say it’s 500 bucks, right? To buy the shed and a couple of hundred bucks to have it installed. So you put up the shed for like maybe $1,000, right. And maybe you rent the shed that’s like a ten by ten for like 50 bucks a month. Well, there’s you know, if you’re making 600 bucks a year on $1,000 only, that’s a 50 or 60% ROI in year one. You know, this thing’s paid for in year two and then it’s just all gravy be on that. So yeah, I did sheds for a bit.

Erwin Szeto [00:26:09] So that was like one of the early, early things that you were known for and then you’re known for side splits.

Ryan Carr [00:26:15] Vertical split.

Erwin Szeto [00:26:16] Vertical split. Yeah, but for the listener doesn’t know what he’s saying, what a vertical split is.

Ryan Carr [00:26:20] Yeah, to make it really simple, I was doing them in in new construction homes and I still am. And I was also doing them in renovation at home. So we would take we would take a bungalow, for example, and when most people were doing basement apartments, but one of the bottom, one of the top, I was actually putting a wall down the center of the house and doing the left and right. So each tenant would effectively end up with like a like a townhouse and two levels of living space and it bump around. So it was better for property management, there’s less noise and all kinds of stuff. So yeah, we went through that phase too. I’m still there. I like that face. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:26:56] We’ve talked about in previous episodes. So, folks, Ryan has a whole lot more so much more to share. Much more to share that we have because it’s been a while since been on. Yeah. I’ve been chasing Ryan for some time to get back on the show. So we’ve had Ryan’s covered in past episodes. You can go listen to past episodes with Ryan on. And also just it’s important for people to know that verbal slip makes sense when it’s a disaster property, right? That’s usually the starting point.

Ryan Carr [00:27:20] Typically. I mean, that’s all I really ever bias disaster properties. So if it’s like if you’re going to go into your basement, you might as well not pay for it on the way in, you know, I mean, you might have to find something vacant, but we’ve we progressed quite a bit from basement apartments and vertical splits into some other stuff now. So it’s been it’s been a great wild ride.

Erwin Szeto [00:27:37] And then more recently, I think you were known for tiny, tiny house. Tiny homes.

Ryan Carr [00:27:41] Yeah. Yeah. Did the tiny house that was a couple of years back that projects that was a new one. That was a really neat one. That was almost like a I guess you could call it like a cottage property in a sense, because it was kind of near a river and it was it had some really neat vibes to it. We bought a property that had a tiny house and a full size house on it. The way that title was registered effectively allowed me to sever the land and keep the tiny house on one parcel and put the main house on another parcel. So we ended up with two houses for one purchase price.

Erwin Szeto [00:28:11] And then that was a perfect case of highest and best use.

Ryan Carr [00:28:15] Right? 100%. 100%. I mean, anytime that you can cut a piece of land into more titles, like more titles equals more money typically. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:28:23] Even going in though, the primary house was made the deal worth it, right?

Ryan Carr [00:28:27] Yeah. So I bought it knowing that it was going to be a bit of a marketing play just because it was really unique. I bought it knowing that the margins weren’t as good as I would typically like to see for the amount of work that we had to put in. But I said, You know what, this is really neat. Let’s try this. I learned so much going through it. So there was an element of education in that too. And yeah, we made money, which was great, but it wasn’t the primary driver of this one, which is usually, you know, my primary driver making money.

Erwin Szeto [00:28:53] And then you got a lot of media attention for it. So we’ve covered that this past episode, but I want to touch on it again. The amount of hate you got.

Ryan Carr [00:29:02] Did so much, so much good things now or is it.

Erwin Szeto [00:29:07] Just applesauce?

Ryan Carr [00:29:08] Said it like we sold that property to an open market on the MLS, which means you can buy it from horrible person. Yeah, you cannot buy it. Yeah. Like, like I don’t know if you want to come through come through and if you don’t sell. So we did a few open houses just for fun and we had a ton of trash and like people were literally lined up down the driveway on the sidewalk. KCTV or CBC News was there one or two? The Toronto Star covered it. I think The Globe and Mail. I covered it. BNN Bloomberg covered it below. Local media.

Erwin Szeto [00:29:36] Yeah, like all the local media, all.

Ryan Carr [00:29:38] The local newspapers, we get 100,000 hits on Facebook. Like it was insane how many people knew about this thing. And now when you bring it up in conversation, even some years later, people are like, You’re that tiny house guy, aren’t you? Yeah, that was me. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:29:54] That’s. That’s hilarious. And then do you give us an overview of your current portfolio, what you hold, and then we’ll talk about your projects?

Ryan Carr [00:30:02] Yeah. So at any one time, I typically have 8 to 10 open job sites in various phases of development. So when I say development, that might mean under construction for something like a basement apartment. I would talk about that. That might mean something under construction like a flip, that might mean something that’s being backhanded in terms of actual residential infill development. So like a rezoning application, San Francisco, things like this anywhere in between is typically where I like to play and I focus on two buckets. So I go short term, long term. All of the short term stuff would be relatively quick in and out projects like a flip or, you know, a basement suite. And then my long term stuff would be more of a development play where it’s going to take me a year or two of planning to get to that point anyways. You know, while I’m doing the short term stuff, that long term stuff is actually playing out in the background. So when we get there in two years, it’s ready to go.

Erwin Szeto [00:30:54] But you still hold properties as well. Like you still have some long term. You hold up, hold it or rent it out.

Ryan Carr [00:30:59] I do, yeah. So I keep off. I sell half as my kind of go to I take on partners strategically, but for the most part, I’ve generally done most of these myself. So I think as of a couple weeks ago, I’d purchased about 40 some other properties in the last five, six, seven years or something like that. A couple of them that my partners, like I say, and the rest of my own just by way of some creativity and strategic financing. So that’s what I currently have purchased in terms of tenants. I think I’ve got somewhere in the 30 to 40 tenants range. Right. And that fluctuates. It comes and goes, yeah. 35 tenants like that.

Erwin Szeto [00:31:32] And you manage in house, right?

Ryan Carr [00:31:35] We do, we do. We manage all in-house. That’s what work it is. This is something.

Erwin Szeto [00:31:41] Because they’re not all some of them are distant from you’re from where you live too isn’t it.

Ryan Carr [00:31:45] Some of them are. So those ones we don’t manage it. So I guess 50% of the portfolio we manage locally in Durham and then the other 50% I outsource. But what’s really interesting about the properties that we manage. Locally is what I’m buying a property because I’m buying the worst of the worst. That typically allows you to buy either at a discount or less than what the market would generally bear. So when I go in, I’m of the opinion that I over renovate a little bit on the way in knowing that I’m going to hold that property in long term in perpetuity. And the reason that I do that is because I’ve always wanted to build my portfolio on quality properties that aren’t smashed up great, and that have good bonds, a good infrastructure underneath it because it never fails. You’ve got to grow the business. And that thing that you did two or three years ago for that property that you only half renovated that you thought you’d get to next year. You never get to it. You never get to it. That’s why when I go into replan things and rewire things, I do it while the walls are open, because to move a tenant out is a complete pain. And not only are you losing rent, but then you still have to make that repair. And now all the stuff is inside. So I just go in. I do it all on the front end. I know that. Okay. I might spend an extra five or 10,000 bucks now, but what’s that headache worth to me when I do want to continue to scale my business? So if I put a little extra building blocks on the foundation so that we can scale and we don’t have functioning issues with the property, we limit those issues to people and payments and tenancies.

Erwin Szeto [00:33:08] That’s a great story to share. I think most people understand that something was cool with your business system that enabled you to scale is you also frontend a lot of the effort and building relationships with your staff. You talk to that investors, a lot of them are new small business owners that are often trying to do things on the cheap. So it’s kind of like the opposite what you just said, you’re like investing everything now that infomercial term, like set it and forget it. Yeah, we said that to people and some people are still trying to cut corners, you know, instead of replacing windows, just try to block the security with a carpet. Instead, even those rotted out would happen. Specs are going to save a couple hundred dollars there. And your relationships, your employees because I’ve seen it I’ve seen it where people try to build businesses on, for example, cheap labor. And the sad part about cheap labor is often they get too busy and now they don’t know that they’re no longer reliable to you.

Ryan Carr [00:34:06] Yeah, cheap labor sucks, so I can’t even sugarcoat that. Cheap fast if good you can pick two, but you can’t have the third rate if it’s cheap and fast. It’s not good. If it’s cheap and good, it’s not fast. That’s how it works. So at least for me, I can only speak to my experiences, right? And I don’t tell people what to do. I just say, Hey, this is what I’ve learned from is Yes, you’re right. I do front end the relationship to the employees I give before I expect to receive and I very much make sure that people are happy with where they’re working. I came from an environment when I was working as a mechanic. I came from an environment where we were building armored cars. It was a very new job and the first couple of months that I worked at this business, it was great. Everybody was rosy, the staff was great, management was great. And then over the preceding two, three years, they stopped looking after their staff. And I slowly watched the morale in the shop go down, down, down to the point that they ended up laying everybody else off. And that’s how we ended up in real estate. But what I learned from this place and really reflecting back, I was basically being paid to go to school because I learned so much here and it was all for the wrong reasons. Right of what not to do is that I remember saying to the owner of this company, I said, Hey, if you don’t look after your guys, who’s going to be here to build your trucks? Right. And truthfully, that was probably pretty rude of me to say I was probably like early twenties in this like mid-forties mid-thirties man was like trying to run a business, but I don’t regret it because it was true. And sometimes the truth sucks. But like that stuck with me. And I remember saying this to this guy in the parking lot one day, like, if you don’t look after your guys, who’s going to be here to build two trucks? And the same thing goes for, in my case, construction or real estate. If you don’t look after your agents, you know, if you cut them on commissions, who’s going to be there to market your property? If you don’t look after your contractors, who’s going to be there to fix that pipe on the weekend when the thing happened and it’s Thanksgiving, you know, so like what goes around comes around. And I’m very much a fan of looking after people.

Erwin Szeto [00:36:00] So it’s funny because that’s exactly true. I had a conversation, someone with a team there, we had a client asking for a discount and then they’re being a pain about it. And I said, You know, because we have a call list when a great deal comes up, we recall list. I said, moving down the list.

Ryan Carr [00:36:17] You go, you go. You know, I’ll be upfront. I pay 6% to sell my properties and people go, you pay 6%. I got that. I do. I pay 6%. And they go, why would you do you can go to comp free purplebricks, you know, sell it for free or you can go here and I still like the agents I use have systems, they market the crap out of this property and they sell for over asking. So I’m happy to pay because I’m also receiving, you know, and they do a really good job for me, just like you do for your clients. You know, if you support the same people over and over and over, they’re going to support you back. So by that person. Saying I want a discount and getting bumped down the list of off market deals are really good opportunities, right? So let’s just say they save 1% on a 500,000. Our house is five grand, but maybe instead of being number three, now they’re number 12 on that list. And that list could have actually been worth 50,000 bucks. I just don’t think it’s worth it. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:37:16] And I give the same advice to people, too, when they think I’m having a tough time renting something. I say, Well, are you seeing MLS? And sometimes they’re saying, yes. And I said the question, right. You don’t think it’s the agent’s attention?

Ryan Carr [00:37:31] Yes.

Erwin Szeto [00:37:34] All right. I’ll increase the above. The cooperative commission, like even like 500 bucks. A thousand bucks, right? Yeah. It saves you a month. A vacancy that pays back very easily.

Ryan Carr [00:37:43] Yes. Yeah. People, there’s so many moving parts. So you got to look at the net of like the activity that you’re doing. So, I mean, you know, we talk about front end of the renovations. It’s no different than commissions if you carry that property for an extra month because you didn’t pay more to get it on every website on the Internet. Right. And you carry that thing for an extra month because somebody didn’t find it for that for weeks. Was it worth paying the extra 1%? Probably. You know, the same thing goes for your staff like year before you receive. They’ll give it back to you. And I don’t do this to be manipulative. I do it to be a good guy and it makes them feel like part of the family, which is effectively how I operate. And I they just love being there. So by them not being there or by them loving being there, they perform better.

Erwin Szeto [00:38:26] Now I want to talk about your business because you started with single family homes and then you’ve progressed to a more severing and developing. What was that point where you decided that you needed to be bigger than just a single family home?

Ryan Carr [00:38:39] Bigger than a single family home? So it came down to opportunity for me. So like I saying with the book, I’m a big proponent of the highest and best use. And because one of the things that makes me tick is being creative. This just came by way of natural progression. I think in terms of ROI, there’s a very long time horizon with development. So if somebody is driven by a life immediately, you know, they might be more of a flipper like we talked about before. I’m more of a short term, long term two bucket type of view. So when I was looking for opportunity, I said, okay, I’ve got enough short term stuff right now. Why don’t I do something along and just try it? And if I fail at it, I’ve got a little bit of runway because I know I’m not going to get to that project for the next little bit anyways so I can work it out. And that’s effectively what led me to being able to spot these opportunities is because, you know, development’s a long term game and it takes time. But when you can understand development and when you can understand the short term stuff like a basement apartment or a flip or you can understand wholesaling. Now I’ve got the full package on the market. I can see, okay, here, this is where the opportunity is and that’s how I’ve continued to grow.

Erwin Szeto [00:39:42] So for example, you mentioned I think you mentioned that you’re looking at doing a mid-rise apartment building and you also did that property at Trenton, which was a midsize multi.

Ryan Carr [00:39:54] Yeah, it was 14 units.

Erwin Szeto [00:39:56] 21 talking about.

Ryan Carr [00:39:57] It.

Erwin Szeto [00:39:57] We talked about the I would talk about the one in Trenton because. Yeah, because you’re basically finished, right? It’s done.

Ryan Carr [00:40:03] It’s done. We just had it reappraised, refinanced, all that stuff. We should be signing the refi documents end of this week.

Erwin Szeto [00:40:09] Right. We have the finished the end of the story. Where did it begin? How long ago?

Ryan Carr [00:40:15] That one began May long weekend of 2018.

Erwin Szeto [00:40:20] Oh, it’s been a while. So since the listener people’s idea of short term different know I used to call it consider five years midterms. So for some people two years is short term. So what did you have to go through for this property?

Ryan Carr [00:40:35] So I guess at that point in my career, I had maybe bought like 20 or 25 residential properties. This was my first bigger, you know, multifamily. So that for me was like, okay, this is my next step. This is my next progression. There’s a number of ways that you can grow in business. One of the ways is just doing bigger volume properties and more expensive ones, and that’s how I took him and I bought that in May of 2018. I looked at the property and I said, okay, I’m going to buy it for X, I’m going to renovate for Y, and this is what I think it’s worth when it’s done. So you do your conventional value add, do a reappraisal by the time you’re done. And if the math works and the math works, this one in my case took 20 months of renovations, which is so mentally taxing. I just I can’t even explain. 20 months of renovations is insane, you guys. So. 14 units. We turned over 90% of the building. I inherited some tenants. We had to buy them out. I had every problem you could imagine extra renovations, bigger budgets, just all kinds of stuff happening. A lot of moving parts with something like that. With all those units and a bigger parcel, this piece of land was actually two acres and it was also waterfront. So we had waterfront to contend with. We had building permits to contend with, we had to contend with. And obviously the finances and carrying costs were a component of that as well. So yeah, 18, 18, 20 months of renovations. I think the rent was about 600,000 bucks and overall I was very pleased with the way it turned out. The tenants are happy and it’s currently being managed by a its first manager who’s fantastic. So the process was very good. Also.

Erwin Szeto [00:42:08] Was this your local crew that did the renovation or a new one?

Ryan Carr [00:42:12] No. So actually yes or no. So I had a local crew to Durham who said they wanted to take on a project because one of their staff was actually already sort of out that way. So I said, okay, I’ll give you guys half the building, go start the renovations. Let’s see how the process goes. It didn’t really work out with them, so I had to change contractors midway through. That was a challenge. It was too far for my own guys to go, even though they did go a couple of days here and there just to get some stuff done, you know, in general was too much. So I had to change contractors. Midway through, I found a new set of guys out there who turned out to be amazing. Like amazing. It was a referral word of mouth because it was kind of far away. It just I just didn’t have the time to go. And these guys, they pulled through. They were so good. They were expensive. But if you’re looking for an hourly rate of return, like, you’re going to pay them more, but you have to put in less of your own time, then it’s by far the, you know, the right way to go. Hey, guys, forget about the place almost, you know, call to call to see them, to taste as they say. And when it’s done, they’ll call you back. And that’s how it went. They were fantastic. Fabulous.

Erwin Szeto [00:43:22] Were you doing napkin math this time? Can you share the narrative math?

Ryan Carr [00:43:26] Yeah. So, I mean.

Erwin Szeto [00:43:27] Like, when do you think that afternoon math was going in? And what turned out to be.

Ryan Carr [00:43:31] The renovation was definitely higher. It’s a couple of hundred thousand bucks higher than I had anticipated.

Erwin Szeto [00:43:35] A couple of thousand lots. A couple hundred thousand between.

Ryan Carr [00:43:38] When you’re spending six, you know, we spend six on a grand. If you’re doing $100,000 rent and you spend an extra 2120, like, oh, shit, you know, 20 grand, that sucks, but we’ll get by. It’s the same percentage, it’s just scaled, right. So yeah, when I, when I factored in the purchase price and renovations and, and all that, by the time I reified, it really did make sense. And doing this commercial refi was actually an interesting process, too, because CMHC has just brought in some new rules where you can’t take out all the equity that you would have previously been entitled to. So that’s a whole other that’s a whole other complexity that we had to go through. And the refinancing process was about four months through CMHC.

Erwin Szeto [00:44:17] Right. And something I noticed about you is that you’re more children. Most people I would not be good. I would not be good for this project.

Ryan Carr [00:44:24] You just got to keep it together, you know? You got to keep it together. This is like on a good day or a bad day. This is what you get. I’m like, I’m right down the middle, man. That’s it.

Erwin Szeto [00:44:32] I know you’ve had lots of bad days, but you’re still pretty levelheaded.

Ryan Carr [00:44:36] I Yeah, I mean, even this week I had some real tricky days on one of the development projects, so we had some hiccups that were not anticipated and turned out to be kind of expensive. And it’s a good thing I caught it when I did. You know, the days just come and go.

Erwin Szeto [00:44:50] Sorry. You said 14 units and the rent was 600,000 per unit.

Ryan Carr [00:44:55] In this case it was. So what is that?

Erwin Szeto [00:44:59] Was there anything structural?

Ryan Carr [00:45:01] 600 divided by 1440 2800 per unit.

Erwin Szeto [00:45:06] D to describe the property to listener.

Ryan Carr [00:45:09] Yeah. So this was this was.

Erwin Szeto [00:45:12] The buildings, actually, specifically the buildings.

Ryan Carr [00:45:14] This was a unique one. So when somebody says 14 units, they typically expect a square box with a flat roof and a corridor inside where you go into a unit. Right. This was not that at all. I’m completely unconventional. So this is built back. I’m thinking in the fifties, sixties, something like this. It’s two acres of waterfront property right on the Bay of plenty, and that would approximate 700 feet deep. And I think it’s 100 or 200 feet wide, something like that. So it’s quite a bit of grass on the property. There’s a six plex, there’s four slab on grade duplex cottages, and then there is a garage, which is effectively a storage unit. So what we did with the property was we renovated everything to what I like to call upper midrange finishes because they were all very, very tired. So we took them all to upper midrange finishes. Got a good tenant for that tenant profile that was out there and found people that really appreciated living on the water. Some people just don’t care. Right. They never leave at home. They go to work, they come home, they sleep. That’s it. They don’t care about being on the water. So we wanted to find people that would appreciate this place, almost like a condo in a sense, you know, where you’ve got people that want to take pride in their gardens and things like that. That’s what we really tried to look for and for the most part we achieved that. You know, you get a couple of people that don’t subscribe to that. Yes. But for the most part, people are very much enjoying the property. So that’s how it was laid out.

Erwin Szeto [00:46:37] So what’s the mix of these one bedrooms? Three bedrooms?

Ryan Carr [00:46:41] All the above. So we’ve got everything from bachelors up to two plus once the cottages are two bedrooms themselves. The storage units are typically five by five and the one bedrooms are anywhere from 400 square feet to six.

Erwin Szeto [00:46:58] Do you know what? The rent, sir?

Ryan Carr [00:46:59] I do average rent out there for a bachelor. I think we’re, like in the nines, inclusive in this is the way that the sub metering works. But for the other 13 units, everything is privately metered. So a two bedroom I think is going to like 1250, 1350. A one bedroom is going for 1100 to 12 bucks. It depends on when you place the tenant as well. Right. But as we move forward, I mean, these rents are just going to keep going up. Like the demand in that market, especially being on the water is very good.

Erwin Szeto [00:47:32] Trinko With times, people want more space and nature.

Ryan Carr [00:47:35] Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:47:36] And these are all long term rentals. Did any of them end up short term?

Ryan Carr [00:47:40] None. None. We weren’t all long term with it. I was of the opinion that doing a short term rental would make it challenging to refinance. And I think that opinion still holds true because if you have a vacancy, it’s a vacancy, you know, and unless you’ve got two or three or four years of track record to show the bank, this is why you guys should give me what I think you should give me. I think it would have been very challenging. And even then, like the CMHC process was a rocky road to begin with. So you really have to justify and submit receipts and basically prove your case to make sure that you go through that process with relative simplicity.

Erwin Szeto [00:48:12] Again. So you played. You chose to play the long game rather than taking more cash up front.

Ryan Carr [00:48:17] Yeah, I did. I did. And that was like that was a strategic decision. You know, I’m not a short term rental guy. I’m in that property for the long haul. I like it. I think it’s great. I think Waterfront will appreciate. And there’s still two of the 12 units that we have to turn over that we didn’t renovate. So I think there’s even more upside there than initially anticipated.

Erwin Szeto [00:48:35] So in the refi, how much of your money were you able to take out?

Ryan Carr [00:48:39] All of it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure.

Erwin Szeto [00:48:42] You get your down payment.

Ryan Carr [00:48:44] Everything, down payment rentals, everything. Yeah. So I made it very myself. Yeah, it does. Very well. Very well. We got all of our rental money back, all the down payment, all the carrying costs. So we’re into that for another plus. And we got some back, too. Very nice. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:49:01] And therefore the down payment for your cottage.

Ryan Carr [00:49:04] Yeah, I guess. I guess you could say that technically, but.

Erwin Szeto [00:49:09] And just for the listener, like the question for the listener, the question that popped into my head is how many people are capable of doing this job? Have the capital and the mental fortitude, the stomach. And this is Trenton.

Ryan Carr [00:49:25] Right. It is. All right. It is. It’s that entrenched. So it’s a growing market. I mean, it’s not for everybody. Everybody has to have their niche, you know? Durham was and still continues to be money. This is a submarket that I’m test piloting. I think, you know, it’s no different than investing in KW C or going out to well end or Port Dover or, you know, any, any town anywhere. You got to be comfortable with it. You got to know the tenants and know the market. So having a team in place is number one.

Erwin Szeto [00:49:49] Right. Right. And you did your diligence on the area where you were just willy nilly.

Ryan Carr [00:49:54] Yeah, I went out there and I understood what was happening. Like there’s a lot of O.W. owed, ESP, blue collar work, things like this. So when you’re renovating some of these smaller towns, you can’t just go and throw spotlights on granite countertops. And because you’re never getting that back like nothing, you’re not getting, you know, granite countertops don’t matter when somebody says, well, all I can afford is 800 bucks a month, so take it or leave it. And it’s a very different tenant profile than what you would see and maybe Durham or Hamilton or whatever. You got to be very careful and conscious on what you renovate. And even still, though, I mean, I front ended a lot of the renovations that I maybe didn’t have to do for the sacrifice of long term stability.

Erwin Szeto [00:50:33] Oh, I want to ask you about Newmarket which feeling interest in the market.

Ryan Carr [00:50:37] We’re all. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:50:38] Overall durum.

Ryan Carr [00:50:40] Yeah. Overall. Okay. So something that I realized I spoke for Katie real estate. Well a couple of weeks ago they did a like an online seminar presentation and I was part of a panel. And after I got off the panel, just from hearing some of the other people speak, I realized that I have a generally conservative approach to the market. So I will I will start with that. My approach is generally conservative, and I hedge that conservative approach by buying equity on the way in. So if you’re going to buy, you know, just like Warren Buffett says, you got to buy a dollar for $0.66. Right. My general approach to the market is such that whether it goes up or down, if you’re buying equity, you’re going to be safe. Right. So you have to buy, at least in my opinion, and in my business, I have to buy, you know, a property that has equity on day one. So if the market does decide to go sideways or does decide to go down, you’re covered off. Now, that being said, my general opinion on the market is generally optimistic long term. I think we’re going to have some short term challenges with tenants paying or when some of the cerb stops kicking in. I think we may have some challenges there, but as a general rule, supply and demand still applies. We still have more people coming in than we can supply in terms of housing. So, you know, that being said, I think we’re good. There’s going to be some challenges for sure. Like there’s no question we’re do so due for a recession. And how that affects real estate is yet to play out.

Erwin Szeto [00:52:02] This was a recession.

Ryan Carr [00:52:05] But it was like in my opinion, was a fake man. It came and the market fell down and the real estate market came off a bit and now things are rosy again. But I mean, people aren’t fully back to normal, you know, and I just think.

Erwin Szeto [00:52:20] Like we have all the stimulus money still coming.

Ryan Carr [00:52:22] It’s just it’s just fake. So if this is the new normal here.

Erwin Szeto [00:52:25] Right on doing all of the stimulus bill, they had a few more weeks, I think, to serve. So it will end.

Ryan Carr [00:52:31] Yeah. So I think we’re I think we’re due for something a little bit deeper, a little bit longer term. But, you know, you got to hedge. So stay liquid, stay in cash. There’s going to be people that have to liquidate their properties and there’s going to be opportunity there. So just like I picked up a cottage on Kijiji, other people can take out their neighbor’s house because their neighbors are out of a job and they’re looking to downsize. So you never know where that’s going to come from, but just be ready for it.

Erwin Szeto [00:52:50] And then if anyone has any short term plans to sell, I personally I would put it out before the election.

Ryan Carr [00:52:56] Yeah, that’s an option to. Absolutely.

Erwin Szeto [00:52:58] If you already have plans though. So it depends though. Right. So folks remember the general and also my circle of friends is typically investors outside of Toronto. So I believe the story is different for the downtown Toronto condo. So don’t take my advice for that. But in general, you know, know your area, know your thing the best because again, right, Ryan are talking in general, not talking about Alberta.

Ryan Carr [00:53:23] Yeah, like I don’t know. I just know what I know and that’s it. I don’t know anything about Vancouver or Texas or whatever. I don’t know anything about those markets. I just know what I know. And this is. This is where I play amateur.

Erwin Szeto [00:53:33] Yeah. So I could play you. You know what we playing? I know a little bit about what Ryan plays and because Ryan tells me what he plays and you can ask about Stephan.

Ryan Carr [00:53:45] Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [00:53:46] I don’t even know where to go because I haven’t touched on it on the podcast. I’ve actually been thinking for a while that I should rerelease the podcast I had him on for, because one of the things about Stephan that he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way with how he presented himself when you actually get it from. But I know a lot of people who are close to him and they’re all great people and they all like they all were big fans of him, they’re clients of him, they’re close to him. And so like the, the public persona is quite different than who he actually was in then. And it’s terrible what happened to him. So for those who don’t know, we’re talking to Stephan Arsenault, who has since passed. I think I do. I do. I should rerelease that podcast I did with him because he was a wonderful guest. He was a you know, is polite. He was sharing. He was open. He wasn’t.

Ryan Carr [00:54:35] Rude or.

Erwin Szeto [00:54:36] In-Your-Face or highly opinionated on anything that we’re.

Ryan Carr [00:54:40] Doing right now. Stephan And he was only a five.

Erwin Szeto [00:54:43] Oh, no, no. Oh, I’m not his coaching client either, so I’m sure he’s different. But what can you share about Robert Stephan?

Ryan Carr [00:54:53] Daphna was a very polarizing personality. If anybody could be a philosopher and a businessperson combined, he was that embodied into one. So he had very interesting perspectives on life and business and government and policy and money and working. And I have five or 9 to 5, all of these different perspectives. You take that. You give me a call, and he split it back. He was the kind of guy that would pretty much tell to you straight whether you wanted to hear it or not, which was good. And he had a very interesting way of doing it. Obviously, a lot of his marketing is very provocative. He gets a lot of people that are looking for maybe more of an edgy vibe, which is great. I trained with him and I did some coaching with him for a couple of years and it was great. I mean, where we the best of friends? The answer is no. I mean, the answer is no. Would you show up at a Thanksgiving dinner with me? The answer is probably no. You know, with some people, the answer would have been probably yes. And I think that just, you know, that speaks to his character. He’s a very intelligent man, very, very, very smart and definitely died, obviously way too young. But I mean, he was before his time. So he definitely live beyond his years. If he had if he had gray hair and he was sitting on a on a board for some corporate conglomerate, he would have been very well received 100%. And yes, it’s very too bad or it’s very sad and too bad that he died so young.

Erwin Szeto [00:56:15] It was just my guessing. I don’t know. When he passed on that one of the first thoughts I had in my head was terrible loss. But also I think his lifestyle killed him as you just had way too much stress in his life. He was just on like full on too much.

Ryan Carr [00:56:33] Yes, yes, yes, yes. So that holds true with manufacturing like in some of the third world countries or sweatshops and things like that. China, Bangladesh workers just work until they die. Right. And they just fall over their desk. And not that that’s what happened to him specifically, but I think there’s elements of that where he just worked himself so hard and worked himself dry. And do I even see that in my own life? You know? And for anybody listening, you can only burn the candle at both ends for so long, for you either pay for it emotionally or with your health or with your friends, your family. Other things start to fall off. So if you’re looking for balance, working, working a 15 hour day is not the answer. You have to be more strategic than that. He was a very strategic guy, which was great to learn from and again, sometimes to learning from what other people are doing and not getting the results for getting the results that you want to see is a good way to model your own life.

Erwin Szeto [00:57:29] After he and Ryan are our doctors and we didn’t know.

Ryan Carr [00:57:34] Oh.

Erwin Szeto [00:57:35] I’ve just seen that. I’ve just seen this pattern too many times or someones full on like 15 hours a day for too long. Yeah. And then something catches up them. It’s called something else that’s either called a heart disease or it’s cancer. It’s something else. But what got them to that point, especially before the age of 40, because he was what was he, 35.

Ryan Carr [00:57:57] Yeah, I don’t know specifically, but he was like 34, 35, something that is.

Erwin Szeto [00:58:04] As let’s move on. You’ve an exciting book to talk about. What’s coming up.

Ryan Carr [00:58:08] Is it a free market, spring market, 2021?

Erwin Szeto [00:58:12] Okay. So nothing yet. None of it is written.

Ryan Carr [00:58:15] It’s three quarters written. We’re going through editing.

Erwin Szeto [00:58:18] Really? Okay. Okay. So it’s three quarters way done.

Ryan Carr [00:58:22] Yes. Okay. Okay. So we’re backing.

Erwin Szeto [00:58:24] Up because when you said three quarters done, I thought you meant like not to write a quarter.

Ryan Carr [00:58:30] So the back end of a book takes like an infinite amount of time to produce. You got to get it printed and edited and a cover page and where’s it coming from and all this stuff. So we’re targeting Spring Market 2021. It was a ton of fun to write, like a lot of fun. And some people are, are you going to go spread it? You know, you’re so busy. And I said, no. Like I want to put the content in this book. I want to write it for me. That’s the best way to reteach myself what I already know. And I just I just really enjoy the process and it’s been great.

Erwin Szeto [00:58:59] That’s awesome. We’ll compare notes later. Mine’s being ghostwritten right now. It’s actually funny. I was texting with my client and she said, Oh, something about Oh, I was helping out with your book. With what

Ryan Carr [00:59:12] Book?

Erwin Szeto [00:59:14] It’s boyfriend type cause my ghostwriter reached out to them directly.

Ryan Carr [00:59:19] That’s good.

Erwin Szeto [00:59:20] Oh, I forgot. Yeah. And for the listeners benefit, like writing in our very different stages of our lives. I have two kids. Ryan has nine still, so. Yeah, different stories. I have a lot grayer hair than Ryan, but I’m sure I’m catching up.

Ryan Carr [00:59:35] I am, man. I am catching up. That’s the long work that is. I got to knock it off.

Erwin Szeto [00:59:41] Awesome. What can you tell us about the book?

Ryan Carr [00:59:43] Yeah. So the book is all about the best use. So one thing I noticed over the last year when any deals have done is that every single deal that I’ve done. Elements of this highest and best use concept. And what I did was I took all those deals, laid them out, and I boiled them all down and I said, okay, what is the common denominator with every single property here? And I’ve realized that it’s highest and best use of three things. So when I look at a property I’m looking at highest and best use of the structure is the best use of the land, the highest and best use of my own skill sets and time. And when I take those three things, combine them. That’s what’s allowing me to get better deals, right? And that’s what I’ve laid out in the book because I’ve broken it down into those three categories and it gives a good outline on how you can see a property and get an I call it like a bit of an unfair advantage over the next person because they don’t see it the same way that you do. And not everybody’s highest and best use is the same, even though you’re looking at the same property, which is also very interesting.

Erwin Szeto [01:00:40] And then just from what I know of you, is some of the advantages that you have, but you have to build yourself there like you didn’t start this one this way is that you have capital, you have access to capital and you have access to you have your teams that can help you do things. That’s really that’s pretty cool because not many people have gone on the same journey as yourself to go to like now you’re planning us. That’s more of a bigger process. You’re looking at doing. You’re already in the works and going through paperwork is like there’s like ten stories, like how big is it just for the listeners benefit to know how big the stuff that you’re growing into?

Ryan Carr [01:01:15] Yeah. So I just submitted a proposal for a 30 unit condo building that was in Durham, so we’re still waiting to hear back on how that’s going to play out specifically. That would be my biggest project to date in terms of units. We’ll see how that plays out, whether it goes condo, whether it goes rental. We’re not sure. But effectively the structure and the planning is all the same. So we’ll see how that shakes out. But yeah, everything else is more infill development, low rise triplex. The six plex is maybe a ten plex will see infill development, San Francisco, things like that.

Erwin Szeto [01:01:43] Yeah, you’re not. You’re very far off from cookie cutter real estate.

Ryan Carr [01:01:48] Yeah, yeah. It’s grown. It’s evolved. You’ve got to keep it fresh, too. I mean, like I call highest and best use the new basement apartment. And five years ago, ten years ago, whatever the basement apartment was a hot ticket. I think it still is. I think it’s still great, but it’s time for me to evolve and I think there’s opportunity for other people to evolve with it. And that’s highest and best use.

Erwin Szeto [01:02:07] I’m afraid. Like the intermediate investor who already has a basement suite, are you doing any additions for third units these days?

Ryan Carr [01:02:15] Me Specifically, no, it’s very common to do an addition of the back or maybe a top up or a coach house, things like that. I’ve done a couple of coach houses, you know, a couple.

Erwin Szeto [01:02:25] I’m only about one.

Ryan Carr [01:02:26] Oh, sorry. Yeah, I did the one and then I did the tiny house for everybody. But yeah, top up rentals. They’re good. Exactly. Good. Definitely. You have to control your costs, something like that. So I sold one and here’s a perfect example. I sold one say three months ago, three or four months ago. And I’m looking at this property. It was major fixer upper. And I go in it and I’m looking around and like, okay, I think we can do this. I think we can do that. And then I’m realizing that if we’re going to add a second suite here or a third unit in other basements to low, so basically we’re going to cut the roof off, cut the floor plates out of the second and third floor. So we’d be looking, you know, we’d be in the basement looking through the sky, and then we’d rebuild inside. And I realized that by the time I went through all of this, the net at the end of the project was the same as if I put it up on the MLS, paid my realtor 6%, by the way, and sold it as is to somebody who wanted a fixer upper. The net was the same, but the time was cut by 90%.

Erwin Szeto [01:03:26] So in your time.

Ryan Carr [01:03:28] Time, effort, risk. Oh my God, you name it. Like if the end goal is just to make money. In a like a onetime transaction, you got to really, you know, really stop and say, hey, well, what are we actually doing this for? Like, am I going to put a top up renovation on, you know, your question in terms of a triplex. Am I going to put a top up rent on just to go and sell a property when I’m done and say that it has three units, what does that value versus in keeping us long term and reaping the benefits of the capital expenses, which is only right. So why are we doing this if it’s to make money now, does it make sense? Typically constructions of dollar for dollar upgrade, give or take, right. Dancers probably know if you’re going to reap the benefits for ten years. The answer might be so. You have to get really clear on what it is specifically that you’re doing it for. You know, top up rentals can be great just as long as it dollars makes sense.

Erwin Szeto [01:04:14] I have a spiral problem myself is I always want to keep everything from watching the YouTube. You can tell him you’re a collector.

Ryan Carr [01:04:22] I like this.

Erwin Szeto [01:04:23] I don’t like selling it. I don’t like of.

Ryan Carr [01:04:25] A connoisseur, if you will. It’s like a like a fine wine. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [01:04:28] So. So flipping. So you like a flip, for example. I know I’m pretty bullish on my market right now.

Ryan Carr [01:04:35] All this more money in the future.

Erwin Szeto [01:04:37] And you’re no different, right? You can make all this more money in the future by just holding it right after that decision to get rid of it versus keeping it. Because I’m sure many beginners have a struggle, like, how should I flip this or should I keep it?

Ryan Carr [01:04:49] They do. So it’s complexity, it’s financing, it’s moving parts is how much can you take on? So I just wholesale the few deals I like to wholesale few deals from time to time. I think that’s fun. Some quick cash is good. The quick liquid is good. Obviously, you know, if somebody looks back and sees our podcast together, they’re going to see a fairly common element in what I talk about, and that’s staying liquid and staying conservative. You know, cash is your hedge, right? Cash is cash is the ultimate hedge against your downside risk. So I like to stay liquid just for the element of the unknown. But I mean, it’s great to have 50 units or a thousand units or whatever and know that in ten years are going to be worth more. But if you’re financing won’t get you to that ten year mark, you’re not going to make it anyways. So you’re going to save yourself and be honest after I factor in vacancy and maintenance and repairs and maybe stress or management or what’s my family dynamic like, or all of these different things that aren’t necessarily strictly financial but you know, in the periphery, what does that look like? And can you actually make it to the end? And if you can’t, how far can you make it? And if you can only make it that far, what does that look like? So I’m always evaluating, you know, just like we talked about there with that house, we’re going to cut the roof off. I’m happy to do the work. I got the chops; I got the financing. Let’s do it right. But at the end of the day, if you’re going to flip the house and make 50,000, let’s say, or you can wholesale that house and make 42, is the $8,000 list really worth the six months of effort? And that’s what people miss. Is the left worth the effort? That’s what they miss. Right.

Erwin Szeto [01:06:28] This is the you and I have talked about is.

Ryan Carr [01:06:31] But.

Erwin Szeto [01:06:31] We’re not recording is sometimes the song, the paper. Yeah, it’s worth it. Yeah. So you mentioned like selling wholesaling. So you have a deal, you just sold off to somebody else, you signed the deal, take a wholesale fee. But there’s also situations where you’ve talked about you have say you have a single family home and now you have a permit to sweep the basement.

Ryan Carr [01:06:52] Right.

Erwin Szeto [01:06:53] But is that a good example, actually, of just selling paper or severance? Severance is probably a better example, is not.

Ryan Carr [01:07:00] Yeah. So I mean, for a severance, I give you a prime example. So if somebody goes to build a house, right, they’ve got a lot maybe they cut a lot and have to build a house on one half and then they’ve got a vacant parcel on the other. That land might have a value now when you go or it will have a value when you go to build a house on that land, it’s going to have a second value. Now what people miss and forget is that as a general rule. Construction is not what makes money. You make money and land. You make money in planning. You make money in design. Right. But. But for walls, bricks and sticks. It’s like a dollar for dollar thing. So let’s say your piece of land is worth 100 grand. And that’s the net because you own that land free and clear. Let’s say you go and put a house on it for a couple hundred thousand and sell it for 100,000 more than what you built it for. Maybe you’re going to make the same hundred grand on the back end. Well, is going through the effort of building that house to make the 100 really worth that time. And I’m just picking numbers here, folks like it can be anything, but you’ve got to think like, why are you building that house? Are you building that house? Because you know what? In two years you’ve got a development deal coming up that you need financing for and you have to prove yourself for that bigger development. Are you doing it just to make 100 grand? Are you doing it because you know that five years down the road, T.D. Bank might call you and say, hey, we’ve got a property that’s going power of sale because your realtor heard about it and it’s a development opportunity and the financing. But they’ll only do it if you have prior experience. Why are you building that house? Do you just want to do it? Because you love construction. What is it for? If it’s straight $4, it may not make sense if it’s for something else or multiple things to keep you guys working. And you do it.

Erwin Szeto [01:08:43] Hopefully investors paying attention to that because I actually know people who personally who bought a piece of land intending to build it and then it became a complete nightmare.

Ryan Carr [01:08:53] Yes, it’s development. It’s complex. It’s complex. Like there’s a lot of a lot of stuff that can go wrong. If you’re looking at a development deal. Just a good example. So I showed up on site earlier this week to a property that I’m building and this is a long term hold. It’s a vertical split to unit house purpose built in furnaces to hydro meters to gas meters that are not. I show up and they were servicing the property and that means they’re putting water and sewer and storm connections into the into the footing right. From the municipal services on the road. So this has been this has been paid for six or seven months. Right. 31,000 bucks I had to pay to do the work that we had to do. The city comes in and they wrap up the road. They do all this stuff. So I said, You know what? I’m going to go by the site on Monday just to make sure that everything is kosher. And I go there and there is supposed to be, you know, to make it simple, six pipes in the ground. They were only installing three. And there were about ready to backfill a hole. And I said, Where’s the other three pipes? They said, Well, that’s not on our plan. I said, Well, you’re going to flush the toilet if you don’t put the other three pipes in and they go way out of makes a lot of sense. So that problem there. Actually ended up costing me. Never mind my time. Right. Or the delays or whatever. That problem ended up costing me $6,000 in 10 minutes because of the problems that we had and the fixes that were required. Six grand rate. So I guess that’s real. That’s real money. 6000 bucks in 10 minutes. It sucks. You know, and I had a development project three months ago where a similar problem ended up costing me 12,000. You can’t even plan for stuff like this. And for whatever reason, I just felt, you know, intuitive enough to go over and make sure that the property was on track. And it was a good thing I did because I would have waited another two months for a water sewer connection. So some of the stuff that goes down, so you got to make sure that the margins are there, I think is the bottom line.

Erwin Szeto [01:10:51] Crazy in that you’re paying you’re not paying crazy amounts of money for your fund, for your capital.

Ryan Carr [01:10:57] That’s it. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [01:10:59] Do we even go back to the book? Is there is there something that a pretty common example of highest and best use that a newer investor would miss over missed out on that they don’t see an opportunity that they miss.

Ryan Carr [01:11:13] Yeah. When value and zoning I think would be the big one. A lot of people right now are doing the basement apartment thing, which is great because you can get that for the most part as of right on a lot of properties. What people miss and what a lot of agents miss truthfully is the best use of the land. So when they’re looking at that land, nobody checks is owning by law. You know, very few people put the actual zoning in their listing to begin with because they don’t know and they don’t want to misrepresent which is which is right.

Erwin Szeto [01:11:42] Agents don’t even put it out. Don’t even check the legal status of a duplex. Right. Because they don’t even understand that. I don’t know how they don’t understand. This is the fact. If it’s legal.

Ryan Carr [01:11:51] It’s worth more.

Erwin Szeto [01:11:52] They don’t go figure it out. That’s hard.

Ryan Carr [01:11:57] That’s, you know, that’s how I made the majority of my list on my first basement apartment that I did. That was the second house that ever bought. I just took it. I took what was there from non-legal to legal. And the list on that was great versus the effort that I had to put in. So that for me and that case was highest and best use. But yeah, land, I think you’ve got to look at the value of the land because you know, as we grow in the GTA in terms of intensification, zoning matters very, very much so like if you own two houses on a corner lot. It might not be worth much, but if you own six houses on a corner lot, you no longer just own those six houses on that corner lot, right? With whatever those like whatever those six houses multiply out at you own multiples in terms of dollars on those six houses because those six houses combined. You could go high rise, but those six houses on their own are just worth whatever the market says. So making land assemblies and flying high, especially as I way is, is so huge. So you can double down on your money for sure.

Erwin Szeto [01:12:59] If friends of mine, their parents, Korean immigrants, I don’t know how they smoked money to do it, but they bought more houses all side by side near square one mall in Mississauga.

Ryan Carr [01:13:11] Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [01:13:12] They’re like they’re like one I don’t know the dimensions like 50 by one, 21, 55, 150.

Ryan Carr [01:13:17] Some like that. Yeah, right.

Erwin Szeto [01:13:19] Developer team wrote me a check on point. Something they bought. They bought each property for under three grand Baba wiped them out for like 1.2 each or something like that.

Ryan Carr [01:13:31] Wow.

Erwin Szeto [01:13:32] And like you said, they’re not worth that much individually. No, but you assemble it. That’s a condo, right?

Ryan Carr [01:13:39] That’s right. Very strategic play. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [01:13:42] I don’t know if they knew that going in.

Ryan Carr [01:13:45] Maybe not. Maybe just buy the neighbor because it’s convenient. Right. The guys, I think we talked about this earlier, the guys are retiring and downsizing or they lost their job and you’re like, oh, yeah, I’ll buy the neighbor’s house. And then that neighbor’s house and then it’s just like, whoa, before, you know, there’s your retirement fund. Right.

Erwin Szeto [01:14:00] Because very simply, that you, you, you speak to your neighbors regularly, like, oh, if you’re ready to sell.

Ryan Carr [01:14:06] Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I don’t outwardly state it, but they know what I do, right. And I don’t come out in hard on my neighbors. I just tell them, yes, you know, if anybody looking to sell, please give me mind. You know, I’d gladly pay a referral fee or maybe I can renovate your house or whatever I can do to help you. That’s great. And generally speaking, you know, down the road, that relationship holds true. And it’s always worked on my benefit. And it’s worked out in there, too.

Erwin Szeto [01:14:34] Right. I was just thinking what a nice guy you are. Cause like I started this podcast, I called The Truth About Real Estate Investing because there’s so many people I do not like in this industry. The good guys.

Ryan Carr [01:14:43] Thanks, man.

Erwin Szeto [01:14:44] You’re there to help people. You’re not here to screw people over.

Ryan Carr [01:14:48] Oh.

Erwin Szeto [01:14:49] Yeah. We both know people that are just horrific people.

Ryan Carr [01:14:52] Yeah, they’re out there.

Erwin Szeto [01:14:55] Awesome. So if anyone wants to follow you along, where can they follow you? Snapchat tik tok.

Ryan Carr [01:15:03] Where are you at? You know what? I actually don’t even have a Snapchat. TikTok that Facebook Instagram is two best places they can sign up for the book at the highest and best use dot com. Or they can jump on my website to be kind of espn.com.

Erwin Szeto [01:15:17] Awesome. And you’re only posting like crazy either.

Ryan Carr [01:15:21] I’ve been busy, like legit busy, busy. I’m trying to do better at it. So I try to post every day for you. Okay.

Erwin Szeto [01:15:29] Just. Yeah. And then just the point I noticed it is that like, Ryan doesn’t post that much for all these people who are who, whose real estate strategy centers around it is around social media. Ryan does very limited and.

Ryan Carr [01:15:42] He does quite well.

Erwin Szeto [01:15:43] Without doing my social media. So not saying it doesn’t work the same Ryan’s case, he doesn’t.

Ryan Carr [01:15:50] Do it awesome.

Erwin Szeto [01:15:52] Or anything. I mean, final words you want to share the listener.

Ryan Carr [01:15:56] Just be a sponge. I say this, I think every time we get on a sponge, soak up all the information you can get, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube, read magazines, read books. Anything that you can do to get information that you need. And I’m actually taking that. Put it to use. This is where it’s at. So first punch.

Erwin Szeto [01:16:12] Is I first met you at a Germany I’m eating and you still go regularly doing what I do. If it was or if it was, I believe.

Ryan Carr [01:16:20] Yeah. Yeah, I do. You know, it’s interesting, you probably see this to some of your meetings as well, like the people that started off as the newbie investors get good and if they stick around long enough, they become the experts in the room. And that’s actually how this does end up playing out for me, is I used to go and extract information from people because they were willing to give it and I would graciously receive. And now, you know, I’m the guy giving out information and I’m happy to help people see how people and see them grow as well. So it’s a lot of fun, actually, to be on the giving end and not always on the on the take. Mm hmm.

Erwin Szeto [01:16:55] That’s awesome, because I when I met Quintin, we were both green. When we both when I first met him, I think combined he made on my properties kind of look where we’ve gone before. Awesome. Ryan, thanks for doing this. Have a great day. Keep being awesome. I can’t wait. Do I get can I. Can I get your early copy of the book?

Ryan Carr [01:17:18] Yeah, I guess. Yeah. See?

Erwin Szeto [01:17:20] All right. Awesome. Let me get a free giveaway on my website until you.

Ryan Carr [01:17:27] It for the highest bidder. Yeah.

Erwin Szeto [01:17:31] Nathan Ryan for doing this.

Ryan Carr [01:17:33] Thanks for having me on.

Erwin Szeto [01:17:34] Awesome. Thank you.

Ryan Carr [01:17:42] If you’re feeling confused.

Erwin Szeto [01:17:43] After all the YouTube videos, books and forum posts, you’re probably still left impressions. Starting a real estate is really tricky. Trust me, I’ve never been this for a long time, and the real estate is always forever changing. What our strategy is for 2020 was very different than what our plan strategy was for 2019 anyways. Frustrated beginners often ask how like a basement suite conversions actually work. Most of the time we can only give general answers, but now we can go deep. After this in-depth free class, you’ll learn how to take your first steps as a real estate investor. Nothing’s held back. Everything from analyzing basement suite conversions to renting out your first property for a profit. Even how to refinance and do it all again. More Secrets You’ll uncover our property, how to profit in the hot market and just bylaws to watch out for mortgage terms that favor refinancing. One barely use tactic for higher appraisals. And if you’re frustrated, unsure how to get started, this is for you. Set up now and be the first to know about the next class. You can go register at investor training dossier, slash free class again. That’s investor training dossier, slash free class. And just to warn you, you probably want to do this soon. We filled up the first classes we’ve done. We have two booked already for 2020. The first one showed up in 30 minutes. The second one, we don’t know how quickly filled up, but I filled up the first day. So seats are absolutely limited. Demand is completely outstripping supply. So when you go register, when you see a new class opens up, register as fast as possible and hope to see you there. And yes, I will be there personally. Hope to see you there.

Listen to The Podcast