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Podcast Transcription
Dave Dubeau [00:00:08] Everyone, Dave Dubeau here with another episode of the Property Profits Real Estate podcast today, zooming in all the way from beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. You’re got to find young real estate entrepreneur Doug Meyers. How are you doing today, Doug?
Doug Meyers [00:00:21] Good day. Thanks for having me on the show here. I really appreciate it.
Dave Dubeau [00:00:23] Well, we’re kind of having fun here because I we just wrapped up. Me being interviewed by you on your podcast. That’s how I kind of first heard about you’ve taken over the revenue podcast. And that’s cool, because revenue used to be run by my friend Julie Broad and you guys taken up the helm of this. So I’m really appreciative of that because there’s so much great, great information and training there with revenues. So thanks for doing what you’re doing.
Doug Meyers [00:00:50] You’re welcome. It’s a journey in progress. We’re looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.
Dave Dubeau [00:00:53] So, yeah, fun stuff. So Doug, let’s talk a little bit. You’ve got a really, you’re a young guy, but you’ve packed a lot in and in a few years. I love what you do real estate investing. I love your back story because you’re one of those smart guys like, I went to university as I was you and I got a useless degree in psychology, in fact, that, you know, you’re an engineer, the engineer, you used to make fun of us and all that kind of stuff. You went to school, you got a very useful degree as a mining engineer, and a lot of people think, Well, jeez, that’s a dream job, because if I understand correctly, is a fairly high paying job. But a few years ago, you walked away from all of that to focus on real estate investing full time. But here’s what I love about it is you skipped the 20 to 30 year process most people take to get to that realization. Like, you realize that fairly early on. So why don’t you just tell us a little bit about how all that came to be?
Doug Meyers [00:01:57] Yeah. Well, I guess first, first and foremost, thanks for the compliment. In some ways, yeah. I guess a lot of a lot of people maybe take some time to get to those realizations. So hopefully maybe mean talking about it will be helpful for some people. It’s ironic that you say the psychology that I actually started off in psychology as well. I played basketball at the time and it just it changed together, but I didn’t see myself doing eight years of schooling in order to have practical psychology degree. I guess it were. But there’s a lot more girls employable. Somebody get a job with, Yeah, there you go. Yeah, but there’s a lot more girls in psychology than there is an engineering. Got away those two options that I’m sure you probably noticed. But yeah, graduated with a mining engineering degree. Twenty fifteen and looking back on it. I didn’t pay attention to a lot of the signs of me not being really interested in the profession as it were. I was drawn to it for a couple of reasons that you spoke about. One was, yes, you get paid really well and you have a really applicable job, right? It’s not like coming out with an arts degree where you’ve got to maybe fight and claw or even in a business degree, right? You had to fight and claw for your first position. And in that you step in and I mean, I had my friends with business degrees were coming out making 40 grand a year, and I was like, Well, you know, I was making 40 grand as a summer student, like, you know this? And I don’t say that to be cocky. I’m just saying that is kind of the benchmark in some of these mining jobs. But you trade that financial gain as it were for the lifestyle that comes with it, which at first was fine for me. I loved working two weeks on, two weeks off, week on, week off, didn’t want to have the Monday to Friday schedule. Unfortunately, at the same time, unless you want to work in a corporate downtown environment, which I did not, you have to leave your home city. You have to leave certain places and go work in the small town for ten thousand the three thousand the one thousand people towns. And it was when I got to Saskatchewan and I’m living in a small, small town there that these voices kind of started to come up in my head and just asking the question has, is this it? Is this it to live in this small town to have a completely different lifestyle, to make a good amount of money, but not really feel like you’re having a strong impact or feel like you’re not doing the right thing? And when I kind of came to that realization around twenty four or twenty five years old, that’s when my journey in real estate investing went from a kind of hobby or a just something that was going on in the background to, OK. Wait, there are people who are building businesses out of this great let’s go attack that.
Dave Dubeau [00:04:47] All right. So how long were you a punch in the clock as a mining engineer?
Doug Meyers [00:04:51] I did that for officially three and a half years. So you
Dave Dubeau [00:04:57] pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. So., I found it very interesting when we were having our offline conversation. How you got started with real estate investing and buying properties in these different small towns that you lived in, so. Walk me through that, I find that fascinating.
Doug Meyers [00:05:17] Yeah. You know, I started investing in 2013 in Prince George, in British Columbia. I would hesitate to call it a small town to say the places that I’ve invested are not exactly small towns, but you are 100 percent right. I’ve invested in just about every place that I’ve lived and had a job as a mining engineer did it for a couple of different reasons. One price points, right? In 2013, when I started 21 years old, I was a student at school and I had used the money that I had saved up from these co-op jobs where you did get paid well to be earning student to afford down payments like. And here I thought, OK, I’m going to go buy a house in Vancouver. Well, you know, $700000 later for non-cash flowing Swedish house. I was like, OK, this plan doesn’t work. So I just kept going further north so I could go to a place where I could afford it. So I worked my way. Colonia Kamloops. Those weren’t options for me at the time. And then Prince George, it was like, Oh, wait a second, we can buy a duplex for $200000 and it can cashflow 300 bucks a month. That’s not bad. I got the down payment for that. Let’s go do it. And so, yeah, at that point, no education on the real estate subject. I just knew I had an interest in doing it from some previous influences in my life. And so I went about just trying to figure out what I needed to account for. You know, I needed to account for a mortgage, property taxes, utilities, insurance, property management and just put it all together. Prince George was the market because I was close to there. I was living there and I needed because I’m one of these kind of analysis paralysis, guys. At least in the beginning, I needed to tangibly go to the place, look at it and be like, I’m not going to mess this one up first because this is my prototype for hopefully scaling up and doing this in other places.
Dave Dubeau [00:07:10] So were you living in the properties yourself as well when you bought them because you’re working in the area?
Doug Meyers [00:07:14] No, no, no. I wasn’t. I’ve only ever lived in one of my investments that was in Regina. That was the third property I bought, and I only lived there because it was three units and a house act. So like, it just made sense. You know, having a house as a liability doesn’t make sense to me. It needs to be some sort of asset. So that means I’ve got to have money in it. It’s actually working. So it it’s cash flowing, even if I’m going to live there. So I was able to accomplish that in Regina with my third property.
Dave Dubeau [00:07:44] So, so that’s so you started out. Prince George bought a duplex and started just renting that off. Yeah. What was the next town, the next property that you purchased?
Doug Meyers [00:07:57] Yeah, the next one was actually pre-construction condo. My brother and I, the reason why I went into mining engineering was because of my brother. He laid the foundation for it. He said, Yeah, I’m doing this year when I’m getting paid. I was like, Great, that works. I didn’t think anything else of it, which of course, you know, to the early part of the conversation. You know, eventually I came to realize that, hey, maybe that’s not the best choice for me, but it did set me up to do a lot of things to be able to invest in my own properties and to be able to have someone like my brother who at this point is my biggest investor, my biggest lender, because he’s stuck with the mining engineer. And I know behind the scenes of what’s involved there from a financial standpoint. So, yeah, we joint venture on a pre-construction condo in the downtown of Surrey before downtown Surrey decided, Hey, we’re going to rival Vancouver in 20 years. And so again, just kind of looked at that situation and said, Hey, Mike, you know, why don’t we? Let’s buy a property here, it’s going to be ready in three years. The reason why we’re doing this is because we want to always have a place in Vancouver to live. Should anything happen in our lives that we need, a place will have one. And that was just the intent behind the scenes. I was like, Hey, Mike, in four years, if we buy this, it’s going to be worth a hundred grand more and we’re going to go buy other money, other properties. And that’s exactly what happened. But yeah, that was the second deal. Third deal is that triplex in Regina, and at that point, this is two seventeen. I’m starting to look at real estate as, OK, now I’ve done this three times. What if I was able to do this refinance thing on a bigger scale? I could snowball this, and in three five years I’ve got enough passive income to leave my job. And at that point, that’s when I was like, OK, it’s time to start exploring this with a little bit more intensity. So then how did you? Because that’s what you’ve done. So how have you been able
Dave Dubeau [00:09:59] to accomplish that in relative? He’s making a pretty short period of time and with without having hundreds of doors in your portfolio because you’ve got a nice portfolio is growing, but it’s not. You didn’t run out and buy 200 unit apartment building.
Doug Meyers [00:10:13] So yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I set a goal. First thing I did was actually, I got educated and you can choose just for anybody out there is watching or listening to this, you know, choose whatever aligns with you. Some people need a kick in the ass and they need to spend $20000 on a program. That’s what I needed to do. I needed to make this large financial contribution to say to myself, OK, you better do something with this because that’s a car that you just purchased. And that’s when I you’re switching from. From your mindset of consumer to investor, in some senses, it’s hard to look at that purchase and justify it. But it let enough of a fire in me to be like, OK, I’ve got to make something of this because there’s some serious money on the line from there. Yeah, just don’t go into the education added. I’d already done some of the stuff, so I had the I don’t know the hard knowledge of having done it before, but now it was like, OK, here’s why you do this, and here’s some things you could do here, and here’s some things that you could do to go purchase more property. You know, learning about joint ventures. Learning about private lending and borrowing. Learning how to create a deal as opposed to just going on the MLS and hoping to find something. That’s what I did. All right. We doubled the portfolio within a matter of a year. That was my goal. So I went from three to six properties, did it in a variety of ways. The first one was refinancing that initial pre-construction condo we bought because it did go up 100 grand in value. So we pulled that money out. We went and bought a duplex in Prince George, which was actually literally the property next door to my first property. So I just remember taking this photo and being like, I’m playing real life monopoly. You know, you buy two properties together. The rents go up, right? Well. In reality, it doesn’t work that way, but the concept was still fun. So that was the fourth property. Fifth property, you know, brought some joint venture money together. My dad, I brought him into a deal, found another partner out of Ontario to qualify for a mortgage. I would go and manage and work the property. And so we created this three way deal on a cash loan triplex in Calgary, which is an area that I was in at the time, and then I bought another condo in Calgary. This is where the creative deal came in, needed to be completely renovated. The owners were done. They didn’t want to deal with it anymore. So, you know, bought a condo 80 cents on the dollar type thing, fixed it up, elevated the value, paid back my private lender on that one because I bought the whole thing with private money. And boom, there was my goal. And yeah, I mean, at that point I’m saying, well, shoot, I’m probably two properties away and an ability to create more of an income stream out of this from walking away from the job.
Dave Dubeau [00:13:00] So that’s that brings up an interesting question in my mind. And that is you’ve got all these different properties and all these different towns, some in cities, some of the smaller towns. What are some of your tips and suggestions for finding good property management?
Doug Meyers [00:13:19] Yeah. Well, OK. It can be a challenge. There’s no doubt about that. There’s some trial and error in it, for sure. In Prince George, I went through two property managers in my first three years of operating. It’s weird when you’re twenty two year old kid and you walk into your property and you’re telling your 50 year old property manager that they’re like, Oh, yeah, like, how do you fire someone who’s twice your age and you’re like, It’s just a weird spot to be in. But you know, I found a good property manager in Prince George. Honestly, I think if I had that property manager everywhere, my life would be a lot easier. When I lived in the cities, I would manage them myself simply because I was there. And as a result of that, I created a lot of just good connections. So for me, I’m still at a point where I do pick up the phone for some of the properties, for some of the property management issues because I have the connections within these cities to be able to go, OK, yeah, I don’t mind picking up the phone for that. Here’s my tech guy, or here’s my handyman guy to go do this. But really, it’s about finding for me, it’s been about finding people to help do the things that I can’t do physically. So it’s finding tenants. For me personally, I don’t have a problem with the AFA management of taking calls and all those kinds of things. But when it comes to doing a move out inspection or moving inspection and doing showings, that’s where for me, it’s about establishing a relationship with somebody who can do those activities, paying them to do so, and then they come into my loop. It highlights the importance of having good properties and. Good areas so that you can have less of the people issues with potentially problematic tenants highlights the importance of screening and vetting tenants when they come into your property. And I think it highlights the importance of just having really good communication, and I’m not perfect at it by no means but having good communication with your tenants where something’s going wrong. You’re very civil in how you communicate. You’re very fair. And I think that alleviates a lot of the problems that are otherwise caused by being a manager from afar. So that’s kind of my two cents on that.
Dave Dubeau [00:15:35] I love it. All right. Well, Doug, time flies when we’re having fun, so people want to find out more about you and what you’re up to. What would you have them do?
Doug Meyers [00:15:44] Yeah, they can check out our website online. I mean, with me, I would say we’re best reach through with the revenue brand. I’m one of the partners with revenue, with real estate, so you can find us online doped up revenue, dot com. It’s our Evie and Y-O-U dot com. If you want to reach me by email there, it’s just Doug at revenue dot com. So that’s the best place. And yeah, I appreciate having you me. I appreciate being on your podcast. Usually it gets confusing when we do back, but it does. It does a lot of it. But yeah, I just appreciate it. But I’ve been able to say here and show the good stuff.
Dave Dubeau [00:16:19] Awesome. All right. Thank you very much, Doug. Appreciate it and everybody. Thank you for joining in and we’ll see you on the next steps. Take care. Well, hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Property Profits podcast if you like this episode. That’s great. Please go ahead and subscribe on iTunes. Give us a good review. That’d be awesome. I appreciate that. And if you’re looking to attract investors and raise capital for your deals, mean we invite you to get a complimentary copy of my newest book right back there. There it is the money partner formula. You got a PDF version, an investor attraction book dot com again. Investor attraction, book dot com. Take care.