Hello Friends,
Happy New Year to everyone!! Another year has gone by. What an exciting year it was for us. A lot of great things and challenging things happened this year. I have definitely learnt a lot this year. So here is my recap:
January – I have been promoted to be the supervisor in training at Best Buy. I tried to do my best as a sales person and supervisor not because I want to kiss ass or anything. I do it in a sense to prove to myself how good of supervisor you can be, and to learn as much as I can on how a big corporation operates. In my opinion, you will never learn anything unless you put your heart to it 100%.
February – We have closed on our first investment property in Vancouver. We spend about one and half month renovating it. We did tiling, painting, changing counter tops, laminate flooring, and dry walling. You might ask why we didn’t hire contractors to do it. It was because we want to experience and learn how it’s like to renovate a house, and also, we didn’t have the budget either. ^^
April – Our first investment was ready to put on the market. You can go to our website if you are interested on how it looks like. www.vantagecanada.com
September – Our property was finally sold after 4 month. We didn’t price it too high or anything. But rather, it was because there was a balcony that needs replacement since it was rotted and water leaking through. So when people go check out the property, they see a big blue tarp right on the roof where the balcony is. In Vancouver, there was a big problem with leaky condos. A lot of condos that were built around 1990~2000, the building code is not good enough for the new building techniques. And so those condos had bad roof and siding design and would eventually leak water into the building structure. A lot people lost money because of the amount of money needed to fix the building. So when people come to see our condo and saw that big blue tarp, they would be scared away because it might be a leaky condo. Even we priced it 5% below market price and offer to pay the fix up, it still took us 4 month to get it sold. Our lesson for this is you need to really be on top of what the management company is doing to your property and their schedule is like, so you know what to expect and you know when is the best time to sell. To replace a balcony for a condo like that, you should be looking at about $50000 and less than a month to finish it. But by the time we close on that property, it still looks like what it was 4 month ago – a blue tarp covering it.
October – we have attended the foreclosure boot camp & field training from EWI (Enlighten Wealth Institute) in Kansas City and Indianapolis. We have also FIRED OUR BOSSES and moved to Kansas City to establish our power team over here and start our real estate investment empire.
November – after a month of searching, analyzing, and making lots of offers (we sent out 45 offers) on properties, we finally have our first house accepted. I have written another column to cover this property. It will be on the newsletter for next month.
December - We have bought another house. This time, it’s a duplex, at a better location, and even better cash flow. This year was the year that Jenny and I both turned 30 years old. But in my mind, I am still 25, full of energy, just got a slightly bigger belly. Although I didn’t make my goal for this year (flip 5 properties and make $100k in real estate), we still managed to flip 1 property and make 20K cash and make 60k in equity. So my goal for next year is to at least assign 10 properties and acquire more properties so we have $2000/month cashflow or more.
Jenny’s Little Corner – How We Get Started
Some people began asking how we’ve gotten into real estate. It all started when my best friend Johnson persuaded me to read this book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki many years ago (before this, I stayed anyway from anything business). In his book, Robert introduced the idea “Financial Freedom”which can be achieved mainly by acquiring properties that produce positive cashflow. Although I liked my old research job but I found it harder and harder to do the 9 to 5 thing. I started to follow what Robert said in his book, I tried network marketing, quit my research job to go work for a company that was going public (to learn the stock side of business), tried to look for income properties in Vancouver (we later learned that Vancouver is more a flip market than a cashflow market), read as many books on real estateas I can get my hands on, went to free seminars on business, stock or real estate. We eventually have to pay tuition to get more advanced information and mentorship but at the beginning when you don’t know anything about real estate, there are so many free resources out there and you can pick and choose your mentors (the authors of those books), go to these authors’ websites and go to as many free seminars as possible. That’s how we get started.
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