Rental Property Investing - US vs Canada

[Jordan George]

Hey BiggerPockets community! This is my first post on these forums after stumbling across BiggerPockets a few weeks back. Since then I've tried to devour as much content as possible and figure out which investing path makes the most sense for me. After buying and finishing The Book On Rental Property Investing, I'm definitely investing in rental properties is the path for me.

I'm still obviously at the very beginning of my investing "career," so forgive me if this is an uninformed or silly train of thought, but I'm wondering if anyone can weigh in on the differences of investing in real estate, particularly in rental units, in the US vs Canada. Specifically, the dramatic difference in purchase price and foreclosure rates in the States vs Canada.

Granted, I'm sure that with enough digging, good investment options can be found in any market, but after a very quick comparison of my local market (Peterborough, Ontario, a city of under 100k about 1.5 hours outside of Toronto) with, for example, Buffalo, the price discrepancies are MASSIVE. 

As an example, here's a property I found in a quick 5 minute search of Zillow: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/306-Landon-St-Bu...

A price of $39,900 is almost unmatchable by anything in my local market, and assuming this property could be easily rented (I'm not familiar with the market in Buffalo so obviously that could be a naive assumption), then it should seemingly be easy enough to get a strong ROI on this property. Heck, I could almost buy that house for cash at this point, which blows my mind because it's not like I'm even making crazy money at my day job.

Now compare that with this property in my city: https://www.zolo.ca/peterborough-real-estate/154-h...

Now, I ran the analysis and if I could negotiate the price down by about 15%, the numbers seem like they would work out pretty well. But still, the price difference between these two properties is clearly drastic to say the least.

All of this to basically ask: is it possible, even likely, for investors in Canada to make similar returns to investors in the US, or is the market in the US much more ripe for investing at this point? Note that I'm not asking this question looking for an excuse to give up on my dreams of real estate investing before I even start - I just want to go into things with my eyes wide open and adjust my strategies if necessary.

Thanks in advance for your input guys (and gals!), I'm looking forward to being a part of this community!

[Sarah Larbi]

Hi Jordan George and welcome to BP. You are right to say that there are some really cheap houses in the US but you may also find some articles written by Brandon Turner himself on the dangers and pitfalls of buying these very cheap properties. Often they are in class D neighbourhoods and often the tenant profile is not so great. Also you will need to factor in supply and demand. Take Detroit you can buy a house for $500 but you will lose money there unless you're very very familiar with that market.
Personally for me I still can find good deals in Ontario (though not 39k) but where I still cashflow well and also has appreciation potential. If you don't mind not being able to get to them within an hour why don't you look at Thunder Bay? There is a good university there and the houses are reasonable in price and rent is very decent as there is not much supply.
I personally invest in Brantford which has done well for me in the past.
The other thing to consider when investing in the US is that you may have a harder time getting any mortgages as you have no credit but I'm sure there are ways around this.