New member from Pickering, ON (just outside of Toronto)

[Jason Murray]

Signed up a few days ago, just now getting around to an introduction.

Longtime stock investor, relatively fresh options investor, now contemplating real estate. Still have not made my first offer, not even close. I've done all the reading I think I need to do for now, just looking for local groups to start attending. I found one in Durham, and on in Toronto. I hope, no I will, make my first purchase in 2019. 

I'm really hoping to meet others on BP that are in Canada, Ontario, or the GTA. So if that's you let me know. 

[Jason Murray]

Hey @Noel, I have bumped into all those names. I've also read a some books by Calum Ross (but his firm is close to the public it seems), Tahan Aburaneh, Doug Grey, and of course Don Campbell. 

The books are starting to repeat themselves: get a team, have a plan, yeah yeah yeah. So it's time to start going out and meeting people, and doing some of the analysis that the books suggest. 

I'm not particular about staying in Durham as I plan to take as passive an approach as I can (to that end I've been listening to the Passive Real Estate Investing podcast, but Norada is US and I'm not looking to go to the US quite yet if ever).  

I have two questions at this point that I'd love some of the more experience to chime in on: 

1) Are Durham, Hamilton, KWC, Barrie, etc considered different markets (in the ACRE sense of the term) or one big market? 

2) I've learned a bit about how to ultimately structure things so you can keep the assets out of your personal hands (LLCs, etc.) but the thing that isn't discussed much is how do you actually get the money into your hands. I mean at the end of the day I need money in my hands in order to pay my bills.

But we are probably past the "introduction" post at this point.