Investing in moncton from quebec city

[Philippe Busque]

Hello guys, I am getting more and more interested in investing in Moncton, nb. I live in quebec city but my market does not make much sense if I want to build another income stream from RE. I'm currently house hacking a duplex in quebec city so I know what to expect from my market, but investing in moncton is very different. What do you guys think about this market right now? Vacancy rate is under 5%, which (imo) means rent should be going up in the near future and buying property right now is still affordable. It looks good from an outsider point of view but the closer I look the more I realize the 1% rule there is not enough. There are a lot of expenses, like an investment property's municipal taxe rate is about 3% (1.5% in my market), owner also pays water and sewer (included in the municipal tax of my market). I've asked some current sellers and they both told me the ongoing rate for management is around 6%, which is pretty normal but I sincerely do not trust sellers (even thought they both mentioned the same %) so been using 10%. on top of that the insurances look like they are very expensive as well, a lot of duplexes seems to be around 2000/y. My current insurance on my duplex is 800/y with close to 300k assessment value. 2k insurance on something worth 120k is insane to me. I don't even know how to consider water and sewer as an expense, since it does not exist in my market, from what I read on biggerpockets you can have unit single metered and charge tenants. The market does seem to rent all utilities (even heat) included a lot thought.

When you actually punch the numbers, given my limited knowledge, it looks like most investment rentals go up to 50%+ expenses/revenue ratio quite easily, even 60%+ when the owner pays for heat, am I correct here? It's amazing because even considering this, it still looks interesting, I just wish I could confirm my findings and learn more about this market but since this is in canada, I can't find much.

[Davis Flanagan]

Hi Philippe

I am a newbie investor but I have lived in Moncton my whole life. I am currently house hacking. If I were you I would look at a 4+ unit building. There are some decent ones around $200k. You can get nicer ones around $300k. With such high taxes the 1% rule is not good enough here. But there are deals out there where you can get 1.5% rent of the total purchase price. Insurance on my single family home is $1440 on a 150k assessment. Water on single family homes is about $90 per month. Not sure about Duplexes and up. I don't know if I was able to answer all of your questions but I hope I helped a bit