All Forum Posts by: Chuck M.

We've grown our portfolio up to 22 units and have a mix of tenant payment methods: manual cheques (fun), e-transfers, bank counter deposits and some have done PADs at their local branch.

Our challenge has become with the PADs, we don't see any information about the source account owner - our statements just show TransferXYZ to Account ABC or similar vague transaction information.

We have about ten units that all pay the same amount and thankfully only a few are on PADs but if we have one that is late - we never know who it may be until we do the dial-around.

Is there another solution out there we should be directing these tenants to be using? What are others doing in similar situation?

Located in Canada

We are fortunate enough to also have a presence in North Bay ;-)

Our Ontario portfolio is largely north of Huntsville. Strong opportunities are starting to become harder to come by, we weren't often in a multiple bidding situation but starting to see that as the norm now, not the exception. Still inventory out there though, be patient and make sure you know your target market and tenant profile for each area you're looking in.

I agree with @Chris Baxter. If you build your own models in Excel - you can use it in combination with Quickbooks or another bookkeeping package.

We use Excel to provide instant access to things like an up-to-date personal net worth statement, balance sheets, and for ratio analysis across our portfolio at any point in time.

Business partners and lenders both appreciate having access to the info in the format that they prefer so we keep worksheets for each in their preferred format cross-linked to our cash flow tabs.

@Chris Baxter appreciate your feedback and the information. Your response has been extremely helpful. Coincidentally that book was sitting in my Amazon cart - on its way now ;-)

Chuck

Hoping for some of the more experienced REI's could provide some guidance.

My wife and got into investing almost by accident. Her parents needed housing and we wanted to control & subsidize their cost of living through their final years.

Blessed by the HELOC gods and good appraisals, we now own 9 units in Northern Ontario.

Because it was easy and we kept getting approved, we did 8 of 9 through our primary lender. This "hey here's another that meets our criteria, let's buy it" approach led us to do all the transactions outside of any corporate structure.

Some back of napkin math says that next year when we fully realize all our 9 units of income personally will be quite interesting. The costs involved to move to the Cherry Chan recommended 3-tier corporate structure (legals, land transfer tax) however don't seem to work either with the small amount of units we own.

At this point we're being advised that our only strategy is to buy as much RRSPs as we can afford. We haven't taken advantage of depreciating our properties for fear it'll hurt us on portfolio exit.

Has anyone else faced this dilemma? What did you do? Any recommended accountants/financial advisors?

Chuck

@Duncan Pratt, thanks for this! I'll definitely check this out.

I have 9 units and have been increasingly asked to provide a means for tenants to pay with pre-authorized debit (PAD). There seems to be quite a few services available for the US (ECH) but haven't had much luck finding Canadian services. We have a few tenants that share our local RBC branch as their bank and setup withdrawals but this won't scale well to our properties outside of our area.

I've come across Rotessa (www.rotessa.com) as the closest match to what I'm after but wanted to see if the BP community in Ontario / Canada have other options available?

Cheers,

Chuck