All Forum Posts by: Eamon K.

Thanks for the feedback @Julie Toh :)

We may be capped out on improving our current property even more but we are definitely going to focus on acquiring a great second property #2 while we still manage the lack of cashflow from property #1. 

Thankfully there's many option in real estate and time will always make things better. 

@Bruce Woodruff Thanks for your feedback and thoughts. Its much appreciated :)

Thanks for your input @Alan Asriants. Appreciate the feedback. 

Hey @Cody Neustaedter. Thanks for your input. 

We technically could house hack our current property now but it will be less than ideal. My wife and I are newly married and we have an 9 month old kid with a cat and a dog. House hacking without a separate side entrance will be a little too invasive and uncomfortable. We didn't know about house hacking until late last year and we would have purchased a property with a side entrance if we had known earlier. Not a condo town home. Thats why we want to house hack our next proprty to lower our expenses. Hindsight is 20/20 of course. We would consider renting out the basement on the weekends as an air bnb but we would need to weigh up the effort vs rewards there to see if it will be worth it. 

@Stevo Sun Thanks for the reply and I appreciate you sharing your story. 

We live in a great location with all of the fundamentals but only thing is that these condo town homes are much older, which leads me to believe that they will only appreciate slowly in the long term and not considerably. It's hard to tell. 

As you said, as a short term solution and to prevent ourselves from sitting on the sidelines, we may still make our move in about 6-12 months to purchase a house hack that will pay for itself if possible (or to cover most of the mortgage at least) and we will still pay for the negative cashflow on our first property until either rates come down or until we decide to sell (which will have its own set of challenges if we sell prematurely). Its not ideal but its not the worst either. 

I'll be sure to reach out if we ever decide to start looking for properties out west :)

@Eliott Elias Thanks for your reply. I totally agree. We do not intend to wait on the sidelines. I just wanted that confirmation haha :)

@Theresa Harris Thanks a lot for the reply. I agree. I don't think the prices have gone back up compared to where they were last May. 

I think paying the 20% downpayment on the second property and the 30 year amortization for the second property on the mortgage is a good call, if we are going to go that route. This will free up the capital to make sure the first property stays a float and until rates start to stabilize more. 

We want to focus on this next house hack in Ottawa for our next move but we would strongly consider checking opportunities out East in the future :)

@Todd Jones Thanks for that feedback. I will see what our lender can do. I personally don't think the house would have appreciated that much since last year. We purchased near the peak in May 2022 so the gap between the price we purchased for vs the potential market value today still needs to narrow.

Hi folks. I would love to hear your thoughts on the current situation we are in.

My wife and I purchased a primary residence in May 2022 in Ottawa for $510K. Our mortgage was $2K a month when we first purchased but now it’s about 3.1K due to the aggressive rate hikes and being on a the variable rate mortgage (hindsights 20/20 and of course we should have locked in at a lower fixed rate). We were not educated enough, we didn't have an investing mindset and we weren't thinking long term, which was our mistake. 

Since we have become extremely interested in real estate investing, we want to house hack our next house purchase but we don’t know what to do with our current property. We can probably rent it for about $2.2 /2.3K but the delta between the mortgage and the rent would be still be around $900/1K+. We will would be cash flowing negative right out of the gate and that doesn't include other expenses.

My question now is, do we wait on the side lines for the next 6-12 months to see what happens with the rates before taking any action or do we continue to purchase a second property as a house hack and if the numbers work, we would eat up the negative cashflow on property #1 and pay our portion of the mortgage for property #2 for the house hack.  We can see if a short term rental would work in our area to improve cashflow for property #1. Selling would not be an option as we only purchased the property last year. For arguments sake, lets just say we would be comfortable in covering the remainder of the mortgage for property #1 and we’d be comfortable in paying our portion for property #2. 

I should mention that we are pretty risk averse in general. We obviously don't want to take on more risk and leverage but we also don't want to have to wait on the side lines for too long. We are both 30 years old so we have a little bit of a run way. We want to buy and hold properties for the long term and we don't plan on quitting our jobs anytime soon. 

I'm constantly thinking about ways to figure this out but I would love to hear peoples thoughts / feedback. 

Thanks in advance. 

Thanks @Hamp Lee III. These are some great questions and considerations. I appreciate the response. Kamron