All Forum Posts by: Sean Lefort

Are you basing that on me not touching my equity investments? Just curious why that low, as I was thinking something more around the ~$250k range... (keep in mind thats in Toronto, and doesn't buy a "whole lot of house" and thus shouldn't be too overwelming...)

Secondly, (and forgive me for being a newbie..) what are you referring to with "65% or less on the dollar."

Thirdly, thank you for your response. I appreciate it.

I'm going to give you my situation and would like some feedback. I'm 23 years old, residing in Toronto, graduating in April, and have intentions of being a property investor with a good friend of mine. We will have no other responsibilities come April, and our plan is to begin by flipping houses, dumping profits into bigger flips. Then once we have a greater working capital we'll have more options. We're just not totally interested in managing property just quite yet.

I've now read a few books on both general property management and flipping, and feel like I have about as much knowledge as anyone can possibly have, without any experience (which I totally understand, really isn't that much..) I feel ready to attack a project, except for the area of finances. We are in a totally different situation than the people who these books are aimed towards. Neither of us will have any "taxable" cashflow with which to approach mortgage brokers with, as any money I've made the past 3 years has been from poker (non-taxable, treated as a windfall in Canada). I have ~$350k tied up in mutual funds, and ~$100k liquid cash in money markets put away for the first flip. I would think purchasing the first house to avoid mortgage payments altogether would be optimal, but I would really like to keep that other money put away and "start small" like anyone else just starting out. The last thing I want to do is get ahead of my learning curve just because I have the finances. So in summary, I'm terrified to approach a mortgage broker. I really have no idea how to go about it other than setting up a meeting, dressing nicely, and having documents showing my assets.

Any tips on any other areas would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that we are looking to start within a few 100 mile radius from Toronto, Canada.

So I'm starting a Property Investing firm with a good friend and our plan is to develop capital in the beginning by flipping single family homes. Our situation is that we are both 22 years old and graduating school in April '08. We have 8 months to prepare for our first flip. So far we have been reading books and making the preliminary steps to creating a social network by finding out who we know are real estate agents, contractors, sub-contractors, bankers, etc.. We really haven't done anything offical but we are two very intelligent and motivated people with about $50-80k capital to begin with.

I'm looking for any advice that you can offer us. The most important of which would be to give a bit of a timeline or order of importance of things that we should be doing and looking into. We feel like our first order of operation will be to find a good banker (after some interviews) and from there we will know our best mortgage option and we can start looking into a certain price range in a certain location as well as finding a good realtor.