All Forum Posts by: Ming Lim

@Matt L. - There is a great group run by a guy named Erwin Szeto aka Mr. Hamilton. They meet monthly (I think) at the Rockstar offices. I'm in no way affiliated with them, but I've been to their meetups a few times. Good folks and lots of education. 

Cheers,

Ming

I can echo what's been said above by both @Luc Boiron and @Taylor Servais . The refi is certainly the area which holds up the BRRR in Canada. We have a much stricter lending market here.

That said, I was speaking about this problem with my mortgage broker and he suggested that I work with him and a lender ahead of doing the BRRR to get an appraised value based on my reno plans. I haven't tried it myself, but I'd go this route prior to starting the reno for my next BRRR.

@Karim Z. - What do you mean by return? Not to sound facetious, but return means a lot of things. I look at returns in 4 ways. 1) Cash-on-cash 2) Cash-on-mortgage pay down 3) Cash-on-appreciation 4) Cash-on-renovation. Toronto cash-on-cash is pretty poor compared to other cities. But I'd argue that cash-on-cash is the least important out of the 4 when looking at building wealth. $500 a month or even $1000 a month, doesn't get me anywhere close to building long-term wealth. I care primarily about cash-on-mortgage pay down. This means, good locations, great tenants, easy to rent. Cash-on-renovation is a bonus for me (in a BRRR strategy) and appreciation has been a extra nice bonus in recent years.

Hope that helps!

@Jon D. - Welcome to BP there's tons of great resources here, but if you're looking for local Toronto meetups there are tons on meetup.com. You'll find that some are great and others are thinly veiled sales pitches. I help to run a small group of investors where we get together and chat about Toronto investing. Nothing fancy! Drop me a PM for the details if you're interested. Thanks! 

@Jonathon White - Are you familiar with the "N" forms from the government? If not, you should read through each one of them. As soon as a tenant is late in payment, you must issue on of these notices. It does not mean they are getting evicted, but you need to establish that paper trail should this end up at the LTB. There are N forms for non-payment, partial payment, consistent late payment. 

@Jon D. - Hi Jon, there are lots of great places to look outside of Toronto. But just curious, why are you looking outside of Toronto?

@Mike Lamch - One of my favourite sayings in real estate investing is "It's TIME IN the market, not TIMING the market." If you pick a town with good long term potential and you're cash flowing, focus on long-term wealth growth. 

@Chris Lockhart - Welcome to BP! Great to see more and more from the GTA. Kudos to you for doing this in your 20's. I spent much of those years partying away. :)

Marry one! That's what I did. :)

In all honesty, you need to build out your network. Most people leave the networking until after they have a need for someone, when it is really work that should be done upfront as during execution of any strategy you'll be relying heavily on others.

In terms of rates, most charge as a percentage of construction costs or flat weekly rate, whichever is higher.

Welcome to BP! Great to see another from Toronto here. I'm an investor in Toronto and personally haven't been able to make condos work. Mind you, they haven't been my focus for a while. We concentrate on BRRR in the downtown core. Let me know if you have any questions!