All Forum Posts by: Shane Hale

Sounds negligent. I had similar issue with a broker. Eventually I went elsewhere (directly to a bank) and negotiated my own refi.

Hi Erik. My partners and I are in and around Ottawa and are always looking for partners, investors, etc. I will send you a PM.

I just received my first tenant submission from SmartRent.co and overall I'm impressed. The tenant submitted all of the information and paid the $25 CAD fee. The report I received included all of the information that I'd previously received from tenantverification.ca plus a bunch of additional data. Unfortunately much of the added fields were blank in this case. But the upside of having the tenant pay for their own report and enter all of their own information to provide an equivalent or better report than TVS is definitely worth it. I will plan to use this more in the coming months and see how it holds up.

There is also naborly.com in Canada which offers a free screening and credit check with an optional ($25) criminal records check. Apparently they make their income by offering to sell the tenants insurance and of course those who pay the $25 fee.

Cozy.co is not available in Canada and Unitdash also does not appear to be. I'm currently doing a trial with smartrent.co. Will report back on the quality of the information received.

I came very close to buying a storage business a little over a year ago. It looked like a really good opportunity but unfortunately the deal fell through. At the time it looked like an ideal business with very quiet tenants (cardboard boxes and golf clubs don't complain very much). The cash flow looked really good so it would've been a nice cash cow. 

I've been using tenantverification.ca for the past couple of years. It provides a credit number and a rating but not a lot of detail.

I do like the idea of having tenants fill in their own information and pay the fee themselves. Both of these would be a big improvement over what I currently have with TVS.

I am curious what the consensus of this thread will be. 

@Chris Habets for what you pay I would say yes. You will usually meet someone interesting and learn something new each time you go. Some portions of the agenda aren't my preferred style as they're a bit sales-y but there's something for everyone. I probably attended 4 sessions last year. I learned of them here on BP and decided to give it a shot. I'd say at least try one meeting to get a feel for it. You can go as a guest for $25 but a year's membership is only $100-ish.

@Chris Habets yes I'm with OREIO. I may not make it to this month's meeting though, unfortunately.

Great!  There are a few of us from Ottawa on BP. Perhaps we could start a Meetup or something like that.