How I Got Started in Real Estate Investing

It all started in the fall of 1991, on the day I was born… 

Ok, ok, maybe I don’t have to go all the way back to the very beginning, but my passion for investing in real estate did start at a very young age. It was my parents, who had invested in real estate (by complete fluke mind you), that first introduced the idea of purchasing a home and renting it out so that there was no cost to the owner other than the initial purchase investment.

Well fast-forward to my early 20s and that idea was still in the back of my mind. I had not myself invested in real estate yet and my parents had swapped their rentals for a cottage (not a bad trade…), but I knew that this was something I wanted to try.

I read books and listened to podcasts, but the more I did so, the more I got discouraged. You see, a lot of the resources I was referring to were based on markets that were quite different from my own and the information they provided was not compatible with the properties that were available around me.

After some months of hemming and hawing, I finally decided to just do it. My wife and I purchased a cute (or so we thought) single family home down the road from where we lived. The plan was to keep the house pretty much as is and to rent it out, but it turns out we had been pretty desperate to finally buy a house and we felt we had overpaid for this one. The solution? To completely gut it and add an extra unit in the basement so that we could make more rent to offset the high purchase price (logical right?)

So there I was on possession day equipped with my trusty hammer we received for our wedding shower and my old drill that didn’t keep its charge along with my team; my father, my father-in-law and my 6 month pregnant wife, how could we not succeed!?

Well it turns out despite many hard learned lessons and a renovation project that never seemed to end, things actually did go quite well. We turned that single family home which originally had 3 bedrooms (ON 3 DIFFERENT FLOORS!) into a multi-unit home which had a 3 bedroom unit on the top 2 floors and a 1 bedroom unit in the basement. To this day it is one of my best cash flowing investments.

That project was enough to turn that idea that had been in my mind into a full fledged passion and so began my journey into the world of real estate investing…


What do you think? Was I crazy to take on a large project like that as my first rental? Would you be ready to do the same? Let me know in the comments! 👇👇👇

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