# Do you any Real Estate Investirs club in Canada?



## Navtaj (Sep 7, 2010)

Would you recommend a reputable, affordable Canadian Real Estate Investors Group in Canada?


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## Berubeland (Sep 6, 2009)

http://www.durhamrei.ca/

This one is free and there are local clubs in most areas. The trick is to avoid the "free one that put their ads in the paper" they want to sell you expensive courses after the seminar. These places are also full of people who want to take advantage of new investors so be very wary.


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## Scottlandlord (May 27, 2010)

Navtaj said:


> Would you recommend a reputable, affordable Canadian Real Estate Investors Group in Canada?


What type of thing are you looking for? Are you a landlord? Investing for appreciation? Looking to buy your own home?

I agree with above, you need to be very careful of associations that are actually sales events.


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## Scottlandlord (May 27, 2010)

Berubeland said:


> http://www.durhamrei.ca/
> 
> This one is free and there are local clubs in most areas. The trick is to avoid the "free one that put their ads in the paper" they want to sell you expensive courses after the seminar. These places are also full of people who want to take advantage of new investors so be very wary.


Oh, you recommend them. And suddenly you are going to "speak" at one of their meetings.

How ethical of you.


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## Berubeland (Sep 6, 2009)

Dear Scottlandlord, 

Clearly we got off on the wrong foot. I'm not really all that evil. 

I am a person. I spend much of my day taking care of my son and I am terrified he is autistic and I have an appointment in October to see a pediatric neurologist. My husband is also quite ill. 

I support both of them with my business, I am the only one working. My business does ok but it's not fantastic. I started it about three years ago before then I worked as a property manager. The only reason I survive is because I am extremely frugal. 

I do offer other services but the bulk of my business is a tenant locator service. I do a little property management. I have got exactly 0 clients from this website or any other. I got 1 client from my own website for a tenant location and then there was a giant leak and so far have made $0 from any deal on the internet. 

I did make 9$ from my site and I make $20-25 bucks for the blog articles I write. Because I'm slow and I'm not a professional writer I make about $4-5 an hour but I'm writing while I wouldn't be doing anything usually while I watch tv or take care of my son in between requests for apple juice, cookies and change your bum. 

I really wish I were better at smoozing people and telling them what they want to hear. Unfortunately that seems to be inimical to my personality. It would be far more profitable for me, the people who are good at it seem to do extremely well. Property management especially is a business of middlemen, you are constantly stuck between tenants and owners and hear all the complaints from both sides. The people who hire me do so to solve a problem not for my charming personality. They keep me on staff because I make them so much money, in spite of the fact that I'm not much of a team player. 

In case you were wondering what my position is on landlords here it is. 

Landlords in Ontario have a major problem, that is that if their tenant doesn't pay rent it takes an excessively long time to kick the tenant out. A plain jane eviction from start to finish if you start right away takes about 4 months. A real predator can take over a year to evict even for someone who is a professional paralegal as tenants appeal the Order of the Landlord & Tenant Board and ask for adjournments and reviews. Make no mistake about this risk, last year about 89,000 cases were filed at the Landlord and Tenant Board and a full 59,000 were for non payment of rent. 

The privacy act gutted the landlord's ability to check up on tenants, previously there was a database maintained with a list of every tenant who went to the Landlord & Tenant Board, previous landlords have to be extremely cautious about what they say about tenants and employers won't even tell you if the person is or is not employed at their company. 

Finally there is a really stupid misconception that landlords are really doing well and that they are financially set because they have property. This is not true, buildings generally have very slim operating margins, just like a grocery store. Landlords may have a decent amount of paper equity but appreciation and mortgage paydown can't be spent without selling the business or refinancing. Kind of like having $150,000 in RRSP's doesn't help you buy groceries. Furthermore many landlords who have bought recently may even be subsidizing their tenants rent every single month. The city and the province seem to consider that landlords are some kind of cash cow and tenant activists keep telling everyone how much money landlords are making as utilities go through the roof, property taxes go up, and rents went up less than one percent this year. I'm pretty sure that every single person has noticed an increase in your utility bills this year and not less than 1%. Can you imagine the horror of having several hundred units full of people who don't care, and don't have to pay their own bills as the rates go through the roof? Then landlords pay more than twice as much property tax as identical condo buildings while the city tries to figure out ways to charge us for garbage collection, false fire alarms. Then landlords get to pay for the plague of bedbugs, where treating one unit can cost thousands of dollars. 

Yet Ontario is far from the only province with these kinds of problem, we have vacancy decontrol at least. Some provinces still have rent control, B.C. has a complicated system for damage deposits and I was reading an article just the other day from California about a predatory tenant who was appealing her non payment of rent case for over a year. 

So you know Scott, I understand that you're angry. It's ok to be pissed off but you shouldn't necessarily be upset at me. I didn't create any of these situations and I have to in my professional capacity deal with all these issues. 

The bare facts are that all these kinds of situations will continue to get worse until landlords and anyone who will help such as people like me stop the infighting amongst ourselves and work together. We have to learn from the techniques used by our archenemies the tenant activists and do it better. 

I am not the enemy, we may not see eye to eye on everything, but I for one will save the vitriol and invective for my opponents rather than my friends and supporters. 

Scottlandord I urge you to reconsider your approach to me and what I say. Quite frankly it hurts my feelings to be accused of being ethically 
deficient, just because I am speaking for 15 minutes for free at a free group. I don't have to own a bunch of property to know my business and I give a lot of my time and free advice, the best I know how to give after years of experience, to small landlords. So maybe now that you know a little more about me we can work together to give the best advice we can.


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## Seth (Aug 16, 2010)

Berubeland said:


> Dear Scottlandlord,
> 
> Clearly we got off on the wrong foot. I'm not really all that evil.
> 
> ...


Amen sister!

Thankfully I don't own property in ON, but here in NS things are almost as bad...

Speaking with more seasoned landlords in the area, I know just how pesky problem tenants who know how to milk the system can be.

It took a friend of mine, 18 months to settle on a 900 dollar debt, and countless hours of his time... he said it's about principle now, not even the money...

Finally the courts agreed to garnish the ex-tenant's wages, but a small percentage of a pittance of a wage doesn't help much.

Landlords bare the brunt of some of the worse type of people, take it from me, last week I spent a hour on my hands and knees picking through wet, soggy month old garbage under the step of one of my units... then I battled fleas for two days... all for $100.00 a month on positive CF.

Berubeland, keep up the good posts, I love your blog - it's helped me tremendously...


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## Four Pillars (Apr 5, 2009)

Rachelle, I applaud you for trying to make thing better. However, I don't think it should be necessary to explain your home and employment situation in order to be treated with respect by another poster.

I've had a lot of experience with forum moderation and I can tell you that if someone doesn't treat other posters with respect, then they are gone. No second chances - no nothing.


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## rookie (Mar 19, 2010)

To the OP, have you considered trying REIN? i hear its about 199 a month to join and you get access to the whole team and expert reports etc. has anyone else here tried it?


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## GeniusBoy27 (Jun 11, 2010)

Rachelle:

I too will applaud your posts as being extremely useful. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, just like some people won't like my posts. That's okay. We're here to learn, take the useful bits, and discard the rest.

I believe that a forum should be an exchange of ideas (just like in real life), not a place for personal attacks. It was like what Justin Trudeau said about his dad, and how he was mad that Justin made fun of Joe Clark, and I paraphrase this: "We may disagree about the ideas and how to do things, but we should never attack the person."

So please keep posting your ideas. I love to hear them, and the philosophies.


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## HaroldCrump (Jun 10, 2009)

Soliciting on discussion forums has become so bad that anyone posting a link or reference gets accused on it these days.
So far, this forum has maintained its clean and spam free culture.
Sadly, the old MS forum went to the dogs because of that very reason.

But let's not throw the baby out with the water.
When a long-time and respected member of the forum is posting a link/reference, maybe - just maybe - give them the benefit of the doubt, and do not assume and jump to the conclusion that it is a solicitation or money-making plug.


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## cmfAdmin (Oct 3, 2008)

Berube, no need to defend yourself, you have proven many many times how valuable your opinion is to the forum. 

@ Scotlandlord, consider this a warning. We do not allow personal attacks in this forum.


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## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

Berubeland
Thanks for sharing your situation. It helps me understand the demons that you must be facing on a daily basis. Good luck with carrying your burden!

And I don't perceive Scottlandlord to be as invective as some are trying to portray him. But then I am a relative newbie with a clean slate in my views of all the posters (except Belguy who I know for 50Plus).


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## Jungle (Feb 17, 2010)

HaroldCrump said:


> Soliciting on discussion forums has become so bad that anyone posting a link or reference gets accused on it these days.
> So far, this forum has maintained its clean and spam free culture.
> Sadly, the old MS forum went to the dogs because of that very reason.


+1. I like these forums because of that. I'm tired of reading (on other forums)about schemes, whole life and mutual fund salesman, etc.


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## rookie (Mar 19, 2010)

folks,

so far i have gained HUGE benefits from this site in terms of information and advice, from several people including Rachelle. please do not spoil it with anymore rubbish talk. lets forgive and forget whatever has happened. i am sure we will learn something or the other from scotlandlord too and slowly he will also appreciate this forum. so lets give him a chance, put this aside and continue the good work on sharing info and opinions.


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## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

+1


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## mrcheap (Apr 4, 2009)

To get back to the original message in the thread, Navtaj *RUNS* a real estate investors group (http://www.preigcanada.com). Perhaps he was asking if Canadian Money Forum would be willing to recommend it.

Of course, how anyone could be confused by "Do you any Real Estate Investirs club in Canada?" is beyond me...


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## HaroldCrump (Jun 10, 2009)

mrcheap said:


> To get back to the original message in the thread, Navtaj *RUNS* a real estate investors group (http://www.preigcanada.com). Perhaps he was asking if Canadian Money Forum would be willing to recommend it.
> 
> Of course, how anyone could be confused by "Do you any Real Estate Investirs club in Canada?" is beyond me...


Aha! Good catch.
In everyone's defense, he didn't actually _say_ it explicitly nor post his website link.
I see now that the link is on his profile but he didn't post it here.
He should have been more up-front with his request.
No wonder the thread went astray.


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