"I was downsized from my job. Taking inventory of my savings and assets, after working in the investment industry and investing in funds and stocks for over 15 years, I had nothing to show for it. Thankfully, our principal residence more than doubled in value in less than 8 years.
The attractiveness of real estate became apparent and an interest was born. At that time, we purchased a couple of Canadian real estate investment books and found a national real estate network. The training was useful: invest in geographical gold mines, build your team, focus on cash flow etc. The model felt so right that I convinced my husband to re-mortgage our principal residence, our home, to invest in real estate.
Knowledge is however useless without action. Without a mentor, it took us another few years of analysis paralysis before we slowly purchased our first investment property, an end-unit townhome, then a semi-detached, followed by a detached with an accidental conversion into a legal duplex.
Our kids were growing like weeds, life got busy, career got busy, time passed.
I fell back into the same industry for work and continued with the same bad habits of investing poorly in the market.
Then those forgotten single-family properties came back into the picture with the first mortgage renewal.
Not paying attention to the escalating real estate values in the past years, we were pleasantly surprised by the fact that the townhome had appreciated 50%. That was a massive return on our down payment in 5 years! And this return was before mortgage paydown and cash flow. Wow! Real estate investing really works.
With refinanced capital in hand, we accidentally stumbled across Rock Star. What happened next was a whirlwind or as appropriately termed now, “Rock Star Speed – RSS”. We checked out a student rental. We were surprisingly greeted by a very mature, polite young man who voluntarily took us for a tour of the house. He apologized for the state of the clean kitchen, the bungalow was nicely renovated. What we experienced that Friday evening was all very different than what we thought student rentals were. Looking at the numbers, even with a substantial above-asking offer, the deal made sense. Shortly after, we were able to purchase our first student rental.
The next week we went back out to see more student rentals and were able to secure a second one and then a third one. Thanks to Rock Star's coaching, these were all very good quality products; properties that would be suitable even for our own kids.
The value of experience is priceless. For now, we are both still working full-time and enjoying a balanced lifestyle with our young people and taking opportunities to travel when we can.
We know that in the long game, our growing real estate portfolio will provide security and financial freedom for us and our children.”
