Darcy has been a supporter of Rock Star for almost a decade. He’s a great guy and he moved his family from Orangeville, Ontario to New Liskeard, Ontario to start a business and take the next step with their real estate investments. Today he’s got a great handle on the area, deals with all the problems that real estate brings and reaps the rewards. Meaghan, his daughter, joins us on the podcast to share her insights into her father and we get to hear some of his famous radio ads too! Enjoy this episode of The Your Life! Your Terms! Show.
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Transcript
00:00:00 Hey everyone, it’s Tom Karadza and look, we have the most amazing members and investors that we worked with on this episode of the podcast. We’re talking to Darcy Griffith and his daughter Meaghan, who came down all the way from. Let me get this straight because I didn’t know where it was from. New Liskeard. I hope I’m saying this even properly. So if you think you are investing outside of Toronto and you think maybe you’re a little bit north of Toronto, let me just give you some perspective of where Darcy is investing in real estate and Ontario, New Liskeard. Ontario is not just north of Barrie or really, uh, it’s north of North Bay and Sudbury, we’re, we are talking like a six-hour drive straight up north. Um, so when they’re investing in a small town, I’m telling you, they’re investing in a small town in a northern part of Ontario.
00:00:46 The population is about 5,000 people. And the reason that we’re sharing this is over the last few months we’ve had several people, Rock Star investors, other people listening to this podcast, of course commenting that they’d like to hear from someone investing outside of the Golden Horseshoe. So this is your opportunity to listen to how they are investing and wait to hear some of the property prices that they’re buying properties for. It’s kind of a, just a little bit shocking when you first hear it, but Darcy and Meaghan came down, they came down for the, uh, your life, your terms event that we just had over this past weekend and, you know, they’ve been coming to this event probably for about 10, I would say almost like 10 years since it pretty much started. So we have people coming are coming to this and coming to work with rocks are from all over Ontario.
00:01:27 So we’re just blessed and grateful that Darcy and Meaghan offered to come down to the offices here in Oakville, share their story and they actually wrote off their car on the way down here. So on highway 11, I think just north of, uh, really, uh, I believe it was right around, uh, really, uh, um, they got into a massive car, pile up. Their car is a write off, um, thankfully they’re okay. They actually got out of their car, I believe, or the people in front of them got out of their car, if I remember the story correctly, and the, the people in front of their car got back into a car and then that car got smashed. So I think the lesson here is if you’re in a massive car, pile up on the highway, stay in your car, don’t get out of your car until it’s safe to do so.
00:02:11 So we’re just thankful and grateful that they’re okay. Um, they are injury free. They got through that. Okay. But they, uh, they brought up their car and the next morning they showed up here at our offices to share this podcast. So we talk a little bit about that. So you’re going to hear about their investing strategies. Darcy also runs a business in New Liskeard. You’re going to hear how he moved from Orange Bealeton New Liskeard. And some of the strategies that he uses to run that business and some of the marketing strategies, specifically some of the radio advertising and how he leverages his family to do that. So I asked him to play some radio advertising on this episode. So you’re going to hear some of his ads. He’s literally just holding up his iPhone to the mic. We didn’t have it plugged into the, uh, to the audio system here, so it might be a little soft, but I think if you listen closely you’ll be able to hear those ads and there, they’re just, they’re just funny enough that you want to hear them.
00:02:58 So they talk about property, some of the adventures you’ve had been through. And then at the very end of this podcast or they get up to leave and he starts sharing a story about a coin-operated business that he bought. And I asked him if we could sit back down and press record again and get that on the podcast. So we kind of wrap up and then we start up again. So if you’re a little bit choppy at the end there, that’s what’s going on, but stick around right to the edge of so you can hear that story. Super interesting. So just really want to thank Darcy and Meaghan again for doing this for us and sharing the story and a listen, if you are listening to this and you are into business or entrepreneurship in any way. In June we are going to have our third rock star entrepreneur summit.
00:03:40 This is something that we did once, um, and we were kind of asked to do it a second time. We were not going to do this again, but last year couple guys came up during the second day and said, hey, what are you doing this again next year we really wanted you to, um, and we committed to doing it again. So in June 13th and 14th of this year, 2019, we are doing the third rock star entrepreneur summit. So that’s two days of content where we’re gonna break down how you think about business, how you start a business from zero. That’s how we did it. We quit our corporate jobs in Canada, myself, my software job started a business from zero clients, zero database, zero software systems, zero processes, um, how you use online advertising, how you, how you build your presence online, how you map out your own rock star entrepreneur blueprint, which is basically all the different strategies we’ve learned from attending conferences and paint to be in mastermind groups, in hiring business coaches.
00:04:35 We’ve documented and put that all down on paper. So how you strategize around that over these two days, we’re jamming more stuff in there than we possibly could. It’s pretty much everything we know around business building and entrepreneurship. So if you are thinking that you want to do something like this for yourself or you have an existing business that you want to grow, you can come out on June 13th and 14th. You can get all the details Rockstarinnercircle.com/summit. So it’s rockstarinnercircle.com/summit, we are running a bit of a promotion right now until February 15th. So we’re going to be raising the prices after February 15, so if you want to check it out now is a good time to check that out. That’s at Rockstarinnercircle.com/summit. And with that, let’s get on with the show.
00:05:26 Are you ready to live life on your terms? Is it time to take charge business? Building the economy, health and nutrition and more. It’s The Your Life! Your Terms! Show With Tom and Nick Karadza. Are you ready? Let’s go.
00:05:52 Okay. So yeah, we might have the first person on Darcy. Darcy’s here with his daughter, Meaghan and Darcy.
00:05:58 You might not have any problem with the mic at all. I feel like you are a booming radio voice. Uh, we do radio advertising on our local station up in a New Liskeard yeah. You don’t run a radio station, you just take full advantage advantage of the New Liskeard radio station. Absolutely. There was an opportunity to add some personality to the advertising and I took advantage of it. Yeah. So before we even get there, because there’s so much to talk with you and, and Meaghan’s going to Meaghan. So Meaghan, your daughter’s Meaghan, how old are you? Twenty two. Twenty two. So Meaghan’s here as well. So Meaghan, we’re going to fact check your dad with you here. So not that there would be anything to fact check or just felt like that was fun. Oh, I should’ve studied. Yeah, but listen. So Darcy, you have to explain to everyone you want to jump into the real estate angle with you first because there’s a bunch of other stuff that talked to you about with, but you’re from New Liskeard, Ontario.
00:06:42 And the reason that we want to bring you guys both on here is that we’ve had a few people say, hey, you know, the golden horseshoe is really cool and you always talk about Toronto. And I always think, oh my gosh, we’re doing a great job of talking about outside of Toronto because Toronto people think Toronto is everything and we’re talking about like Mississauga and Hamilton and Kitchener and St Catherine’s believer. You drive all the way to Niagara. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, so people like yourself who were from further out think that’s still just like the golden horseshoe, that’s nothing. Exactly. So we have you guys on here to talk about real estate investing in much smaller communities. What’s the popular? So whereas New Liskeard, so just paint the picture. And what’s the population? A New Liskeard is a, bout five hours north. Uh, we are, uh, two hours north of North Bay and halfway between North Bay in Timmins were the Tim Horton stop on the way to Timmins.
00:07:34 You’re, that’s important stuff. And so at 5,000 people and the main industry is um, it’s pretty diversified. It’s a lot of um, a mining, forestry agriculture. And how did you get up there? Like why are you there? Uh, we were living in Orangeville, we had some, uh, some rental real estate in Orangeville. You realize most people are already going to think Orangeville is a little bit outside of Toronto, you know that, right? I know for anyone listening in Orangeville orange, it was a great spot, but I know, but you decided that wasn’t far enough. Um, well, uh, I took a package from work and I was like, what were you doing before we get to share that? Or No, I can, uh, I was a manager of police and parking services for University of Toronto at Scarborough. Um, so it was in that role, uh, advanced your promotion for 20 years.
00:08:24 It was time to move on and took advantage of that. Launched a little publishing company in Orangeville, uh, did that for a couple of, a couple of years and started looking for a dry cleaning opportunity. I talked to some people who, who owned them, looked all across southern Ontario and ended up identifying one that really worked for us in New Liskeard because you figured out that dry cleaning, there was an opportunity in that business. You like to, you like the monetization model of it, the numbers made sense. Yeah. So, uh, the guy that got me into it ran just a straight dry cleaning operation. So it was mostly counter service.
00:08:56 People brought clothes in, had them cleaned and took them out. Um, we couldn’t find one that, uh, that wasn’t too heavily a kind of leaning towards one way, so some was insurance restoration, some was a wholesaling, so you had one or two key clients, so you’re really at risk for somebody making a decision and taking away 50 percent of your business. Um, and that’s what we liked about clean scene, which we found a New Liskeard it’s a uniform format rental business, a dry cleaner and it was diversified, has its own niche and it was the size we wanted. And that’s what you’ve been running up there for. Hello? I feel like it’s been, has it been 10 years almost? Yeah, it’s been a eight and a half. We moved up in a well of closed April fools day 2010.
00:09:36 Oh, and I can’t believe you do those radio ads up there for your business, but do you remember some of those radio ads? Um, them on my phone. It, we’ll see if we get there. But. So let’s. Okay, so you’re up there, you have a business, you drag your family up there kicking and screaming. Come on, let’s face it. When, when I told my wife, she said, I’m not moving to New Liskeard. I don’t even know where that is. And I said, well, you take the paper map of Ontario, turn it over and it’s just right there. That’s only an inch up from the bottom of the map. I had to actually get my parents when I was telling my friends that I was moving to write it down because I could not remember it, nor could I actually find where we were moving. So you know, where are you going? Look at this paper and note it’s New Liskeard just ripe for adventure. And our kids were mad. They said yes, you didn’t even ask us if we want it to go. And Meaghan was the oldest, she was just starting high school and I said, to be honest, I assumed you voted no. We took that into consideration and then decided we were
00:10:33 going to move. Because you’re going into grade nine, you said, right? Yeah. Yeah. Tough one. Tough. Tough time to move. Yeah. There’s a high school in New Liskeard. Uh, yeah. Okay. And I’m sure. Yeah, $5,000 got to be at least half of a high school update. We have one English high school in one French Catholic high school. Oh, got it. Oh, two high schools have dropped so much that it’s the high school and seven, eight, nine. Yeah. Is that because of mining? I guess, why is it number of dropped population? Just a, it’s been stable.
00:11:02 Well, for a long time, but like everywhere else in Canada, it’s a declining birth rate. Yeah. Got It. Um, so fewer and fewer people are having fewer and fewer kids.
00:11:09 Yeah. The immigrants that are coming here aren’t rushing up to New Liskeard yet, but maybe we should start. Maybe we should sort of billboard at the side of the QEW and you’re coming into Toronto, you know, why check out the Niagara Region when you can go to. Okay. Well, we, uh, I actually lead the fundraising campaign. We sponsored a Syrian family of six. No way to, to come to a New Liskeard. When did you do that? Two years ago? Yeah. Oh my God. No idea. It’d be a little longer. Oh, cool. It, uh, yeah, it was one of those things I don’t tend to think things through later. Act For the family. Do you know the footage? Responsive? Did you get to know them at all or you just. Okay. Yeah, they are. They’re from Syria. Yes. They end up in New Liskeard, Ontario where the weather is going to be different than where they are from in Syria.
00:11:53 How is that? How’s the adaptations been to a Canadian winters? They, uh, they were there for a year. Uh, they ended up, uh, we helped them move down by London a little more. A community down there for the London, Ontario? Yes. Got It. Okay. Um, but yeah, they were there for a, for almost a full year. You gotta sell it harder, man. You gotta you gotta sell it harder. So you’re up in New Liskeard properties to a what are the, you’ve been buying for a while. So I don’t know if you can share some purchase prices maybe from before or whatever, but can you paint the picture kind of for investing in that size of community? What kind of properties have you been buying? What are the purchase prices give us and what our rents like? Um, so, uh, unlike southern Ontario where prices are, uh, are, are increasing exponentially, they’ve actually declined a little bit in New Liskeard.
00:12:41 It’s, it’s definitely a buyer’s market right now. Um, we buy single family homes, duplexes, and we have one fourplex in one warehouse that we had bought. Some of them we bought privately. Um, and most of them we bought through real estate agents, a little tiny story and a half home. About 900 square feet. We bought for $50,000. Um, we rented out for nine $75 a month. We make about 5:50, 600 a month from that one. I got $50,000 for 900. Yeah. Um, okay. Uh, eight 75. Eight 75. You rounded up on me there. I apologize for 900. We just reduced it actually. Just joking. I’m just joking. Um, we’ve bought a duplex for 128. I’m a three bedroom two bedroom, a main floor, um, rents out for about 1600 a month plus utilities. So they pay their own utilities. Um, got it sold, doing better than the one percent, you know, that one percent rule.
00:13:40 Did you ever read those books, those books that talked about the one percent rule? Yeah. And that just became a myth, like right when nick and I started investing, I guess it’s 20 years ago now or so, you could still Kinda sorta get something. One percent rule ish in Hamilton. So the one percent rule is that, you know, you’re trying to get rent. That is one percent of the purchase price. If you buy something that is $100,000, you’re trying to get rented a thousand dollars in your case here at these prices, you’re doing better than the one percent rule it, it seems like Utopia. There’s a few challenges. So limited property management opportunity. So we manage our own properties. Okay. Um, we have some awesome tenants and we have had some tenants who are not as awesome. Um, so we had a $6,500 damage to a two bedroom unit. Um, so they, they wrecked a lot of damage to. Yeah. So what did they do? Oh, flooring, kitchen, bathroom holes in the wall, kind of wrecked all the doors, kicked in the front door, kicked in the back. Why do you think they did that? Um, it’s just, uh, there’s kind of a rougher crowd. Yeah. Okay. And so, uh, the first one we don’t want to, we see it like it definitely with the amount of stuff that’s going on at Rockstar and with investors find properties. We definitely see that stuff, but
00:14:52 on a percentage base that basis we don’t see as much as I thought we would, you know. Um, so that’s a shame. Yeah. That’s
00:14:59 um, so we, we put 6,500 and fixed it back up, rented it out in three and a half months later. Um, tenant fell behind in rent. Uh, there were some personal circumstances. We let them run longer. Um, and at the end when we got them out, uh, we have a landlord-tenant board order now for the $11,800 in damage. Um, but you’re not gonna be able to find them. Are you? Oh yeah, we know where they are. They just don’t have any money right now. Okay, so you’re not going to be, we have the judgment registered. Uh, we’ll just wait for them to turn their life around and work
00:15:31 challenges. If I could sum it up our vacancies. Okay. The damage thing is something all of us are battling with tenants obviously, but I would, I guess. So when you have a vacancy, is it taking longer to find a tenant? Not really, no.
00:15:44 No. Okay. It’s pretty easy to find tenants. Uh, it’s sometimes a little harder to find quality tenants. Um, so it,
00:15:53 if you’re the quality tenant, just the, the rental price of the properties, like if you just bought a slightly more expensive properties, would it take you maybe a little longer to find a tenant but you would get a better tenant? Maybe because they’re paying more? I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a, I mean we have some awesome tenants. Uh, so we, we bought a house out of, uh, the bank have taken it back and put a bunch of money into it, refinanced it, got back all the money. It’s a higher than average rent and we had a real challenges with the first two tenants. And it’s a 3,200 square foot, five bedroom, three bath and a real problems with the first two tenants. Uh, now we’ve got a family in it that are absolutely amazing. They’ve been there for two and a half years. You’re renting that as a single family homes? Single family. That’s how many square feet? Around a 3,200. What did you buy that one for? Roughly a 60,000. $60,000. But then we put 45,000 into it. Okay. It appraised after that for 140. So we left the down payment in and pulled out all of our downpayment and repair costs.
00:16:56 Yeah. Got It. So that’s brilliant. Um, and so when you look at cash flow from what you’re buying properties, if something’s Ca, like what’s a minimum cash flow target for you when you’re looking at a property? Now I like to get
00:17:08 around four to $500 a month per property, going to get four or $500 per property. You’re not too interested? Yeah. There’s, there’s other opportunities where I can.
00:17:17 And then financing for these properties. Are you going to just regular Canadian banks to finance these things?
00:17:24 We were like everyone else because we have 10 of them. Um, we, we’ve kind of hit the wall with getting financing. So the first seven we got through Scotia Bank, um, we have a really good relationship with the local Scotia Bank. They were able to put that through. Then there were some changes in the reporting structure in the decision making level and especially liked you before, but were kept with you now. Right? And so our lender, they’re said at 20 percent down, I can get you as many mortgages as you want. And uh, so we went fast because when you get that offer, it’s time to find them. And uh, and then we took a pause, uh, for, to come up with some additional equity. And when we came back she said they, they just don’t want to. Um, so we went with Scott Dillingham. We refinanced a fourplex and a duplex through CBC.
00:18:13 Um, it was privately held. Mortgages was a vendor take back for those two originally. And uh, and after that we, uh, we have two trailers engrave and Hurst in a year-round trailer park that we bought. Oh, awesome. I’m good cash flow numbers there too. Yeah. What were the purchase prices on those? Uh, again, we bought them for 40,000 and we bought one for mid-twenties, 25, 26. They both needed some work. Uh, so we ended up putting more money into it. Then we thought I could have pretty much bought the nicest trailer in the park and paid full retail for it. But uh, okay. Like anything. So you learned through that process, what are you renting those out for? A 13 $50 a month plus 1350. And what is the square footage of a trailer like that? A 1200 for the largest and about a thousand 54 for the second.
00:19:02 Okay, got it. So even after you put in money onto that first purchase, you’re still happy with that one? Yeah. As a cash flow and cash flowing for you? Oh yeah, absolutely. My goal was again, to, to refinance the trailers, leave some money in and pull out the equity. Uh, found out that CMHC won’t, a grant mortgages on refinances for that they will for a mobile homes that were brought on a flatbed trailer lifted off and put on a foundation, but they won’t for a trailer that was pulled there and then is on its own foundation that used to have wheels on subtle difference. Um, so we have the wheels are still attached to this thing. Even if the things lifted on blocks or whatever, they don’t, they’re not going to finance it or find if the wheels are often is what we’ve been told. So we’ve talked to a number of institutions and we can’t, uh, we can’t get that done.
00:19:50 Got It. Um, so we have a bunch of equity tied up in that right now, but you know, at the cash flow numbers were making eight, eight and a half percent on the money. It’s okay. It’s not great. I’d rather have my cash back, but uh, it’s uh, I’m not, I don’t work. Right. And this is in a mobile home park? Yes. Where you have purchased the lot or the spot? No, it’s just the land lease sorry. It’s a land lease. Okay, got it. Okay. So we pay a monthly maintenance fee. They take care of water, snow plowing, tenants, take care of their own shoveling for driveways and yard maintenance. The land leases for how long I’m. There is no end to it. You do that land lease annually. Uh, yeah. So we pay monthly. Okay. Um, and that covers a water, sewer park maintenance and to these parks ever decide, no, we want our spot back or no, you’re good.
00:20:40 Once you’re in, you’re in kind of thing. Seems to be good. We’ve only had those for eight and a half months. Eight months. Um, so we haven’t. Yeah, we haven’t run into problems with it. Uh, but we looked at it, we talked to other people that have been there for a long time. Um, the park itself is going through a little bit of a, of a revitalization, um, the demographic living there because it’s year round. A lot of trailer parks are seasonal or they’re nine months out of the year or their 12 months, but they can’t be your permanent residence. We went out specifically looking for some stuff in southern Ontario that could be a permanent residence, so you can live there 12 months out of the year, male comes there, you can say, hey, this is where I live. Um, and so that’s what we found. So when you think trailer park, most people think rowdy parties and this is just like a community. It’s people live there, they go to work, they drive to uh, really have that drive to move to a Gravenhurst,, uh, they work, they come home. It’s just like any other subdivision just happens to be to the homes or mobile homes. Yeah, I’m gonna make a note that you say southern Ontario, but to most people that’s still, that’s what I’m going to her. And I’m like, no. Well I guess gravy and hurts. Does that qualify as southern Ontario? This? Tell us, I don’t know the border of southern Ontario. No, but when I heard that too, I’m like southern Ontario graven. Wow. That’s if you live in you this skirt, then a graven hearses down south. That’s right. Okay. So, and then, so back to New Liskeard. When you, you came from Orange Vale, so when you first got up there, will you just kind of shocked at the property prices there? Like, was that an instant opportunity? I think if I moved up there and I saw that. Or were you just still hesitant because you were new into rental properties?
00:22:25 Um, well we had bought the, uh, the uniform rental floor mat rental dry cleaning business. I had zero experience in that. So, uh, I knew how to run a business and moved up. Uh, so I really spent the first year just focusing on learning what I had to do about that, uh, filling the gaps where my knowledge was lacking a building redundancy in a, trying to make sure that we had what we needed for that. So it was stable and would run. And then at the end of the year when I lifted my head up, I realized, hey, let’s start buying some stuff. Um, and so we bought one a and just continued from there.
00:22:57 How did you find them? You said some were private, so you just made a word got out that you were buying properties.
00:23:02 Um, ultimately, yeah, so, uh, the first ones, it was just a for sale sign. I’m literally the duplex right next door, uh, to clean scene and the history of clean seen talking to the previous owner. He said, yeah, this used to be a house and my father in law bought it, tore the house down, built a one, a one bay storefront, and then he bought the house next door in case he had to expand and then he tore it down and added the second bay, he said. Then when I bought the business from my father in law, I bought the house on the other side, tore it down and expanded the business and I said, Huh. So I looked at the house next door and so the time to buy it, it’s when it’s for sale, it was a two bedroom, a duplex, two bedroom units side by side, two stories and, and we bought it for $8,000 and he held the mortgage.
00:23:49 No Way. Yeah, he did a full vendor take back on that thing. Yes. Oh my gosh. He’s been realized is this stuff that I read about in books probably in the late nineties. I like, oh my gosh. I remember calling me. Oh my gosh, nick, there’s something called a seller take back or a vendor take back mortgage. If we can convince people that we will buy the host but give them no money and they sell the host us and we’ll just make payments to them. We can buy houses for no money down. We’re going to be rich. And I remember we tried that. Nick and I tried that with a gentleman out in Hamilton. We bought a student rental property from the guy and he had another property, but nick and I had no more money so I go up to the guy and I think it was a word or it was word perfect.
00:24:27 Do you remember that word? Perfect way by this, how old we are. It was word perfect. I grew up like a, a no money down like agreement of purchase and sale, like cutting and pasting things from different areas. Like I don’t even know what I put together and I gave it to the guy. I actually had to go somewhere and fax it to them. Like I paid effects until my fax that to him, I waited like a week. I think I put like deadline, our offer expires on this date kind of thing. And I heard nothing back. And I was in town in Hamilton dealing with the property we just purchased, ran into him there. I think he came by to check up on the property. I’m like, Hey, did you get our other offer? You know, I’ll buy that property from you for no money now.
00:25:03 And he puts his hand around these guys. I know at the time, I guess I felt like he was like late seventies by the way. We bought this property, the first property from him. I’m in Hamilton, he bought in the mid 19 seventies for like 22 or $24,000. He bought it. Uh, he sold it to us for 250,000. So gone up 10 times. He had never made a principal payment. He just made interest payments on his loan for that whole time. It went up 10 times. He’s like, I guess I’m finally going to pay that off. Can you believe that? He was just how much cash flow he was making on this student rental for that many years. So, um, anyway, he puts us, uh, when I say, Hey, did you get my no money down off or he puts his arm around me and he kind of laughed.
00:25:43 He goes, listen here son. And as soon as I heard that tone comes to me and he’s calling me son, I’m like, oh, this thing is dead in the water. He’s like, we used to do stuff like that back in the seventies and early eighties when. But now you know, when the real estate market’s hot, this is like, I guess the late nineties. So he’s calling the late nineties real estate market hot for perspective here. Um, he, uh, he says, we just, uh, we just take our money. I’m not going to do a no money down deal. And you just kind of chuckled at me and laughed and walked away into his car. And I’m like, oh gosh, well yeah, we had to put 5,000 down on it. So it wasn’t no money. He helped, we’d have to qualify for the mortgage. Uh, he was happy with that. Uh, we ended up buying a fourplex from them for 99,000. We had to put $5,000 on that. He had another vendor takeback. Yes. So he, he really just wanted the cash flow. He wanted the cash flow. He had a fairly large portfolio and uh, he’d been doing rent to own up there for 25 years. No significant a default rates on the rent to own. I’m so he had the reputation in town of just selecting properties.
00:26:43 Yeah. Just be careful dealing with him because, you know, if you fall behind, you know, so on this really nice guy, um, how to further lower nice guy with a really bad reputation. Yes, that’s right. And then we bought the warehouse from um, as well, uh, for uh, he did the full. The vendor take back on that. We, we put a little bit down on it and he, uh, he’s holding the mortgage on that one, still the other two we refinanced. So do you think with those ones he was just hoping that maybe you wouldn’t make a payment so that he would take the properties back? I don’t know. Um, well how has he been? Have you been made two payments? Does he still hold those vendor takebacks, Regena paying those off? He still holds the warehouse. The other ones where we refinanced through CIPC. Um, but yeah, no, he’s uh, he’s always been great.
00:27:24 There’s a, he’ll travel and you know, the checks will run out and we’ll be phoning saying like, Hey, we have more checks, even messages emailing saying we have more checks. So where, where would you like them? You’re the ideal buyer, put them in your mailbox, a god, he’s just traveling and he comes back and then he’ll cash a couple of months at a time and, and uh, but yeah, no, he’s uh, he’s had a good success at it. I think the secret is always, he’s always been a local and that’s the same as he knows the mark and so now you must have and that’s where we tell her, listen, I think sometimes people will question us and they say, well why don’t you guys pulling people into like kitchen or even though we think that we’re pulling somebody from like Mississauga to Kitchener, we’re doing a good service because we’re taking them into a really good community to be a real estate investor or like a Brantford.
00:28:09 Right? Or even like a Woodstock perhaps. Something like that. Why aren’t you talking about some of these other even better cash when communities and the reason that we don’t go that far out is because we deal with all investors directly ourselves here and if the investor has a vacancy, we want a certain population base in where they’re buying so that if there is a vacancy there are going to fill it with a tenant fairly quickly. You know, they have busy lives. They might have kids maybe working downtown Toronto who knows what they’re doing. We don’t want to have the, you know, have a vacancy in a smaller community. You can have, instead of, you know, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks on a starter home, you might be dealing with a little bit longer and if they don’t know that community, they might get nervous and then you have to sell the property under some duress and we don’t want that kind of situation.
00:28:52 So we’ve always helped people to what we considered smaller communities. But to people like yourself, you’re like a kitchen or Ontario. I mean, that’s a metropolis, right? So, uh, you know, that’s why we kind of pull people into some of the communities that we’re investing in. But you have the local knowledge of New Liskeard and nothing can replace that. Like, you know what, you can rent it out for, you know, the inside knowledge of that community. And if you’re, if you’re, if you’re listening to this and you have that knowledge, we’re all for it. We’re like, yeah, by where you are, make money in your own backyard. That’s the best way to do it. No one’s going to beat you. You basically have insider knowledge, right? And you can’t replace that, which is what you have. Yeah. And the benefit is as well that, uh, sometimes tenants are late with rent. Um, and so to be able to follow up with them immediately as your way of saying, you know, where they live. Yeah. They know who are, you can go visit them. Uh, you know that there’s only two coffees. You, how tall are you? Six. Six, two.
00:29:47 So you’re, you know, you’re not the smallest Kinda guy. So you showing up at their doorstep collecting rent.
00:29:52 No, but my, my wife generally looks after the real estate and so I’ll talk to the tenants and say yeah, I don’t know if she’s really mad. I’m trying to rein her in. But uh, so basically if you can’t make the rent payment you better spend a little bit of money and buy a box because you’ll be living under a bridge. So you, that’s really nice that you’re the good cop and your wife is the bad cop paints the picture. Oh, okay. Got It. You just playing the game. You got it. Okay. So yeah. So being able to follow up quickly, um, is good and what we find is there’s times we get busy with other stuff and so we’re, we’re maybe not as on the vacancy as we should, um, and if you’re not posting it and following up and making the phone calls. And uh, we tried to group showings and we find that’s a lot harder to do because people are often renting when they’re moving into the community. So if somebody has a job and now they’re trying to find it and you’ll say, okay, well we’re showing it to Tuesday night at six and they say, well, I’m not driving in until Saturday. Is there any chance I could see it Saturday afternoon? Um, because they’re coming from out of town and they want to find something, you know, for the next month when they’re moving up or um, so it’s,
00:31:06 it makes sense that it’s different. Yeah, I get it. Okay. So it’s hard. It’s hard to build that demand on a showing when people are coming in like six hour drive. I’m joking a little bit shorter, but I’m five hours that a pretty big. Um, uh, an appreciation, you’re okay. I’m just trying to put myself in your shoes. If I was buying up there, I would kind of be buying, fully aware that the appreciations not going to be this thing that takes off on me, but if I buy this good asset, it’s cash flowing on me. I have, I’m paying my costs, my biggest risks, uh, the things that are going to have to control our obviously vacancies and the other one will be interest rates are my costs on my lending. So if I can control the costs on my lending, um, and I have an understanding of the vacancy rate or how long it’s taken me to get some tenants, I can control my biggest variables and I’m going to be happy with the cash flow I get. Is that how you look at it? Like you’re not banking on the appreciation?
00:31:57 Yeah, we’re, we’re not, we haven’t seen the appreciation. I really wasn’t expecting it. Um, our biggest expenses repairs from damage. Uh, every year we have at least one apartment get trashed. Um, yeah.
00:32:11 So true. So liquid people on the way out or just trashing or as they’re living as they’re living there? Sometimes, yeah, sometimes it’s on the way out, but every year since we’ve started we’ve had at least one, $6,000 repair, something that’s breaking in the relationship with the way you’re handling the tenants.
00:32:32 Um, I don’t know, uh, like, are you overly demanding in some way, do you feel?
00:32:39 No, I don’t. I don’t think so. Okay. Um, it’s sometimes a relationship breakdown. Sometimes it’s a mental health challenges. Uh, sometimes it’s a people that just have a party and their friends trashed the place. Got It. Okay. Um, and we’ve had tenants, uh, you know, do a lot of the repairs to fix it. We’ve had more tenants promised to do a lot of the repairs but don’t. Um, and so if we look at it, you know, if you kind of look at each individual property and say like, wow, I can’t believe how much money we lost on that property this year. When you look at it across the whole portfolio, it sorta makes sense. We sort of feel like, you know, and it, and it may not be intentional damage, it may just be the way they live. It may be that it’s incredibly dirty and you know, unfortunately it’s, it’s really, really heavy wear and tear and so you come in and think, yeah, we’re going to have to repaint the entire apartment and they put up baby gates and now there’s holes in all the walls and yeah.
00:33:38 Okay. So that kind of stuff. And just knowing you, I know you maintain your properties and that kind of thing. Yeah, we try. So um, what is the average length of time for a tenant then for you guys? You know, we’ll have some tenants who are just years and years and years. Do you have some people that are coming into work? Like is it a little bit more of a transient community that some people are coming to work in the mining industry, for example, in an area of Ontario living in New Liskeard and then they kind of disappear after a year.
00:34:03 What we find is that the longer term tenants are also the often the longer term residents. So there are people that have grown up and stayed there. Um, they, uh, they have roots in the area, right. And so they’re looking for someplace that they can stay. A lot of the people that come from out of town, uh, we have a college up there, so sometimes it students that are staying for one or two years to finish their program, um, generally people that come up and chase the jobs in mining or agriculture, forestry or in retail because we have some multinationals that will bring in managers to manage it and then they need someplace to live and they might stay for six months, eight months, a year. And then once they realized that they can purchase a house, they’ll move out and buy something on their own if they’re going to stay or they finish eight months or nine months and say, you know what? Because it was a transient for them to move in, it’s easy for them to look somewhere else and say, hey, I’m going to go chase a job over there. Um, and so they might, might move out and leave. Got it. Okay. So that’s a little bit of a different dynamic that we don’t deal with as much. We obviously have people moving around and stuff and it’s slightly different. Yeah. Um, because people will stay if someone’s renting from us, like, you know, like an outfield spot or a Hamilton spot or Brantford spot. They’re often, that’s where their roots are. That’s where their families, they might be switching jobs, but they’re keeping their family unit for most of the time there, you know, we have had people leave and move, especially when the oil boom was going on in Alberta. We had a couple things happened. We had some people leave, I’m on some rent to owns that were great properties, but just because it was so lucrative for them to move out to Alberta. Um, but then we also had some people where the husband was flying out to Alberta and working family unit was staying. Actually, this was in Hamilton, a stinging Hamilton and the husband was just going back and forth, just making so much money out there that that’s obviously I’ll change now with the last couple of years out there.
00:35:54 We had exactly the same thing with tenants, we had tenants that would, would drive an hour and a half, two hours to the North Bay airport and fly out west and then come back for a week, drive up and stay with their family.
00:36:04 Even our rentals or even as much as like curriculum, like going to the mine there, they’ll, they’ll move or they’ll move here and go work at the mine and their family was Daniel about. So what the cost of living in New Liskeard compare to in this area of Ontario? Man, they must be, they can be making good money and then not spending that much money on accommodate like shelter.
00:36:25 Um, yeah. So, uh, you know, we rent out a three bedroom house, a 1295 plus utilities as low as a, as 10:50 plus utilities for a smaller one. Um, are most of your, is, are most of your properties out of that portfolio, single-family homes, are they most like duplexes?
00:36:44 I’m probably 60 percent. So we have about six single-family homes and then we have three duplexes and one fourplex.
00:36:50 Okay. What was the, what was the cheapest one? What’s your best? What’s your favorite deal?
00:36:54 Um, it depends how you look at it. A soul we bought, the cheapest we’ve ever bought least we’ve ever paid is a story and a half, two bedroom and we paid $50,000 for it. Um, and uh, we’ve done a bunch where we did one we bought for 87,000, we put 17,000 intuit, had it appraised for 1:30, refinanced it could all our money back. We bought the one for 60, put in 45, refinanced it could all the money back when it appraised for 140. Um, I described as getting a free house. Um, the free houses are always nice and, and we’re working on a duplex deal right now, a 67,060 $8,000 that we’re working on, um, that, that just to hear those prices with the stuff that we’re dealing with out here, I’m definitely different. It’s totally different. I know for you guys it’s sounding totally normal, but um, yeah, good for you.
00:37:50 But there, a majority of them are. I mean, you can pay more for a house. Um, for sure. Uh, like everywhere else, a New Liskeard or the city. It’s misdemeanors because it’s amalgamated. The town’s amalgamated into the city. It’s a misdemeanor. Shores have neighborhoods where people, we know this is what the rent is in that neighborhood. This is what houses sell for. And as you move up to a kind of a, the more upscale community with the newer, a newer stock, you’ll pay 300, three, 10, three slash 20 a thousand dollars for a three bedroom, two bath, four bedroom.
00:38:24 Got It. Okay. So there’s a, there’s a big range right in the community then. Yeah. And it also helps having like our realtor, are you a realtor who knows what you look for now and can bring you those deals that they see that seemed to suit what we like or what put you guys like in a community of that size? Or are you known now as the guy who’s going to buy some properties? Like do you have competition out there? Yeah, I mean there’s competition out there is. Okay. I didn’t know Meaghan, I didn’t know if your dad was the guy out there saying, hey, there’s going to be a property, I’m going to ring up Darcy.
00:38:55 We actually have people that find us so they know because I’m on the radio, they know me as Darcy from clean scene. And so because of that they’ll come in and say, Hey, I hear you buy houses. I’ve got a three bedroom, one bath, I don’t know if you’re interested. I don’t want to deal with realtors. This is what I want for it. So we’ll go look at it and say, yeah, let’s do it. Um, and we’re already saying, oh, it’s just something that’s going to work for us. Um, but we, yeah, we’ve probably had five or six people come to us and say we’re looking to sell, are you interested? You know, and instead of listing at a maybe we can come up with something privately between it and like our paths crossed. I feel like it must be eight, nine years ago. Do you know when 2008, 2009. It was 2009. So it’s about 10 years. Yeah, um, why, and I’m just curious, you know, first of all, you got to tell us why you got into a car accident on your way down here. So what. Yeah. So what, what, what happened on the way down here?
00:39:51 Uh, we were one of the many vehicles involved in the many multicar collisions on highway 11, uh, just south of Orangeville or a. sorry. A really? Yeah. And the car is a write off. It’s A. Yeah, it’s a write off, but you guys are okay, obviously. Yes. Yep. Yep. Cars can be replaced.
00:40:07 And so in that kind of. So what icy condition, somebody breaks in front of you, icy conditions, a whiteout started slowing down and then it opened up and there was a pickup truck and a trailer sideways. He’d gone into the back of a transport and flip sideways and they were getting out of the vehicle and my vehicle was sliding and I thought I could probably stop, but it was sliding towards where they were standing outside their vehicle did. So what did they do? Jump out of the way? No, so I made the decision to let go of the brakes and crank it into the bed of the pickup truck instead of with them instead of maybe not stopping at that point, they got back in their car and not. He says, time slows down in these things.
00:40:47 10, 12 seconds later, a Subaru Suv just came straight into the front of our car, right into where they had been standing about 10 seconds before. So it was exciting. It all works out. Okay. Yeah. No one died, uh, some injuries, but uh, yeah, isn’t that kind of thing stay in your car? Yes. Yeah. Why? Why are you saying time slows down? Because I’ve experienced that. I had a car, right? I got rear-ended. My car was written off at, around, I want to say 2009 or 2010. I forget now. Um, and time slow down for me.
00:41:16 We’ll see. I’m the opposite for me. It’s, he says, he says it’s happily he knows it’s happening. So he warns me and I just, everything happens in a matter of seconds, but for him he said, you know, everything just completely slow down. He had, he thought everything through and made his decisions and knew what he wanted to do. And then just like, how do you do that? How does one person with that? Yeah.
00:41:36 Um, I remember when I got rear-ended, I looked in a. So I was sitting in a, I was sitting in my car was a BMW three, two, three, so the four-door sedan and I was behind an 18 wheeler that said flammable on the back. And I looked and I was just sitting there, I don’t know what got into magic, looked in my rear view mirror and this truck was coming so fast. That guy had fallen asleep at the wheel. I didn’t know that at the time. It was a big coffee truck with a dually tires at the back. So it was a bigger truck and the guy was coming in apparently now I know, or afterwards I learned it was about 70 kilometers an hour, fell asleep at the wheel. All I see in my rear view mirror is the Ford symbol. It’s, that’s how close he is to me.
00:42:12 I just look up, I see this symbol and then everything went into slow motion thing where I grabbed my steering wheel and kind of tweaked it so that I didn’t hit the 18 wheeler in front of me. And then as he smashed me and I was, I clipped the side of the 18 wheeler. I remember blacking out. And then I remember hearing my own voice out of body. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I was blacked out, but I heard myself screaming from a different vantage point, like I was out of my body and I couldn’t, like, it’s Kinda like I could see myself in the car, but my voice was like up to my right screaming. Um, and then I guess a somewhat, the next thing I realized is someone just knocks on my window and it felt like half an hour had passed. But apparently it was like, you know, 20 seconds or something. Someone knocked on my window because I had hit another car so hard two lanes over it. Then hit a car, um, and uh, they knocked on my window, got me out the truck driver in front of me, comes and gives me a big hug. He’s like, if you smashed me, you know, because he had one of those flammable things. You would have seen this thing. We were in Burlington from downtown Toronto. It was just like this epic moment. I’m like, holy.
00:43:16 That was with the accident that we were part of after the fact. I didn’t know, but he, my dad was telling me after he said, yeah, the giant transport truck in front of us was carrying a compressed chlorine gas. Gosh, but it was a square sided trailer probably with individual canisters inside it. And uh, so he had been hit by two vehicles, a one in the side that was almost buried underneath and in the pickup truck had buried right up to the windshield at the back end of it. And, uh, so yeah.
00:43:47 And is that, I don’t know, is that like flammable substance?
00:43:49 A chlorine gas was what? Shut down. Ms Dot saga back.
00:43:52 No Way. Yeah, I remember that. Was that rail incident? Yes. Darcy, you guys are lucky man. So then what this happened. Luckily this truck doesn’t explode. Your cars are right off. You sat on the highway for hours, I guess until they cleaned it up. Yeah, yeah, I was there four and a half. Five hours. Okay. So why are you driving? So this is, this is my long way of getting to like for, for about 10 years you’ve been driving all these hours, bringing your kids down to different rockstar events. Why are you doing this? Like, what’s the mental state that you’re in that’s pulling you down here? And I’m curious because Nick and I obviously travelled around to different events and conferences all around North America too so to meet somebody like you because we have, people will complain to us saying you’re doing your event, you’re in Oakville or your, your events in like I’m coming all the way from Scarborough, you know, like I cannot believe that it’s not closer and there’ll be people like you said, where are you? What’s your mindset?
00:44:40 Um, I’ve chased education my entire life until I got married. I never had a vacation. I would always book it with a course I would travel to learn, I would do something and then I got married and my wife was looking for more vacation, like vacations. Um, but yeah, coming down here, uh, I love surrounding myself with people that are doing things. Um, I, uh, I always, uh, compare myself to other people. I described myself as a greyhound. Um, I’ll run until my heart explodes, but I need a rabbit to chase. If I don’t have a rabbit to chase, I, I forget that I’m supposed to be running. And so I come down to find the rabbit so I can look at people and say, man, am I a slacker? I can’t believe this is all I’m doing. Look what they’re doing. And uh, so I find it incredibly motivating. I find the information very valuable. Um, do you use, I’ve been a, I think every level of membership with you already to run a platinum level of membership that you were a part of and a great contributor a to and Meaghan, why are you. So you’re, you’ve been coming down. Yeah.
00:45:44 Been coming for God since I was 30, while I mean I took a break in between when I was in high school. I wasn’t coming for a little bit, but ever since I was really like really little. I don’t even remember how old, but it’s just been such good information and like I went to school before this, but coming back to the rockstar and all of that and obviously my dad because he’s a mogul, uh, he, I kind of got into business more so now I’m more into that and enjoying that aspect.
00:46:16 Cool. Yeah. You know what, for us to do these kinds of things and to have people like yourselves coming all the way down from New Liskeard to, to come to a rock star event. This, your life, your terms event that we’re hosting. Yeah, I mean we feel kind of honored and we feel like the obligations on us to put up a lot of solid content because you’re making that effort and you stay with your brother who lives in Mississauga.
00:46:36 Yeah. I stay with a girl. My son now lives in.
00:46:39 Oh, got it. Okay. Got It. So he’s living down here now, so, uh, so we get to stay at his place and spend a little more time and see him. Yeah. Cool. What’s he doing down? He’s working here somewhere. Uh, yeah. So he works at one of the Amazon facilities as a building operator. Yeah. Oh awesome. Um, and then your. And I want to talk to you about your business. So clean scene. You have done something. Radio advertising is dismissed a lot of times. Radio advertising works really well and you’ve done it really well. We talk about people who are running their own business that you always have to be a little outrageous in your marketing, like outrageous marketing is just the way to go. How you run the most outrageous radio ads that we’ve ever heard and you’re confident to do it. You’ve pulled in your kids, you’re younger. I guess Meaghan, it wasn’t you, but your younger sister, sister to be on the ads ever since she was really, really little. She started when she was seven. So you would run some ads, can you, like what are the kinds of ads you would run for your business?
00:47:33 To be honest, I, I, I kinda got the idea of Cory’s clothing and so I looked at that and bay Bloor radio and I thought, you know what, those seem to be the ones that I remember the most. So I thought, okay, well I’m definitely going to record my own. Uh, and then, uh, when you start looking at the dynamics, that took me a little while to tune it in and I finally settled on kind of a, a burns and Allen a type of thing. Um, so I play the George Burns role and my younger daughter plays the Gracie Allen role. Um, and everybody finds it hilarious when the George Burns gets made fun of. But nobody would find it funny if he was making fun of her. And so, uh, so Lauren is the smart one, a Lauren’s always correcting me. And uh, so yeah, it, uh, I get to sort of be the straight man and, played a little bit. You’re running these ads for clean senior business in New Liskeard you this skirt has its own radio station.
00:48:27 Yeah, we do a and the way there’s one in Kirkland Lake. I run it on both.
00:48:32 Got, um, the costs and the radio stations for decent, for you, for a business, you don’t have to share actual numbers. I just mean the numbers work for you.
00:48:38 Yeah, it works. Um, it’s, it’s all about finding the right package a. So you want to find the one that, uh, is kind of reaching the market when you want to reach it at a price that makes sense and has a good return on investment.
00:48:50 Yeah. And uh, Nick and I run some of the radio ad stuff that you can run sometimes radio ads will run things called like remnant space, kind of like the newspapers where they just can’t fill a certain different segments or different times of the slot. You can kind of get those for cheaper. Um, but we’re big believers in personality based, a radio ads as well, but we don’t have your booming voice to do it. So usually it’s nick kind of doing the ads, not my voice. I heard them today while I was driving around. We’re still running. This is that time of year that we’ll run it for sure. Um, but you run yours? Uh, and yeah. Yours are funny. I know I don’t, I wish I had them to play it here, but uh, if I can pull them up on my phone.
00:49:28 Yeah, if you pull it up on your phone, let’s see if we can, we can put it close to them. We need to have your phone wired to the system to get the perfect audio. But if it’s loud enough I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem. So, uh, actually you know what, here, I’ll just. Okay. So we stopped recording there just for a brief second for Darcy to get up. We’re very sophisticated right here. Darcy, who’s going to hold up his iPhone? Is that my phone? That’s an iPhone. iPhone. You’re gonna. Hold up your iPhone and hold it to the like, I should have an auxiliary cable. We will in the future where I can pull in sound like this, but for now can. Yeah. Can you hold up the. Let’s hear the radio ad. Okay.
00:50:03 I think it’s more important. I don’t just mean you’re pretty regular pants and shirts your kids course that and your adverts tie with that coffee stain almost came out. I mean, just think of how good you look and how much more extra time we’ll have by letting you on the radio. Oh, I better go call Clean today at seven. Oh, five, six, four, seven, six, one, one, seven. And let us help you.
00:50:32 Darcy. Lauren, are you, is it, Lauren? Is Her name? Lauren, are you on the radio? That’s your whole thing. That’s his part. Yeah. You wrote it for her. Obviously she’s reading this and you are doing how many iterations of these ads a year?
00:50:46 You just constantly. I wanted to initially, I said I’ll change them every two weeks and as it turns out now I run them between two and three months. Uh, once people, uh, stop coming in. I tried to have a hook in everyone. Uh, so there’s some talk about hooks, so this is a great marketing lessons here. So when you’re talking about a hook, we’re talking, you’re making an offer of some sort to get them to come in. No, well kind of. Yeah, so I always have that, but I’m trying to come up with a, maybe a soundbite is, is a better word, something that people will love capturing memory to remember. So they’ll come in and say, are you on the radio? And uh, and when people stop saying that to me in town, it’s time to change. Yeah. That is the ultimate measure of your marketing. We tell so many business owners that we work with, we say unless people are coming off the street repeating back to you some of the things that you’re saying your marketing isn’t outrageous or it’s not personality based enough. You need to be doing that in a great test is whether people are doing that to you. So Darcy, if people are doing that to you, that’s the ultimate validation that your marketing is kind of working. And I know you know this because we’ve talked about this in mastermind meetings together over the years. Yeah. Um, so we are teeing up another one. Feel free if you want to look for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you look for it. Um, and just so you know, Darcy, I think Meaghan, do you help in the, do you help him to clean seen business at all? Yeah. Yeah. So what, what, what kind of stuff do you do? But you’re not doing any bookkeeping or any of that kind of thing?
00:52:10 There was a time when I was, I did it. So what are you doing now? Right now I’m, I was working on the industrial laundry side where it was like the hotel laundry and stuff like that. Um, now it’s, it’s kind of doing that sometimes and helping where I can with what I can.
00:52:29 So is your dad using free family labor or is he actually paying your. Dad’s not on the mic right now. So you can say whatever you want. Free family lady. Oh, he’s paying, he’s paying. You got it. Are you roping in any of your friends into this business as well or. No? Friends are working into the businesses, but that’s what my and the reason I’m asking is my father and the drywall business, when he needed help, he would always come to myself or nick saying, Hey, get some of your buddies together. We need some friends. Wouldn’t know it. You’re not repairing any of the machines in, in, in this operation. Are you. Because I know my dad is your dad’s constantly talking about different machines that need repair constantly because these are industrial-size cleaning machines. Like I have no concept of what this looks like, but these are big massive cleanup.
00:53:09 Massive, so I don’t even know how tall the building is, but there are just giant, giant machines like 300 pounds, washers and dryers and I don’t even think that’s the biggest one. There’s just so many big machines.
00:53:21 There’s A. Yeah, we have. Our machines aren’t big. I’ve to plants that have big pieces of equipment because what you’re throwing in mats into these pieces. So we do rental, floormates, coveralls, a rental linens, so sheets have washing machines or dry cleaning. I don’t, I have no concept of what this stuff looks like. But you get there that big that they can handle floormates. Yes.
00:53:40 Yeah. So our, our, uh, our largest machines, and again, they’re not big bice standards. Exotic are 275 pound machines. So your standard home machine is a 12 and a half pound. Um, ours are 275 pound capacity. There are about an eight-foot cube. So there seven and a half feet tall, about six and a half feet wide, seven or eight feet deep. Are you walking right into these meetings? I know it’s a 36 inch opening in the front, usually. Got It. Okay. And then a repair, I guess maintenance has to pain because you’re paying, you have to pay for specialized maintenance?
00:54:14 Yeah. All of the parts are, uh, they’re, they’re not generally off the shelf. You have to buy, you buy the proprietary parts. Uh, but, uh, we had a relatively small for us, a 60 pound machine that we use to wash them smaller stuff and it ran for a year and then it shorted out, stopped working, we replaced the board and the boards are thousands of dollars. We put a new board in and uh, it, it lasted about three weeks and then it shorted out and while we’re trying to troubleshoot it, we realize it’s probably shorting out because there is a most living in it who is urinating that was very nice to them. So yeah. That’s nice that you. Who found that out? You found that out?
00:54:52 Uh, well we, we tried to figure out why it was corrosive and uh, how water got into that particular location and uh, and then we saw some mouse droppings around. So, I mean we have a pest control program in place. Uh, he, uh, had had holed up inside our washing machine.
00:55:10 Darcy, why did you move from orange? Like, what got you to think you want it to run your own business for someone listening to this who’s like, you had a career change. There was just no way you were going to go back into like a corporate type position. You wanted to go and be your own entrepreneur, your own business owner.
00:55:26 I’ve, uh, I’ve always been entrepreneurial. Um, so even when I was in the corporate world, um, I ran my own training company on the side, so it was physical skills training. It was a how to protect yourself, defensive tactics, uh, uh, had an arrest go wrong. Had my knees shattered. Uh, they told me if I get hit in the knee again, uh, they would end up, it would be a lot worse off, um, they’d have to replace it. So I transitioned the company over to do, um, a intercultural communications training and documenting a use of force and report writing. Um, and then ran that for years, uh, backed into real estate investing. Um, my mother and I had bought a house in Orangeville. I was dating my now wife and uh, when we found the house, we found one with a four bedroom upstairs in a one bedroom basement apartment.
00:56:15 My mom said like, I’ll live in the basement and you guys can live upstairs when you get married. And um, we rented out the basement and it was just my mom and I and then we got married and uh, my, you know, my family all got along great and my, my mom got along great with my wife and the other way around. And so we continued to rent out the basement. Is that in Orangeville? It was an orange one. Yeah, it was a semi. A, we paid 1:24 five. What year was that? Nineteen 94. Got It. And I thought you got ripped off. It was crazy expensive ranges. Yeah. And a yeah, 1997. We found our dream home, uh, my wife and I a Victorian, a six bedroom. And when we went there I said, well, we’ll sell the other one. There was never a thought that we wouldn’t.
00:56:57 And uh, we realized that after owning it for three years, uh, I would only have to pay $5,000 more a to pay the real estate and the closing costs and then we wouldn’t own the house anymore. And I said, I’ll not do that, forget it. I’m just going. We’ve been renting out the baseball rental, the upstairs. I’m done. Uh, and we did that for a year and a half and uh, I’m not as bright as some. And the light bulb finally went off and, uh, we moved on from there, bought a triplex in Orangeville, uh, ran that for a while. Um, you’ve always, it’s always been in you to do your own thing. What do you think your kids are, your kids, Meaghan, you know, in your, your, your family, your children are picking up from you watching this. I hope so. Uh, all I want is for them to be happy and follow their dreams and find something that’s going to give them the lifestyle they want. So they all have a great work ethic. Uh, they’ve all kind of seen what we’ve done, you know, they may choose to follow this path. They may choose to follow another path. I just hope that they’ve learned something from us. Um, you know, everyone’s an example, whether it’s good or bad, never a dull moment. But I, I like learning these things. It’s opened me up to a whole different world. I talked to my friends now who are like, you do what? Wait what? And I just, to me it seems so second nature that it’s, I never even really thought not to do it.
00:58:15 Yeah. Good for you. And uh, what about, uh, Darcy? I feel like you go on some pretty good vacation. Are you going on vacation recently? Do you go on a scheduled vacation too? I remember talking to you saying you, you’re going, when you go into scheduled vacations in a year, you make a panic or is it just when the business can survive at that? Do you escape? Yeah, we, uh, we’ve done different stuff over the years. Um, 2009. Was it an anniversary or something? I can’t remember. We know we just, uh, we flipped a house in Orangeville and we’d been told it would be two months and at the end of two months it was still a, about two months away from completion. And I started pushing the contractor’s until I realized it was an appreciating market and then I stopped pushing as hard and at the end of four months when they were done, uh, he did appreciate it, about $25,000 more than what we expected our exit price to be. So we spent the money and took a, my wife, our three kids and my mom to Europe for a month and we moved around Europe through Italy and France and the UK and Scotland and other. Must’ve been a great shot down through Egypt and Greece and yeah. But since then we’ve, yeah, we’ve been all over New Orleans, uh, New York, Mexico, Cuba, Mexico.
00:59:29 What about depth perspective, living up in New Liskeard now? Would you ever come back to kind of a bigger population center or. Yeah. So Meaghan’s. Yes. You actually said your sons are here, families leaving you. Uh, but Darcy, how about yourself? Are you, do you kinda like the way of life and the pace because it is different.
00:59:44 I, uh, I liked the pace. Um, I liked the lack of traffic. Um, I’ve had it, I’ve heard it described that it has all the shopping you need, but maybe not all the shopping you want. Um, I like, I like art. Um, and so I, you know, if I could come down and uh, go to the ballet and go to plays and uh, you know, taking the art gallery of Ontario and the Rom, um, I would enjoy that a lot, but we usually add that into two trips when we come down. And yeah, it’s funny, you know, we live so, so in Oakland we live so close to Toronto and some of these things we rarely take advantage of some of that stuff that Toronto has to offer. And then when you leave Toronto and people are like, wow, I love that. Or if we meet, some Americans actually live in kind of northern New York state, they’re always like, we’re coming to Toronto for different art or different museums. And I’m like, oh my gosh. No, you’re so right. Darcy, did you find you. I find that you have the next one here. It has to be my favorite.
01:00:41 Darcy’s GRANDPA for clean scene. When I walk my dog or my blankets cleaned or I’m looking for a rental coverage, I called Queen scene in New Liskeard. Jim Dandy. Good God, what are you doing? It’s just embarrassing. What do you encourage Vilmarie or Tamagni Conklin seen today at seven? Oh, five, six, four slash seven. Six, seven months. Seven. Or check out a new website. A Queen Scene Inc. Ca. Do you think they knew it was me, Lauren? Yes. Dad.
01:01:15 So did you, what was the response on that one?
01:01:17 Fabulous. Yeah. Yeah, it, uh, I’ve actually brought it back for repeat performances a few times.
01:01:24 It’s a classic. You’re running the radio ads, guys. Thank you. Uh, anything else that you, anything else you wanted to share to, for anyone listening about investing and kind of a smaller community? I think we covered most of what I wanted to ask you. Anything coming to mind?
01:01:36 No, it’s uh, it’s been great for us. Um, the, the big secret is a, as far as I’m concerned, it’s being close. You have to have a little more contact with the tenants, a follow up a little more quickly and just stay on top of it.
01:01:53 You know what I wanted to ask you just your bookkeeping on your properties. Are you using Quickbooks? Do you use an excel spreadsheet or you just stuffing stuff in a shoe box? How are you doing that?
01:02:01 Um, about two years ago we started a kind of passing the receipts right over. So we retained our accountant to do the bookkeeping services for it. Okay. Um, so we pass it off to them. They do the entry. Um, what we found was we were trying to do it and we were not doing it, uh, perhaps as well or in manner that, uh, that they would have liked. So it was actually costing us more money to do it ourselves and let them correct it, uh, than it was to just collecting the receipts per property or just as one big group of receipts. Um, capital stuff we collect per property. Okay. Um, because of all of our properties within about a six-minute drive of each other. Got it. Okay. We’ll often get a receipt from, from our plumber that will be, I fixed the tap on that street, uh, I redid the water heater over there and I fixed the drain there, here’s my bill. And so it’s a little harder to carve that up. Um, so we just have kind of a general repair and maintenance, uh, across the portfolio and uh, you know, if we have to make any capital improvements put in a new furnace, then that gets identified to a specific property and um, I know with our accountant will meet with our account usually twice a year actually in between returns so that we can kind of strategically get organized for some of our properties because maybe some of our properties are making a little bit too much and just your revenue and we didn’t have the expenses or we want to talk about if you want to depreciate a property or not. So we do that once a year. Do you do that with your accountant as well or do you just kind of let your accountant decide what he wants to do with your taxes and let it roll? The benefit is that our accountants, uh, I drive, she’d drive by their office between my house and uh, and clean seen every day and they hear your radio ads to surrounding them. Um, so if I’m going to make a major purchase, I’ll often reach out to them and say, hey, what’s the best way to structure this and how do we, uh, got it. Okay. So you have a her own dialogue. Um, yeah. And, and then, uh, you know, we’ll talk about what we depreciate and how we depreciate it. They work with me to decide which of the corporation should pay our salary and the best way to structure that and you know, make sure you do this year coming up. And uh, so it’s, it’s an ongoing discussion with them.
01:04:08 Yeah. Cool. Darcy, Meaghan. thank god you guys are alive after the accident. Stay in the car. If you ever get into another accident like that, thankfully everything went into slow motion and you were able to kind of steer the right way and not smash into a chlorine. What was it called? Yeah. Compressed chlorine gas cold compress chlorine. That’s what the placard says. Yeah. So, uh, you know, just thankFully everything is okay through that. It sounds like a new car is in your life. It certainly will be our car of some sort anyways in your life. What? Do you get the rental car all the way home now? Yes. Yeah. You were able to negotiate that?
01:04:43 Uh, yeah, we have, uh, we have, uh, you know, enterprise rent a car up there in addition to.
01:04:48 Got it. Okay. Bob’s house of. Sure. Yeah. Got it. Cool. Thank you so much guys. Appreciate this. Thanks for sharing everything that you shared. Really appreciate it. Pleasure. Okay. We started to wrap up there, but I wanted to bring Darcy back because Darcy, you also went to China. Why did you go to China? You went with Greg and Brian who’ve been on this podcast to China. Meaghan, you didn’t go to Toronto. Darcy, you went to China. Why are you going to China now?
01:05:11 Um, I, I was intrigued. I had been to the entrepreneur boot camp, um, for two years. Both years. You, it, listen to Greg talk at both of them. And the second one, I thought, you know what, maybe this was a good opportunity for me to do something where my kids can learn from it. So we had said, look, we’ll, uh, let’s start an Amazon business will learn how to do it, we’ll grow it, learn what it needs to be successful and get the ads working and pulling and selling, bring all three of the kids in. They can cut their teeth and learn the knowledge and figure out how to do it. And uh, you know, and then as the business is successful, we’ll be able to take the profits from that business, split it up, you know, kind of pay the kids, uh, the money from it, which will give them the steak they need to move forward and start on their own.
01:05:56 Are any of the kids interested, Meaghan? Oh really? You’re, you’re interested in that kind of thing. Got it. Was. And it was a helpful going to China to actually see kind of sourcing of some product. Like what did you take away?
01:06:06 Um, I’ve been ordering my own coveralls, a more clean seen internationally for years. um, so I took advantage of the trip to Shanghai to meet with my Chinese contact for my cover all supply, um, but I also use the opportunity to look at, uh, other suppliers, striping suppliers, and then, uh, also had done the product research to look at other products completely outside of, of what we’re doing right now. Okay. So you did the pro product research for possible arbitrage opportunities on like an Amazon or an e-commerce where people are looking to buy stuff and there might be an opportunity for you to sell it.
01:06:44 Yes. Yeah. That, that was the goal. Um, again, uh, I had involved the three kids in, in the product research. So this is how you find it so that they kind of learn how to go through that process.
01:06:55 Yes. Follow the step was building, had bracelets. Was it your son who was. Alex was Alex who had the bracelets and he was getting from Alibaba and he was selling into his high school buddies or something. I still have. One of my son still talks about this was, he was in elementary school when he was in elementary school. He had like cool motivational kinds of things I feel like, or something or no? Yeah, it was just the same thing as trying to get trendy. Simmer down. One of the teachers here, set it at the school. One of the kids was acting out and she said, hey, simmer down. So then that became a catchphrase at the school until the school band it and once it was banned, it became much exciting for, for the grade school. Kids are making fun of the teacher by repeating, simmer down. He makes it into a bracelet and start selling. Absolutely. Okay. So the entrepreneurial spirit runs right through your family? That’s right, yeah. Got it. Okay. And then so back from China, are you, uh, are you getting to get you, you’re chatting with Greg and Brian again recently. You’re keeping in touch. They launched an e-commerce VIP group, right. We joined the e-commerce VIP for. sounds like you wouldn’t join something like that. It’s funny how we’re similar in that way is that when you want information, like I look at things that I want an information advantage of and I won’t let anything stand in my way, whether that means I’m flying somewhere, paying for access to something and people think that’s come. Most people will think that it’s completely ridiculous.
01:08:12 Nick doesn’t, thankfully. That’s why we were able to so many things together, but you’re one of the people who think like us, you know, uh, we, we are on the same page with that. I look at access to enter information as my competitive advantage in my life and I’m not trying to compete against other people. I’m not trying to beat other people in life. I’m just trying to do well for myself, for my family, for people that were trying to help. So I look at that as an investment into myself more than an expense. And that’s exactly the way you look at it. Well, I, yeah, the more knowledge I have, the more connections I can make between a completely disparate things. So it’s, it’s finding ways that one thing of can build on the other.
01:08:51 I can’t wait to hear a crazy radio ad for one of the e-commerce products that you’re gonna you’re gonna run, um, are, are you, uh, are you, are you able to share that radio ad one about the dust mites or no, not plate or talk about it? yeah, absolutely. Yes. Explain this, what campaign this is. This is a brilliant advertising campaign. Can you explain this campaign?
01:09:09 Um, so one of the things we ran for, for clean scene, um, we used to be a dry cleaner. We’re now a green cleaner. We’ve moved away from, from chemical cleaning and now use a green cleaning solutions. Um, but we ran a campaign around a, a dust mites and bedding. Um, so we, uh, we put it together. I ran a full-page newspaper ad that said, who are you sleeping with a one-third picture of a, of a dust mite, which you’ve never seen it as a microscopic relative of the spider and looks absolutely hideous. They are everywhere. And uh, so we pulled up some and you can’t see the ad if you’re listening to this obviously, but if you see this ad, it’s a big picture of a gross spider looking thing that’s basically freaking people out in the community that they’re seeking with this. Well, it’s, it’s more of a manual. It’s a health outreach health service for the community by identifying this problem, right? I’m with, you know, I’m willing to help you. You just want to help. And you ran a corresponding radio ad with this. Yep.
01:10:08 Ah, that talked about, uh, the dust mites and how much a pillow ways from dust mite droppings.
01:10:17 And you had people in the middle of the night washing there.
01:10:20 We had one of our, uh, one of my youngest daughter’s friends’ moms woke her family up at midnight and washed all their bedding and wouldn’t let them sleep because she saw your newspaper ad the radio head. And then she phoned me the next day and, uh, and loudly, loudly explained how unhappy your family and you are a personality known in the community. You know, people know you and you list your, your dad’s hesitating, you’re nodding no way. Yeah. Cool. So once this e-commerce, you know, as you go down this e-commerce path, we’re going to have to bring you back on to see what you do here and how this all plays out. I mean, there’s a big opportunity over the next few years were like in the first inning of this whole opportunity. So I’m interested to see where you go with this just because with your marketing and business knowledge now apply to this form. It’s going to be interesting to see what you guys come up with. Well, you know what, uh, I have been extremely happy with Greg and Brian. They know their stuff guys.
01:11:13 Absolutely. Yeah. And the fact that they’re willing to share it the same as, as yourself and nick, you gained something and to be honest, that’s why I’m doing the podcast. I’ve gained so much from being associated with you guys and you’ve been such a huge motivator and uh, and, and part of the success that we’ve been able to achieve that, uh, you’d be able to give back and, and hopefully help somebody else. Uh, it makes sense for that we growing up, even like I grew up with these events, so it’s second nature for me to be like, oh, I’m going down to Toronto for this conference that everyone’s like, why are you, what, what is happening? But they just don’t understand the value of these things.
01:11:48 Cool. Very cool. That’s very kind of you both. I really, really appreciate that. And just, you know, I just want to say thank you for coming on here and sharing, you know, your properties that you’re purchasing up. There are some of the battles that you’re having with repairs and maintenance and some of the cash flow number just so it helps people here in Toronto understand perspective outside Ontario and what’s happening.
01:12:07 Well, and, and it’s not just New Liskeard I mean, no, this is in Sudbury or you landed in Kohlberg or you landed anywhere else. It’s all about learning the market, uh, and, and finding the opportunity. I’m one of the things that always amazed me is it’s a bit like putting on 3D glasses, um, or you know, those red-blue glasses and so you look out and you see what looks perfectly normal and you put on a different pair of glasses and all of a sudden the new image appears that wasn’t there, uh, in, in your, in your site before. It’s always there. You just couldn’t see it. And so it’s, it’s finding those filters. It’s picking up knowledge from wherever you can. It’s knowing your local marketplace. It’s understanding the key concepts. So how can you do a rent to own? They had been done In New Liskeard for years. they’re done in the GTA. It’s identifying how you can do that. It’s picking up how do you run a duplex? Being able to look out and say, okay, so here are the principles and how do I overlay that over my community and find the opportunities that spring up that I can now see. And if you don’t have that knowledge ahead of time, you look out, you don’t see the opportunity. Um, but it’s always there. You know, Darcy couldn’t, uh, I mean I tell people all the time and sometimes getting your information is like looking at something different. You get an advantage by new information, lets you see things differently. I never thought about that different perspective by looking at it through different things. And we all have to go make mistakes. Like I used to be scared of kind of making mistakes. Now I realized the more mistakes I make the fast start make them the sooner I’m getting to my end goal. So I’m all mistakes and you don’t have to make them again. ExActly. And we tell our team here at Rock Star were like, hey, go out and make mistakes. Try not to make the same mistake twice, but go out and make all the mistakes you can possibly make. And the faster you make them, the faster you’ll progress on your own journey, whether it’s your own personal life journey or your own development here at Rock Star. Right? So absolutely. Yeah. And, uh, and I know you have a. Yeah, we just talked about that. We were off the, off the podcast here. We talked about your experience with, uh, um, uh, Bellville. Was it coin to coin laundry, so that coin laundry experience, we, uh, we were living in Orangeville, I was working in Scarborough and it seemed like a brilliant. I was a genius too, uh, to buy an unattended coin laundry in Bellville because clearly how could you not make money at a coin laundry. I’ve been to all of those seminars and it is the golden when you learned about that, that was the passive income play right to that and vending machines. That’s right. And uh, so, uh, we bought it for $18,000 and we owned it for just under two years. Um, I lost money every single month. Uh, we hired people, uh, to, uh, to manage it and to repair the machines and to clean the coin laundry and uh, and that sometimes work great more often it didn’t. And, uh, at the end of it, it took us two years to sell it because they couldn’t find anyone willing to pay for it after six months.
01:14:57 And you were driving from Scarborough a once a week to collect? Yeah, I would, uh, I’d come to work in Scarborough, Scarborough at 4:00, drive to Bellville. We’ll get there around six or 6:30, collect the coin and then drive home and get home about midnight, 1230, go to bed, get up at 4:30 and back to work for an hour and a half in the wrong direction to drive five hours ago. So that I could collect less money than I had spent. It’s a learning experience, Darcy. That’s how we all do it. And that’s how we all do. but, uh, the, the, the kids loved it. They got to roll quarters. Uh, that was exciting. Our tenants usually paid in cash. And so that just became a, it’s a little weird, but, uh, my kids at the first of every month, they would lie on the floor and we would sprinkle them with a $20 bills and uh, they would have money fights in the middle of our living room floor. And Uh, and why were you sprinkling them with $20 bills? It was just the rent money that came in and they would run in and lie on the floor and have a money shower. And uh, and that was fun until one of them decided they would do it with rolls of quarters and, uh, and then it wasn’t as fun.
01:16:05 What happens in a family, right? At least splurge for the little. When you were wrapping those quarters, did you splurge for the ones that were those plastic wrappers that kind of measured itself and get the paper ones where you had to actually count it all up.
01:16:16 We just use the paper guys. Thank you so much. We’ve said thank you once again to say thank you twice, but to appreciate this. We’ll talk again soon. Hey everyone, it’s tom crowds again. So hopefully you enjoyed that. Darcy and Meaghan are just great people. They’re both of them sharing their insights into how they’re investing in Darcy, sharing his story, you know, it’s just a testament to the fact that you can basically make anything happen in life anywhere you are. I’m Darcy, just such a great guy. I feel like we’ve known him forever. Um, so we just want to thank him for how much he supported rockstar in what we’re doing here over the years. So, um, hopefully it took a lot of value from that. If you are listening to this and you want to check out some business building strategies for yourself, the next big thing that we’re hosting around business building is the rock star entrepreneur summit. You can check out all the details for that at rockstarinnercircle.com/summit. So it’s rockstarinnercircle.com/summit .That’s it for today. Until next time. Your life! Your terms!