Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everybody, it's Adrian Pinozzo here with the more to life real estate investing podcast, where we try and help and educate you to get more to life with the help of real estate investing. We are here again live at our EXP headquarters here in Hamilton. And very special guest, but before we get there, super excited to tell you this is season two. Sounds like a tv show. This is season two, episode six.
So super grateful to be this far with running this podcast and some great feedback. Remember, if you like the content, everything. I need that, please, like, below it obviously goes well for ratings and so on and so forth. So on that note, live here in Hamilton, we have.
Excuse me. We have Evan Ungar, who get this. We're going to cut it short, but we'll get into it. Two time Guinness World Record holder, a very savvy and well to do real estate investor, and CEO and entrepreneur who started Tuck Capital. Evan, welcome to the Morning Life. How are you?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you. I'm good. How are you? Thanks for having me.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Awesome, man. Good to see you. Good to see you. So I met this gentleman, I don't know, maybe, what, six months ago? It was before Christmas, wasn't it?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the event happened, like. Yeah, definitely last year, for sure.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Yeah. End of 2023 ish, give or take. So I meet this guy. We're at an investor meetup, and I start talking to Evan. And the more I talk to him, like, holy shit. Like, this guy's the real deal. He's got a ton of stuff going on. Very, very knowledgeable in the investor space, property space, so on and so forth. So why don't we get into it?
And I'm sure the audience will obviously mimic my feelings about your experience. But anyways, before we start talking real estate investor stuff, two time Guinness world record, everybody must ask. Tell us about that.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Yeah, everybody does ask.
It's a great icebreaker. I used to be in, like, the fitness industry, so I worked at a gym, ran personal training departments and whatnot there. So, you know, basically, the long story short of it is I have two Guinness World Records for the highest standing jump. So, you know the box jump is.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yeah, you put the boxes in.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So I have the Guinness world record for the highest box jump in the world, and I also have the record for the highest single leg jump in the world. Like, single leg box jump in the world as well.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Oh, neat. I didn't know they did that. Well, I know you do that, but.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: I didn't know there was a giving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, we were like, I had this guy at the gym who I worked with and we were very competitive and so we would always challenge each other to different things. And one day that thing was jumping. Box jumping. And so we started off, you know, adding and adding and adding. And then finally, by the time we got to, like, the tallest height we could do, there were, like, people around us clapping.
They were impressed. So afterwards we googled it and I was like, I'm a foot away from the record here, which is, like, a good amount of space, but I have the specialized knowledge to train for it. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna do that record. And a year later, I beat that record. And then the following year, I beat the single leg record, so.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: And how old were you when you beat that record?
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Oh, man, you're gonna date me now.
I was probably 26, maybe 2625-2627 somewhere in there.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Since then, I mean, I traveled all over jumping and had some crazy, crazy, like, excursions for jumping. Yeah. Flew to China to be on Alibaba's live event. Was on stage with Kobe Bryant and David Beckham. Yeah, that was fun.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: All because of this jumping.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: All because of this jumping. Yeah. They love these things on tv around the world. So I've been to Germany, Amsterdam, China, like, literally everywhere jumping. So had this, like, four year spurt of just, like, being on tv in different countries and it was a great time.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: So why don't we get into it? Let's talk about how all this started. Obviously, you're the founder, CEO of Tuck Capital, but let's back it up. So you're how old now?
[00:04:22] Speaker B: 32.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: When did you start this company, this business, real estate. Yada, yada, yada. Take us from the beginning, how it all evolved.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: So we started Tuck capital. I want to say it was like Tuck Capital, maybe 2017, 2018.
And my business partner and I, Jordan King, we had very like minded ambitions, goals and focus. And so we ended up getting together, starting this company, Tuck Capital. And it wasn't real estate related when we first started. So when we first started, we just. We both had a huge network and decided, okay, how can we help businesses or people that need, you know, startup money or growth money to find it for people who have it? So we started consulting in that space and we did, you know, did some good deals in that space. And then someone approached us and said, hey, you know, I need a second mortgage and I'll give you this interest rate for it. Wow, we'll do your loan. We don't need to sort of say, we'll do this loan for you. That was really the first time we had really looked into, like, real estate as an investment. We both owned properties, we both had an extra property, but not as like this, like, business. Right. It was more just like, we know we should buy real estate anyway. So we do the second mortgage. This guy we see, he's making money and we're looking at like, how are you making money? And we're charging you this much. Interesting. That's kind of what we looked at. Right, right. And so we said to him, okay, you know what? Teach us what you're doing. So that's where we learned the burr model from and kind of took off from there. And then Jordan and I decided, you know, we're going to do this on our own, and opened up tough developments. And that's kind of where we do the majority of our real estate. And just started growing aggressively and then opened up choice renovations canada full scale construction company, and then ended up integrating our own property management company called Leso. So we're fully vertically integrated and just press it forward as hard as we can.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Amazing. Sounds very familiar to my story with the different verticals, but all under one roof.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Tell me, tell me.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah. So we did the same kind of thing.
I started investing full time in 2017, part time before that, when I was a police officer. And anyways, I left in 2017, started doing this full time, and then the different verticals evolved because, you know, we were aggressively growing as well, rather than outsourcing all this other work side to the whole Brrrr model with the construction and the property management, we thought, well, nobody's going to care more about our stuff than us.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: That's exactly it. That's exactly it.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: So why not keep it in house where we can control it and have peace of mind who we have working on our projects.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: I agree.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: So that was the mindset. So very similar with the different verticals like you described.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: I think once you get to like a certain scale, and more importantly than scale is once you get to a certain understanding where you actually are able to make the high level decisions on those areas of real estate. That's kind of when you bring the in house, right? You still have to be educated in those spaces. You're gonna hire great people, people better than ourselves. But we still have to be educated enough to make those final, bigger decisions and still have to have the scale of our portfolios large enough to warrant having these companies. Otherwise, you're just managing a lot of stuff for no reason.
Why did you get into real estate investing full time outside of being a police officer?
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Things went well with my initial first acquisitions.
There was no joint ventures involved in those ones. So my wife and I leveraged a heloc.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Used that to start. So we bought our first two or three leveraging at HELOC. And now this is probably 14 years ago when I bought my first one. Things went well with those properties. And as much as I loved being a police officer, and I really, really did, amazing, amazing career and experience, I wanted more to life. Hence the podcast meme.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Follow like and subscribe.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Right. I wanted more to life. And as much as I loved real estate policing, it wasn't going to give me the freedom. Not even so much financial freedom, but time free for sure is why I continued to aggressively grow in that space. And then ultimately, financially, I was able to leave after 21 years.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Wow, amazing.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: So I completed 21 years. So I left nine years early because most guys stayed put in their 30, get their full pension and whatnot. So I left nine years early and never looked back.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: You look like you're enjoying and doing very, very well.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: So, knock on wood, it's gone. Well, obviously, having the one stop shop has helped us as well, for sure. But this is about you. So let's get back to you. You start this construction company, property management company. And what kind of acquisitions would you say, you know, tuck focuses on?
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Yeah, we focus on value add.
Excuse me. So we do follow the burr model. It's our favorite. We've done plenty of flips. We're not the biggest fan of buy and hold because we just don't feel it will stretch us or our ability to scale.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Like buying turnkey.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Yeah, buying Turnkey. I mean, like eventually we'll get to the point where buying turnkey fits into our model.
But we're fully self funded. Just Jordan and myself growing this portfolio. We're finally starting to open the door to other opportunities.
But we were playing with all of our own money.
We need to make every dollar count. And so try scaling a portfolio. You have to be able to recycle the money over and over. So the burp model was most attractive. And value added is kind of where we landed. Now we've got amazing partnerships with publicly traded companies that we work with and we do their acquisitions for them. So they approached us a few years ago. We worked with a few different companies and groups and they know we have a great funnel. We're well connected. We can do the renovations and development for them. So they come to us when they're looking to acquire. So not only do we acquire for ourselves, but we actually provide this full term key model for larger groups. And then we do it for smaller people, too, but larger groups, especially in.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: A joint venture structure or straight consulting. Slash what kind of structure is that?
[00:11:07] Speaker B: It depends. It depends what we're doing and the level of involvement needed. We're working on some really, really cool built to rent developments right now that will be in a joint venture structure. There are really large projects for me anyways. They're really large. We're working on one east of Toronto. It'll be 156 townhomes, and then we're going to duplex all of them. So they're not built yet. So we're working with the city to get those duplexes.
156 times two. Yeah. So, yeah, we're going to be doing a lot of townhomes there. And then we were working on one up north in Barry. I mean up north, I say north. So those ones. Those ones will be joint venture, but on the smaller acquisitions, like a couple properties here and there, or they're looking for, like, just single family homes in this type of single family home, we'll just do that on a consulting basis.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: So let's say I'm an investor, hypothetically, I listen to this podcast. I want to reach out and talk to you and whatnot. And I say, hey, Evan, I'd love to get a value add six flex.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: But I don't want to deal with anything, and I just. I don't want to join venture. Yeah, we'll do it.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Turnkey from start to finish. So we'll source the property.
We'll help you get financing in place dependent on your structure. If it's a joint venture, we'll take care of all the financing. If it's not, we'll let you kind of go from there. Or we can help create that.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: You'll facilitate all the renovations, all the.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: Renovations, all the permitting, all that stuff. All that stuff gets taken care of, and then we can even help in the lease up and tenancy as well.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Fill the place up with new tenants. What do you do with.
Obviously, it's an experience that everybody has to go through if they're going to enter the apartment building space. The legacy tenants. Do you guys negotiate cash for keys?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So we'll help start to finish. Start to finish. We'll do it. Yeah. So we have a great legal team we work with.
I personally am not going into the building doing cash. Rookies definitely have had those conversations in the past, but I think when you sit down with someone, a paralegal or a lawyer, people take it much more seriously. It's always good to have those person to person conversations first, but when you get to larger apartment buildings, send the professionals in for sure. So we have that team incorporated into our turnkey solution.
And the townhomes, I couldn't remember townhomes. 256 townhomes being duplex. So 512 units.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: That is a massive.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: It's the biggest project that we've taken on or even considered to date. So we're progressing on it and we'll see where it goes, but it's promising.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: Nice. So do you have, like, a head office, a building, or where do you guys operate? Tuck capital from?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: So we're fully remote. Jordan loves being home with his family.
Same here. It just gives us the most flexibility. So you get to come to beautiful offices like yours. Right.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: But you're. You're fully integrated regardless, correct?
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Correct. And you.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: So you guys are both running this massive operation, and then obviously you must have your own staff underneath you guys and do what you need to do.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Do you particularly focus on any cities or wherever the best deal comes around? Like, are you. I guess, are you geographically, can you do a project in London and then six months later do a project in Niagara Falls?
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. And we do that. Currently, we're in eight cities right now.
So, yeah.
Technology is a beautiful thing, right? Yeah, definitely helps with that aspect. We love the Niagara region, like in Hamilton, two of our favorite places to be, I would say up north as well. Sault Ste. Marie. We're heavily invested up there too.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: So.
So I asked this to everybody, and I'm not sticking to the questions. That's that I've written down. I just, like, I like to let the conversation flow.
So you used to be a personal trainer in your twenties, win the Guinness world record for jumping.
And obviously you start, call it fluke or just right place, right time, opportunities come around with some lending, segueing into what's the brrrr all about? And you're starting to get into this real estate investing thing.
Did you ever think that if you closed your eyes and think, okay, I'm gonna fast forward and let's say I'm 28, I'm 32 now, did you ever think in four years you would undergone the growth that you guys, like, where here it comes back to, you know, dream big, think big.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Talk about that. Like, how has that affected you and your.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: It's a great question. I think it's really interesting to be able to give you an answer to that. Because, like, when I first go to answer that, I would say, no, no, I never would have imagined it.
But then I can't. I never would have imagined necessarily this exact setup.
But when I look back and I think about it, like, Jordan. Jordan has huge.
Jordan's vision is massive. Just huge.
And so when him and I get together, we have these ridiculously big goals that we plan and big, big vision. So I would almost tell you, yeah, everything we have is based on the goals we've set and the vision that we created. But could I actually fathom, like, having all these different companies that are integrated and networking with the type of people that I'm networking with now? No. Probably wouldn't have seen it like that. So it's quite exciting. I'm very grateful every day. I mean, I'm very stressed every day, too.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: Been there, done that.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, you gotta balance your stress with gratitude and keep focused on your goals.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: I like that. Balance your stress with gratitude. That's amazing. I've never heard that before. I need to learn how to do that because, yeah, I mean, we all see what happens above the water, but nobody sees what's happened. You know, behind the scenes, off social media, you know, all the bullshit you deal with, it's the day to day, it's nonstop.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Social media plays a huge trick on people. Right. And that's, like, some of the advice I give new investors. Reach out to us all the time. I want to buy this property. I want to buy this one. Like, okay, cool. Have you thought of this?
I got just enough money for this. I was like, okay, well, just enough money in real estate will never work. So you need money for rainy days and all the things that go wrong with real estate. So I try and tell people the horror stories, not to scare them off, but to prepare them for anything and be more resilient. Right. But, yeah, it's stressful. I mean, just like anything is stressful, right? But in real estate, you're not often trading your time for money. You're in real estate investing. You're doing exactly that. You're trading money for money. And so you have a lot of money on the line when you're doing these deals. You buy a property, you got a hundred thousand dollars renovation budget, plus your down payment. Or buy an apartment building, you got a million dollar renovation. So it's stressful, right? But in the end, it's exciting, it's amazing, and it's definitely worth it. Yeah.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Because we all know historically, the longer you hold real estate.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: You can't lose.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: That's right. Hold something, hold real estate for ten years. You're winning.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: I know we're in a bit of a rocky, and hopefully we're at the end of this rocky interest rate world. I think we're coming close to the end. I hope the end, realistically, is around the corner. I think we've gotten through the bulk of it. Is that fair to say?
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I think.
I would hope so.
And I also think that we went through the worst season with the highest interest rates. So I'm hoping now we're coming into spring market, summer and some interest rate drops, hopefully. Fingers crossed. So, yeah, I think we're through the thick of it.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Thank God. So have you got into any. Well, you talking about this place in the east end of. To all these townhouses, duplexes that you're building? Have you actually gone into building yet, like performed a build as of yet or is this gonna be a. This will be getting your feet wet with a 500?
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we won't build it ourselves, obviously, like something that big. We don't wanna. We wanna learn and grow, but we wanna do it smart. Right. So we'll partner with the builder and we're already partnering with that developer on it, so we'll be co building and developing. We'll come in with our expertise as well. But yeah, we've done some infill. We've done some like, full tear downs.
We're starting to poke our head into the Toronto market, you know, for like the infill on the four units to get access to MHC. But for the most part, we really started with like the value add renovations. We'll tear a roof off and add a story for, you know, put something in the side or the back to add units or basement conversions. So that was kind of our bread and butter. And now as we grow, we're growing into more multi, like bigger multifamily apartment buildings.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: We're working on stabilizing them, renovating them, refinancing.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. Hoping to this year, I think we'll make our move into the Alberta market.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: So I've heard some good things about the Alberta market. Just the landlord tenant laws here are terrible.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Wild. Yeah, wild. And, you know, it's like, this is stressful enough.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: You throw the tenants in the mix and it's like, you know, I want my priority to be providing the best, providing the best home and experience for the tenants. That that's what I want my priority to be. I don't want my priority to be constantly worried about if the tenant is going to screw me or not. You know what I mean? It really puts you on two sides of the fence. Like this is, they divided us instead of having us work together. And so you're one small thing. The tenant decides they're not paying. It's like, well, there goes a year of rent and any damage they decide to do. So I don't want to be in that situation. I want to be in a giving situation where I'm giving them everything and they're giving me everything and we work.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Together and most landlords, that's all they want.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: That's all they want.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: We want to provide good homes, good units, new, renovated, you know, beautiful units, just respect the space, pay your rent, stay the term of your lease and then leave if you want or stay longer. But it's, it's almost like, you know how backwards it is here in Ontario. It's almost like a sense of entitlement for the tenants, the way it's kind of shifted.
[00:22:13] Speaker B: Yeah. They're doing it as a human. Right.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: So now, you know, I don't know, you can walk into a grocery store and you can take, you can steal a candy bar and get put in handcuffs for it, but you come in and you steal twelve months worth of rent while your landlord's paying a mortgage.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands. Yeah, easily, easily.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: We just had a case that we won.
It'll break 50 grand in damages and lost rental. This is like when I tell you it's stressful, it's stressful.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Right. But, you know, and they could care less.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: They don't care less. They're on to the next.
They're on to the next. That's what it is. So, you know, hopefully in due time there'll be some kind of. I actually don't mind the landlord tenant board process.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: I think that it's there for a reason and it would work well, even though there's a lot of hoops to jump through. Like you make one wrong error on the address or the misspelling of the name and it's garbage, but it's just the time it takes to get there. That's really.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: If they turn these over in two, three weeks, even in 30 days.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, why not?
[00:23:21] Speaker B: Let's do it. But a year later, it's like.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It's nonsense. So you mentioned you're now in the space of a network with some trading companies and whatnot. How did that come about?
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Yeah, so one of our, my business partner in choice renovations has a family member who is working at one of these companies. And so they were looking to begin acquiring buildings, buildings, homes, etcetera, based on specific criteria. So he reached out to his cousin, said, hey, you know anything about this? What are you guys doing here? And then put two or two together.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Connect the dots.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Connected the dots. And it just started growing. So we do a lot of renovations for them on assets they've already owned or continuing to purchase through choice Renovations Canada. And, yeah, we've done some amazing turnkey acquisitions. Value add acquisitions.
Really cool.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Do you like joint venturing?
That's kind of a two ply question.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: What are your feelings about joint ventures?
[00:24:34] Speaker B: We have one joint venture. I know. I guess we have two now.
I love the idea of not only providing value in real estate, but providing value to people.
Very people driven. So when I have the opportunity to come together with someone and they have value for me and I get to do all this for them, yeah, it makes me happy. It's good. I think there's pros and cons of every type of business venture, and I think joint ventures are a great way to scale. I think where people go wrong on joint ventures, personal opinion only is like, their utilization of joint ventures isn't always just for cash. It's also for like, getting approved for financing. And I think in southern Ontario, you have to be very, very careful with this because the numbers work out really well when you're burring out in terms of comparison approach, but they don't work at all in terms of, like, cash flow. So very easy to find someone and be like, we're going to duplex this house in Hamilton, and on completion, it's going to be worth $750,000. And we're buying it for 400, and we're putting 150 in. And then, you know, so our all in cost is 80% of the after repair. So we get all our money out. It's like, okay, great. Are you approved? Yeah, I'm approved. And then you get all your money out and the property loses money every month. Right. And so I think exit strategy in joint ventures is really, really important, especially, I mean, for both sides, so.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah, there's pros and cons for sure. We, obviously, my business model has really grown because of, or I guess our portfolio has really aggressively grown thanks to joint ventures. And we've really honed the whole partnership program and everything like that within the GW group of companies, but, yeah, absolutely. There's pros and cons. There's good days and bad days, of course.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: How many joint ventures you have?
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Probably 80.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: 80 joint ventures. You just do, like a couple properties per joint venture?
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Yeah, some. Most of the time, they'll rent some, repeat their capital to the next one.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Oh, multifamily.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Yeah, we're at like $445 now. That's amazing. Through joint ventures.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Yeah, sure, yeah. So they bring the capital, you do.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: Everything else, and then we'll take either 40, 50 points on the shares of it. Yeah, sure, yeah.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: And then.
And then on your. On your. On your joint venture, on the exit. So are you. Are you commercially financing these?
[00:27:22] Speaker A: Well, we pivoted once. Rapes went through the roof and everything, because our bread and butter was historically triplex. Four plex.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: Four plexes are the sweetest lot. We are obsessed with four plexes.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: I know.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: We love them.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: I know. I love them. And then fucking rates went where they were. We burrow everything, too. So we started to pivot probably about a year and a half. Two years ago, we started to pivot into the smaller apartment building space.
So as of the last two years, it's all been 6810, 1520 unit buildings, jvs. And that has allowed us to, obviously, the scale as well. It's been great. And obviously, with the CMHC incentives, MLI, we're getting our 50 year amps.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: That's amazing.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: 95% LTV.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: It's great. So lower interest rate.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I like this one. Leading a company off often involves making tough decisions.
I should say various companies.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: Can you share a specific challenge you faced as a CEO?
And we talked a little bit about the stress that comes. It's not all glory, but can you think of a specific example you face as a CEO on one of your companies and how you navigated it, demonstrating your leadership style?
[00:28:50] Speaker B: That's a great question.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: I asked that because, you know what's funny? You probably, when you're put on the spot, you're like, okay, I know.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Which one should I say? This or that?
[00:29:02] Speaker A: If you were sitting at home right now, you know, chilled and relaxed, you probably have a hundred. Right. Day to day, you'd probably go through.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Yeah, we go through this every day.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: Yeah, you probably go through problems every day that you solve, but you're always trying to think, what's a great example? You know, keep it simple.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I think.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Is it staffing? Is it.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: I think it's gonna be systems.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Systems, yeah, we love our systems.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: I don't know how much. When it comes to my leadership style, I often try to determine, is this a person problem or a system problem? Right. And can I give you a perfect example? I'm trying to think outside the box here, but originally, when we started our property management company, you know, there was. Property management is a lot of moving parts, a lot. And we had people managing everything, and there was a lot of repetition, and people were starting to stumble on the repetition for no reason. So you kind of sit back and you look at, like other people in the company may have said, this person's messing up. They gotta go. Whatever it may be, you wanna be able to step back and look at it and say, have I done everything I possibly could before I make a dramatic or a serious decision, good or bad, before I purchased this? Have I done all my due diligence before I let someone go? Have I done everything I could to help them? So kind of step back and look at and say, okay, we need to implement, like, a large software system into this company. And so in our very early days, ended up making that change, and that person, to this day, is thriving. So I think that's a positive one.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: What was that thing you said? It's either a person problem.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Yeah. It's either a people problem or a systems problem. You have to look, and I think that's a decision you have to make right away. What is this? Is this a person issue or is this a systems issue? And then from there, you can kind of dissect it and break the problem down and make your decisions on what to do next.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Nice. I couldn't agree more. Systems can save a ton of time and a ton of money and a ton of headaches.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: It's obviously spending the money and getting the right system in place at the onset. Yeah, yeah. Cause you could spin your wheels, and then all of a sudden somebody says, hey, did you know this app, it's called da da da da?
[00:31:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: This could totally take care of all that bullshit that you're dealing with.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: And it happens all the time. It still happens to this day, people. That's why I love speaking with like minded people. Right. Everyone has a system or a software that they love. And so even as recently as we use VoIp phones for a lot of our systems, we were using, like, uma for a while, this. This business system. And I don't know if it was a year ago or eight months ago or whatever, but someone. Someone had mentioned openphone I found open phone. I was like, this is incredible. Like, this VoIP phone system is the best one I've ever used, and now I recommend it to everybody. So we have openphone, and you can add, like, whatever line it actually looks like. Like WhatsApp? Yeah, its system looks just like WhatsApp. So it's very user friendly, very easy to use. You can. Multiple people can see the text conversations going on with anybody, and then you can even comment and, like, tag your coworkers, like, on a text that came through. So say someone texts in, something's broken in the property management whatever, and it's like, something broke. We can comment on that, saying, hey, can you handle this? Or, hey, send out this guy instead of this one. It's on the actual message that came in, but the tenant can't see it, so there's so many. I'll go on for days. Yeah, there's some great features, and it's software like that that continues to be amazing tools and systems to help us scale.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: So you need systems to scale. That's 100%.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah, we used to go by, or still go by.
It only works if you can duplicate it.
That's what we go by. So if it can't be duplicated, it's not a system. You have to be able to be able to duplicate it over and over and over.
[00:33:09] Speaker A: Second last question. Where do you see so, obviously you've been successful these last few years, growing an incredible business, so on and so forth. Where do you see yourself? Let's fast forward talk five years from now.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Sky's the limit. Or I'm going to scale back and retire and go down south.
[00:33:36] Speaker B: Definitely going to have. Definitely going to be in warmer weather for the majority of the year, for sure. This has been in my vision for a long time, so I'll definitely be there. I don't know where south think in Mexico. I really like Mexico, so I spent a bunch of time there already.
I like it a lot.
But in terms of tuck, I see us, our renovations company, we want to take it national. This is a huge goal of ours. So we want to actually break out of Ontario and grow this across multiple provinces. So this is a really big goal of ours, and we're already pushing the boundaries there. So it's going to be really exciting.
You know, our holdings, sky's the limit. We're really, really excited to grow our holdings. Probably break into the states in a few years as well. So Alberta, first couple other provinces here, and then eventually the states.
We have some crazy goals that we want to house a lot of people, and that's how we focus on it. We don't want to focus on how many doors, how many families can we create these homes for. And we want to be known for it. We want to be like, I want to. I want to live in a tuck house. So it's exciting. We have some. Some big vision and some good motivation to go with it. So, yeah, we're excited.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Amazing.
Last question, similar to the title of our podcast.
So when Evan thinks about or he closes his eyes and he pictures more to life, is there more to life for Evan? And when you think about it, what do you see? What's more to life for Evan?
[00:35:23] Speaker B: I think more to life is spending quality, uncapped time with the people I love and care for and being able to provide similar opportunity to others and have a deep, deep rooted why with it, and, like, this vision that I can. I can smell and taste. So, yeah, it's exciting.
And there's. There's definitely more to life. You know, real estate is just a vehicle.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: Right. Just like being in the fitness industry or police officer.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:04] Speaker B: Real estate, it's a vehicle to achieve freedom.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: So I think that freedom is what we're all seeking. Freedom and quality of life.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: Amazing. And that speaks volumes to your character that you say that, you know, more to life would be spending quality time, essentially, with the people that you love and mean a lot to you, obviously, family and close friends or whatnot. But that's amazing. And it speaks volumes to your character that I've heard people, you know, we've interviewed guests that from that extreme to, well, more to life, to me, is owning my own jet. Like grant cardone. Yeah, that's more to life for me to be able to fly anywhere I want and have my own private pilot and stuff. We've had that, too. More to life, for me is being able to spend great, quality time with people that I love.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: And, hey, I'm not saying there's not a jet on my vision board right now.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: I'm just saying maybe it gets me to my family faster.
Money is just a vehicle, and I think that's really important.
We do a lot of goal setting for investors that come and see us, and part of that is really understanding, what do you really want the money for? What do you need the jet for? Why do you want the jet? What is it after the jet? Because if it's just money, you know, there's going to be crazy, stressful days, and money's not getting out of bed and, like, you, you gotta find out what the end result is. So if you had a billion dollars right now, what would you do with it? Like, that's kind of where we go. And so you really find people's, like, deep reasons and you plan their goals based on that.
[00:37:46] Speaker A: So amazing.
Well, listen, thank you again for being on the podcast.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Thanks for having me. Amazing.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: Another awesome guest here in season two of the mortal life real estate investing podcast. Evan, you're on your way to some really big great things. Congratulations on your success.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: It's glad. I'm so happy when we see people come to the show that been in the trenches like you and started as a personal trainer to now, you know, getting your hands into a 500 unit development project and everything else that you got going on.
Congratulations.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Thank you for being with us.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: Cheers, brother. Cheers.
