| The company has shown great growth in the past year and continues to run like a well-oiled machine, in spite of the fact that we are dealing with a much higher vacancy rate and a slower real estate market. We have to work really hard to retain every tenant/client. Outstanding customer service and a lot more tolerance is our new mantra, and it’s working. We are very pleased with the ease at which the office operates these days in spite of the fact that the current market conditions have created more difficult scenarios than in the past. Tenants tend to misbehave alot more when they know they have many other rental options out there. The Current Regina Real Estate/Rental market for those of you who are interested Prices of homes are still down about 6 or 7% from 2014 and only about 50% of all listings will sell, but the overall number of firm sales remains constant at about 275 sales per year. The amount of construction of new homes being built in the past 4 to 5 years has thrown our market a little out of whack but it’s slowly being filled by inmigration. It’s currently a buyer’s market and there are some good deals to be found. However, what we know for sure is that the Regina real estate market will continue to increase at its usual gradual and positive pace over the next several years, as it always has done. Regina House Price Comparison From Janurary, 2000 to May, 2016. Average Sale Price went from about $85,000 to about $300,000. Over the past 12 years, the number of firm sales has remained constant in Regina at about 275-300 houses per year, but the number of listings has almost doubled from an average of about 300 listings in 2004 to about 500 listings in 2016. This is the recipe for a buyer’s market! Buy and Hold vs. Cash is King? We sold a 30-unit building plus the duplex next to it in Winnipeg in June. This is a huge step for our team! We are so ‘old-school’ in our thinking that we always believed we would own all of our investments for the rest of our lives, passing them down to our children who would also own them for rest of their lives. I would debate anybody on ‘Buy and Hold vs. Cash is King’ – especially these newer investors who focus more on creating cash-flow rather than sacrificing and supplementing the project for long-term wealth! We felt like it was SO hard to gain momentum in real estate. Every mortgage was like a touchdown; a huge score, so it just seemed counter-productive to ever sell anything. One of my favorite books of all time “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck is a heart-wrenching story of a poor, young couple in the early 1900’s in China who built an empire of land and wealth. I think every investor should read this piece of fictional literature as food for thought. It seems as if new-age investors these days seem to want to get rich faster and enjoy the fruits of their labor along the way. They invest for cash into their pockets. This is such a bizarre concept to us. We bought because we believed in the basic principles of mortgage pay-down, moderate to slow appreciation over time and to be wealthy after 20+ years. It’s been great having Taylor around who isn’t at all afraid to sell and move onto the next interesting project. He is always thinking about the upside and the cash-flow, and optimizing his money at work: PUT THE MONEY TO WORK, NOT THE INVESTOR: unlike us, who seem to believe MORE WORK, MORE MONEY EVENTUALLY! We are slowly changing our philosophy and have down-sized our work load a little and are starting to accept the idea that CASH IS KING! It’s a work in progress in our heads but we are starting to see that sometimes LESS IS MORE and selling can be a good for the soul and for the pocket book. A couple little tricks I use to mentor and teach our teenage kids about business I bought the box set of Anthony Robbins CD’s: “Unleash the Power Within”, copied them onto my phone and listened to all 6 CD’s several times over (while walking). I’d never really listened to Anthony Robbins before. I found his stories compelling and super motivating. I especially loved his short little real-life stories about perseverance, making changes in your life, or taking action. Now, as to be expected, our teenage kids aren’t that ‘into’ learning life lessons listening to self-help CD’s, so what I do is record short, little stories on the Voice Memo feature on my cell phone and then text them to my kids. What I have found is that they will always listen to these stories if they are short and arrive as a text. The coolest thing happened the other day when my daughter texted me back, a week after I had sent her one of these stories; ‘Heh Mom, can you please text me that last voice- message-text again. I want to show it to my friend’. Apparently kids do listen and learn, even though they don’t always show any tangible response. Our kids constantly get free business coaching from us – and they don’t even know it’s happening! The other day my son was going out the door to his part time job at a bistro-café wearing new, but ripped jeans with the knees shredded out of them. I strongly warned him that we would send him home to change his pants if he arrived at our restaurant looking like that, so he reluctantly changed into non-shredded pants. As he was going out the door I yelled after him… “Bye. Have a good day, and don’t forget, the person with the most energy wins!” When he came home that night, he said “You’re right Mom. The person with the most energy DOES win. They had a draw after work for free movie tickets and I won!” 🙂 Hmmmm! Not exactly what I meant, but it’ll do for now! I bought a Fitbit in May and logged about 70 km of brisk walking per week Paulo and I have always been long-distance walkers but this crazy little gadget is like wearing your own personal trainer on your wrist every day. Being held accountable and knowing the truth about how many steps you actually took that day is an amazing psychological motivator. I got rid of those few extra pounds that I put over the past 6 months and feel happy I can get into my favorite jeans again. It’s easy to avoid jeans when you live in a hot country for the winter, but it’s a reality-check when you come back in April looking forward to the crispy, cool Saskatchewan air and your favorite jeans, only to find that they are too tight! I love my little Fitbit. It’s a great little accountability tool! Until next time, Happy Investing and Many Blessings folks! by Kathy Berner July 2016 |
