Why Invest In US Real Estate? US vs Canada Market

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Summary – Transcript

Once upon a time I did. Now I do all my investing in the United States. Quite often people say, “Well, wouldn’t it be easier to invest close to home,” or, “Why would you go to all the trouble investing south of the border?” So, I’m going to tell you not only why I do it, but why … I can’t even speak, but why you should do that too. I’m speechless. So, there are a number of reasons. One, yes, absolutely, it would be so much easier to invest close to home.

It’s easier to invest in your own backyard, but the goal of having a successful real estate business, or any business, is it for it to be easy. The goal is for it to be profitable and successful, and hopefully create a lifestyle for you where you don’t have to work anymore. The goal of real estate in my opinion, should be pretty passive income, so you can create freedom for yourself, so you don’t have to do the things that you don’t want to do, and you get to do things that light you up, make a difference, and that are fulfilling and make you happy. So, yes, it would be way easier to invest in my own backyard. Just like it would be way easier to set up a lemonade stand as opposed to owning Apple.

If had a choice between the two and I was going for the easy path, I’d set up a lemonade stand and I would pray … You’re only going to get so far in life having a lemonade stand. If you own a successful company, which is what everybody should do. If you’re getting into real estate, you’re creating a business for yourself, and the goal of that business is for it to be successful, so that you don’t have to work so hard. Anyway, yes, it’s the easy, easy is not what we’re looking for. And, by the way, it is easier to invest in the US anyway, so we’re going to get to that in a minute. But, so the number one thing is in Canada, we have something called the Privacy of Information Act, and the Privacy of Information Act basically says that you can’t just go publishing information about people.

You can’t make a, I can’t just go put a list online of a whole bunch of people getting divorced or in foreclosure or whatever the case may be, whatever their distressed situation may be. For those of you who follow me and have worked with me, or if you’re in my inner circle, you know that one of the things that I teach and that I preach is that we are not real estate investors. We are problem solvers, and there’s a whole bunch of people out there, especially now that there’s, with this COVID pandemic, there’s a lot of people in trouble that need us to help them. Some of them have lost their jobs. They’ve lost their businesses. They’re starting over. People are going through a lot of transition and transformation right now, and they need problem solvers like us to go and help them.

Now, in return for solving their problems, we get paid. We create a win-win. If we can create a win for them, and we can also create a win for ourselves, then we get further ahead. Now, in Canada, as I mentioned, we have the Privacy of Information Act, which makes it very difficult to get access to lists of people that are in trouble and in the US, it’s the opposite. They have, instead of the Privacy of Information, they have the Freedom of Information Act. The Freedom of Information act basically allows people to publish massive lists. For example, there’s foreclosures that take place all the time, and I can access these lists online. There’s also software. If I’m trying to find people in trouble, there is software that will allow me to find people that are going through divorce. I can target people over a certain age or under a certain age.

I can target people that paid cash for their homes. I can get access to a lot of information that I could not possibly get access to in Canada. Now, that’s not to say you absolutely can’t do real estate in Canada. You certainly can. There’s ways to do it. It’s a lot more work. It’s a lot more difficult to find these people in trouble, and it’s just a lot of red tape. So, as a human being, I’m not totally 100% happy with what happens in the US. I don’t necessarily think everything should be public domain. However, as a real estate investor, I am glad that I can get ahold of these people that need my help, come up with a solution for them, create a win for them and get paid for it. So, number one reason that I love the US is the access to information, and there’s so much, there’s so many different things that go on every month where lists are created.

For example, these auctions that I love to go to, which creates a second thing, and that’s, there’s certain strategies that work in the United States that don’t exist in Canada. Now, one of them, and many of you who follow me know this is one of my favorite strategies is something called tax deed. Now, what a tax deed is when people haven’t paid their property taxes in a number of years, eventually the county needs to put their homes up on the auction block because they need this money for their hospitals and their police force to keep their, for the roads. All of these things are paid for through property taxes. So, eventually the county’s going to put these homes up on the auction block, and I’ve had some of my students pick up single family homes in Houston, Texas, is my favorite place to do this strategy.

They pick up single-family homes for $7,000, $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 that are worth 10, 15, 20 times that. So, these auctions … there are auctions by the way, that do take place in Canada. They’re very, very infrequent and quite often, because there’s so few of them and people get excited, they see the word auction and they think everything’s a good deal, these homes get bid up. I literally don’t know one single Canadian who’s ever picked up a good deal at an auction in Canada. Now, I’m not saying it’s never happened. I’m just saying, I don’t know, and I know a lot of real estate investors, I don’t know a single person in Canada that’s ever gone to an auction and picked up a deal that they went and made a paycheck on.

So, there’s certain strategies that work in the US that don’t work in Canada. That’s one of them. Tack fees, that’s other one. One of my favorites is also something called overages. Now, if we go back to talking about this auction for a second, let’s say the opening bid on a property, the opening bid is going to be whatever the back taxes are, and sometimes they’ll add in some legal fees. So, let’s say the opening bid was $5,000 on a home, and it ended up selling for 50,000. Well, that first $5,000, that belongs to the county fair and square. That’s where the back taxes. The additional 45,000, that’s what’s called an overage, and that that money actually belongs to the previous homeowner. And most previous homeowners have no idea this money is owed to them.

The county makes very little attempt to track them down, because they get to keep this money as part of their slush fund. There’s a statute of limitations, and once that statute of limitations runs out, the county gets to keep that money and they can do whatever they want with it. So, a great strategy, and this is perfect for people that have, if you’re watching this video right now, and you have very little money, and you’re thinking, man, I want to get into real estate investing, but I’ve got very little cash. Well, a great strategy is to go find these people, track them down and say, “Listen, I know somebody owes you $45,000. If you’re willing to split it with me,” and you can negotiate whatever you’re going to split,

You can take 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% of that money, and you can offer to help them get that cash and keep a portion of it. Now, you got to remember, these people just lost their home over a very small amount of money, and you’re creating a big win for them because they no longer, they’ve lost that home. Chances are $45,000, even even if they got 70% of that, that’s going to be a game-changer for them. That might mean the difference between living on the streets and being able to afford rent and have a place to live. So, it’s a great win-win strategy. Once again, this information is published publicly and you can get access to it and you can track down these people and help them recover this money.

Or, if you’re really heart-centered and you’re saying, “Oh, well, these poor people, I just want to give them the money. I don’t even want to take part of it,” you can do that too. You can go to the auction, make your money that way, flipping homes, and as a give-back project donate some of your proceeds or some of your time to tracking down these people and helping reunite them with this capital that’s owed to them. So, there are just a lot of different ways to make money in the US that don’t exist in Canada. Then, also, on top of that, as if we need more reasons, in every Canadian market that I’m aware of, the home prices are ridiculous right now. I mean, a starter home in Vancouver, 1 million bucks for a piece of crap starter that you want to bulldoze. In Toronto, $700,000, $800,000 for … Anyway, these prices are ridiculous.

Calgary, where I’m from, which is in a slump financially, the pipeline’s been canceled and oil is not doing very well. Yet, people are fighting over homes right now. It’s totally ridiculous. Now, I don’t want to make it sound like every market in the US is priced well. Certainly, California is not. New York, there’s a lot of markets that don’t make sense, but there’s a ton of markets that do make sense. One of my favorites is Atlanta, Georgia. Many of you know that I sell turnkey properties there. So, these are properties that I bought, I fixed, I put tenants in place. My property management team is looking after them, and we sell these to investors all over the world. The average house price that I’m selling a home for is around $150,000.

They started around 80 or 90,000, and in any market in Canada that doesn’t even get you a shed. So, when you just look at the sheer numbers, when you look at also the return on investment, how much rent you’re going to get relative to how much you have to pay to get the property, what the cashflow looks like, there’s so many reasons why I love investing in the US, and I would love to be able to invest in my own country, but it just that, the numbers just don’t make any sense. So, these are some of many, many reasons why I prefer investing south of the border. If you’re a Canadian watching this right now, I recommend that you learn how to do that too. You’ll most likely see much better returns than what you’re used to, and that’s one of the things I specialize in. Whether you’re American, Canadian, where you’re living, no matter where you’re living on this planet, I’ve got a free gift for you.

I’ve got an ebook which outlines a top strategy that you can do right now, even if you have little or no capital. I talk about things such as the tax fee, and the overages, and a whole bunch of other strategies that you can do right now. I know so many people are going through tough times. COVID took away a lot of jobs, shut down a lot of people’s businesses, and so I created this free ebook that’s going to outline some of the things that you can be doing right now to get started in real estate, no matter where you live. Some of these will work in Canada, by the way. All these will work in the US and no matter what country you live in, a lot of these strategies will work for you.

So, I hope you found this helpful. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel so you get all my latest videos, all my new content as I create it. Please give us a like, because that gets more attention to our videos. I want to help as many people as possible. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you’re safe and doing well wherever you’re at right now, and I hope to see you all soon, live and in-person. Take care.

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