If you follow the Real Estate markets or own rental property it is incredibly easy to get depressed about the current market situation. As you scan the Real Estate headlines and find out sales have dropped 41% from the last year. Or as you can talk to Realtors, who will tell you about the huge amount of inventory currently for sale or you can even talk to your tenants about how they feel you need to lower rents because there are so many vacancies out there. The last trap was the one I fell into with my tenants help.

With this many options and this many negatives, it’s easy to get worried and it’s important to understand where your sources of information come from. My mistake began with talking to a tenant of mine, who was requesting a rent reduction due to the changing market. I am aware there are more vacancies and I know the market is a bit more competitive, I also know what a headache it can be to move. But they were good people so I caved in and ended up offering her a $75 reduction, which wasn’t good enough for her. So I agreed to switch to month to month while they explored their options, without doing any rent reduction!!.So now, here is how the trap unfolded.

When I collected the last monthly rent check, I listened to her story about how she felt bad for landlords like me, since there were so many vacancies out there and so many choices for renters, I may be vacant for quite a while. It was all rather depressing really.

To help elevate the potential depression, I also had another property that was just getting some renovations completed and was currently vacant, plus two more vacancies coming up. It all looked rather glum.

Next, came the reality versus what I had been told by the wrong source, or at least a source with a different agenda. Late one evening as I stressed about how long I would have empty properties, I finally had my ads all written and proceeded to post them online with less than stellar expectations. Much to my surprise by mid morning, I already had my first viewing booked for that day. Then another one came for the following day. Then two more for the other property, then a friend’s son came out of the woodwork interested in the third.

The response took me off guard as I was expecting a disappointing response, but it quickly became better and better. Now the key from my viewpoint is as follows, we like to keep our properties well maintained and updated and this is an example of this tactic paying off. Here we are not even a week later and I have all three properties lined up with new tenants. One will be vacant for less than 24 hours!

When chatting with the actual tenants looking for new places, the real view of the market emerged versus the one I was fed by the current tenant. Yes, there are a significant amount of rental properties out there, many at very low monthly rates. However, it appears there is a reason many of them are languishing on the market and steadily reducing rates and it has nothing to do with an over abundance of vacancies. Rather it has to do with tenants having options of where they want to live and they don’t want to live in dumps!

Resoundingly the tenants informed me that a majority of the “cost effective” properties were not places they would choose to live if they had options. During the economic boom earlier in the decade, people took what they could get, now the landlord and property owners that took advantage of tenants and just pocketed all the profits are feeling the results of their decisions.

So the real message behind this article? You really need to talk to the right people to get the real answers. The neighbour, or the tenant or the Realtor may have an opinion, but you have to do your own research to find out how valid their opinion really is and what is actually happening in the market.

Revelations – Realizing how lucky you really are.

Definition from Bill Biko

Since yesterday there has been quite a few fun little stories pop up, but let’s touch on my definition of revelations first.

As I mentioned, I’ve been getting more irritable for a while now due to myriads of minor and major headaches. These range from a partnership that has been going through a split for over a year and a half, another partner who is managing a property in Lacombe who hasn’t been able to provide any details on the property for over two years and may now be going into foreclosure, being forced by banks to sell properties in a market not conducive to sales, tenants who seem to be more concerned with their welfare than mine and I could probably go on for another thousand words with all the headaches and complaints I have.

All the pressure, all the worrying about everyone else, well it’s just worn me down. Because I have been looking at it as ongoing problems that will never subside and I think that is where the revelation comes in. This all comes back to Tony Robbins new show again, the Breakthrough. Now I quite enjoyed the show as it’s great to see people over come what obviously completely changed their lives, but what I didn’t realize is after the show Tony posts a video explaining some of the background info that gets omitted due to the show’s 44 minute time frame.

It was watching some of this post show video yesterday that I started to realize how lucky I am. Yes I have some big challenges in front of me, but some are transforming as we go along. Last week the year and a half split finally was complete, we received some very positive reviews of the property we are still trying to sell, I’m getting more calls on the vacancies we have, my new business while slowly growing is starting to get some nice results and some referrals, my family still loves and adores me (well maybe adore is strong, especially with how pissy I have been lately, but they still love me!), I have a great home and there is plenty of positive out there.

When I look at the story from the Breakthrough and how the fellow became a quadriplegic who was stuck in his house, afraid to go outside, yet has transformed his views and has become upbeat, positive and enthusiastic about his life and future. Then I compare at how I have started to look at all the negatives without seeing the positives it was a bit of a wake up call.

So while there are no guarantees I will be 100% happy all the time, I will start working on remembering the positives, the good things that are happening and try to let more of the negative wash away.

So with that in mind, here are a couple of developing stories since yesterday. Last night the police stopped by and I was subpoenaed for a courtcase later this month!!

Not against me just in case you were wondering! This relates back to my tenant from last summer who stole another tenants vehicle, cell phone and wallet at knife point. Apparently he and his buddy were caught in Ontario five days later sleeping in the car. I get to show up to confirm he was a tenant and help put him away hopefully for a long time.

The two guys who pissed me off Sunday, well this morning there was an apology text message on my phone. Apparently they are sorry about the misunderstanding and they wish they had taken my place and the fellow who wanted the discount may be interested in coming back at regular price.

I just received a referral yesterday from one of my very happy web clients, not sure how it will turn out, but after a quick look there seems to be plenty I can help them with.

On the slightly negative side, people don’t comprehend ads very well, I have been getting quite a few calls on a rent to own property and another one for a live in manager for another and it’s apparent that I need to write them with more clarity. Obviously including prices, how it works and everything comes across confusing (see look at me finding a humorous bright side!).

There’s been a lot of economic doom and gloom and it’s probably not going away for a while. If you haven’t the time, or had it thrown in your face, about how really good you may already have it, perhaps now is a great time to do so. Happy revelations!

Revelations – Something revealed, especially a dramatic disclosure of something not previously known or realized.

Definition from Answers.com

I was talking with a friend this morning (you know who you are and thank you!) about how angry I am with people lately. Last week I had a former tenant send me an email who discovered a $1,295 judgment on his credit. He stated that I had lied to put this on his credit and he had witnesses about black mould in the property and was considering consulting a lawyer. It pissed me off a bit, so I suggested he go ahead and proceed as I would then have his current address and could go after all the additional charges I didn’t have in the judgment.

It irritated me that he tried to get out of paying originally and when it finally caught up to him, he was still trying to get out of it.

Yesterday I met with two guys from out East who were here to do some promotional work with the Calgary Herald. They called last week and wanted me to hold two rooms for them. They were persistent and very concerned that I had to hold them, so I did. They were supposed to call Saturday to confirm time of arrival, but of course they didn’t so I didn’ t expect them.

Then they called Sunday to say they were here, the rooms weren’t quite ready, so Karen and I had to rush over and prep them before they got there. When they did show up, they didn’t have the money with them for the rooms, and they wouldn’t be able to get it all since they had to withdraw money for traveling earlier that day and had daily limits. Yep, this irritated me too, especially since we had the conversation about costs a week earlier.

So they ran to the bank, came back and wanted to talk to me, in private. So we go outside and they tell me they thought it was too much. They wanted a discount of about 30%. They explained if they ended up staying longer they could rent as apartment for less. So to recap, I held two rooms, rushed to prep them for them, gave them the benefit of the doubt and was letting them only pay part of it up front and now they wanted a further discount. I was furious. I suggested they go get an apartment and walked away leaving them to drive off.

What I’ve been noticing over the last month is I’ve been letting incidents like this get to me. It’s just been a series of little pin pricks that get more and more and more and more and more annoying. The phone call this morning was part one of the revelation that this was happening.

You have to wait until tomorrow for part two!

Just going to throw a few quick thoughts and items out.

Tony Robbins

Tonight (Tuesday July 27th) is the premier of Tony Robbins new TV series. I have long been a fan of his books and audio packages. If you are having some struggles in your life, want some positive reinforcement, or just want to see some stories to make you feel good, check it out tonight.

Here is a link to a behinds the scenes story about the show, Tony Robbins – Breakthrough

Rental Properties & A Lesson

Been a busy week, Karen, the kids and I have been working on a vacant property in Forest Lawn. We are trying to teach the kids the value of working hard and getting paid for it, so our 10 year old learned to paint walls yesterday. She put in a solid two and a half hours and we will reward her for it.

It’s her lesson about life and earning money as she is constantly asking us how she can make money, now she knows and we are taking them back today to finish up!

Getting Things Done

I was up until 2:45 the other night, couldn’t sleep, so I went and worked on some of my web projects. It didn’t hit me until today that I keep falling into the same trap all small business owners have. I’m busy working in my business (as I prepare to go paint again at a rental property), rather than working ON my business.

Most of you aren’t aware I started another business up now as I need something to fill my time.  I have done a ton of research on how to market websites, products and information on the internet over the last few years as I sat on the sidelines and waited for the Real Estate market to settle down. Now I am leveraging that knowledge to help small businesses and a few charities get some exposure on the internet.

You can read a bit about some of it on my new site http://www.billbiko.com.  I do everything from creating blogs for people and companies, http://www.keepingthecirclestrongcalgary.com,  http://www.erelogistics.com, to creating short videos to promote products ERE Logistics Portable Scissor Bridge, or even creating lead capture promotions for companies Granite Countertops Calgary. If you know someone looking for some online promotion let them know about me!!

With so many things on the go, it’s important to get things done! If you don’t get things done, you cannot move forward. This is why it’s so important to take some time to work on your business! Sometimes you just have to block off half an hour to review what needs to be done to get ahead. Anyway, I’m off to get things done now so I can come back and work on my business later!

It seems like wingnuts are flying off the shelf these days and I am receiving even more content for a potential book about tenant stories. Here is the email I received the other day in response to one of my weekly rental ads on Kijiji;

I want your condo for 2 days, i m planing on having a party. It’s going to be my Birthday Bash so yeup
let me know if you agree, also let me know how much for a day & i’ll let you know when i want it.
email me asap Please and thank you

So, what do you think, should I contact the person? Seem like a winning solution? Just to show how confounding this is,below is a section from my ad,

To ensure a great experience for our residents the property has the following rules in place;

• no smoking in the home
• no drugs
• no overnight visitors
• treat the other guests with respect
• no parties

These rules help create a safe quiet environment and also discourage the types of roommates we are sure you do not want to share a place with.

I highlighted a couple spots the potential short term tenant appears to have glossed over! Bottom line, I think I will take a pass and not bother to reply, I know, I could be throwing away money, but sometimes you just have to take a chance and pass on an exceptional offer!

Love to hear any stories from you!

Happy Bill!

Definitely happier times now! Not sure if anyone noticed, but I haven’t posted anything since April 14th, over three weeks ago. Don’t worry it’s nothing life or death that held me back, it’s just nightmare computer, hosting change and WordPress issues.

I was getting ready to put another post up for everyone late in the week of the 19th when I received an email form my old host warning me I had almost reached my monthly quota for traffic. I was close to 90%, which meant with this particular host I would incur extra expense if I went over. This was a good and a bad thing.

The good is my traffic, my readers, my showing up in Google search results has all been exploding for the last couple of months. The bad, since I had never hit the quota before, I had no idea what the costs to go over would be.

So I had a tough choice, no posts or transfer to a new hosting company. OK, maybe it wasn’t that hard a choice as I had been planning on it for a while, I just didn’t have the time currently to get it done. So my option was to refrain from any posts.

I finally had a chance to do the transfer May 1st, and had nothing but nightmares. I could get the main site up, http://www.housez.ca, but the blog wouldn’t show up,then when I found out the problem there, the database which controls all the information wouldn’t work. It has taken me the last week of research, talking to support people and tinkering to get back up.

So here is my first post from the new host, within the first half hour of being back up and alive! I’ve saved up some rants, some thoughts on the market and some views on some future trends for you, but you may not see them for another week as next week is completely hectic for me, but I may try and surprise you, so stay tuned!

For those of you wondering, I have moved my site to Bluehost which is where we currently have several other sites running as well. The great part is no more quotas, which means I can really work at ramping up traffic, I will have the ability to add a ton more features to make the blog and website run better and possibly more efficiently and I just have to find more time!

If you want to check out one of the other sites we have running on Bluehost right now, go visit http://www.31daystodeclutter.com. It’s a project that has been keeping my wife and our household quite busy! And yes, that is a picture of me above with my new longer hair look, it’s probably just a mid-life crisis thing, but I am having fun with it.

You’ve seen the stats, you’ve read the news, and you are likely aware home prices are continuing the trend of increasing in Calgary and area. What they aren’t telling you is that it’s not every area of the city!

The numbers that get released are an average price and when you look at averages this means some areas are growing more, while others grow less. No less than three individuals whom I have talked to in the last month have all been getting excited that prices are going up and have automatically assumed their property values have as well, but this isn’t always the case.

As we have been working on streamlining some of our portfolio and reducing some of the properties we own, I have been looking closer and closer at trends in a couple of areas and these areas have been completely flat or worse. They have shown either no growth or crept downwards a bit in price.

To add to this, inventory levels are continuing to increase around the city and with the upcoming mortgage rule changes, we have the dual problem of more product and fewer buyers. Now before you start to think I am predicting pending price drops, just realize this is something to be aware of, not meant to cause a panic. It may result in a temporary hiccup in sales and prices, but nothing long term.

There is nothing new about inventory increasing in the spring. This quite common occurrence usually starts in March and runs into June and brings not only additional inventory, but additional sales as well. Spring fever tends to be a huge factor with Real Estate every year.

As for the mortgage qualifying changes, this will only have a short term affect on buyers. Yes, it will reduce the number of qualified purchasers, but the purchasers getting pushed out would potentially be setting themselves up for a foreclosure in the future as rates increase. By reducing future foreclosure properties, these new rules will actually help keep prices stable and over time gradually increasing. Within a couple months, these changes will be forgotten.

Now, let’s get back to my original point about not all home prices increasing equally. Since average sales price is based on averages, don’t automatically assume since the average price increased by 3%, your property automatically increased as well. I’m seeing this mistake being made by both home owners and Realtors right now and new listings are coming on board for way too much.

In the one area I am looking at, when you compare the new listings to other properties listed all seems fine, but everything that has actually sold is all about 5% less than these currently listed prices. If you have a property a buyer absolutely loves, you might be able to get away with this as you have the leverage of emotion winning out over logic. However if you either don’t have the time to wait for that person to show up or you just want to sell your property most efficiently you need to have a firm grasp of what properties are actually selling for.

You really need all the facts when evaluating a property you are about to sell, or even a property you are about to purchase. Don’t fall prey to the headlines, make sure you find out what is really happening and as Don Campbell says, “Look behind the curtain!”

If you missed it, Garth Turner was in Calgary recently forecasting for Calgary’s bubble to burst another 20% in the near future. As always he had a loyal following turnout, but it appears he managed to hit a couple of nerves with some Realtors and other folks in the Real Estate industry.

So just for some perspective about why things may not be as bad as he is projecting check out this article from the Herald by Marty Hope,

Author Forecast Just So Much Hooey

As a side note, anytime anyone seems to post anything bad about Garth his supporters bash the individuals soundly, it will be interesting to see if Marty gets some backlash.

It appears as I look back through previous posts I throw in quite a few references to motivation and trying to stay positive. This ultimately stems from my endeavours to stay in a positive mindset and look towards all the positive things happening for us.

But I tell you, some days (and some weeks and some months) are harder than others are!  Ultimately though, by staying more positively focused, people and companies can evolve into winners. Not to say this is true in all cases, as you cannot thrive and grow just on good intent or hopeful dreams, somewhere action is required as well. I believe it’s this action that helps separate the eventual winners and losers.

The problem with action though, is what action is required to make these strides forward? What makes winners stand out? It’s easy for many individuals to stay incredibly busy throughout their whole day, week and life, yet at the end of these terms, they have really accomplished nothing. As I reflect back, many former co-workers during my employee days actually turned this into an art. These individuals were always busy, yet never seemed to really accomplish anything.

So to be a winner you need action that moves you forward. It’s defining this forward moving action that causes the real issue. In the last couple of years I have dealt with several individuals who have once again turned the activity of staying busy into an art form, yet at the end of the day, no real forward momentum is ever gained, it’s just another day completed. What’s the point then?

Unfortunately, quite often as I look through my week, I too get caught in this trap of never ending tasks that need to be completed, yet never move me forward. A prime example for me is our collection of weekly rental properties. It seems I am continually coming and going from property to property signing in tenants, signing out tenants, showing rooms and cleaning up rooms.

While all these activities result in a steady flow of incoming cash and mange to keep me very busy, they typically don’t allow us to move forward. This week’s example was a potential tenant who wasted my time, but also incented me to write this post. The full story would bore you, the short story is he left a deposit and wasted my time because he found a cheaper place.

This ended up costing me about two hours of driving around, left me irritable and didn’t help move me forward, until the story evolved into this post. How many activities in your week create the same situation of just spinning your wheels or causing frustration, and what can you do to take these situations, turn them around and help them make a positive forward movement in your day, your business and your life?

The alternative is to stay focused on these roadblocks, waste time and energy and never win. Or if you do, it’s only short lived and at the expense of someone else. Winner or loser, the great thing is you really can be whatever you choose, so just make sure you make wise choices.

He had to be in his late fifties, he was reasonably well kept, dressed in the company provided uniform and he wouldn’t have looked out of place in many different service companies. He had greying hair, a full beard with some of its original reddish orange color peaking out amidst the grey.

Most importantly, he wasn’t happy. He didn’t smile, he didn’t laugh, and he obviously just did his job. He was also probably very good at it; it appeared he had been doing it for a while, so this is really an assumption on my behalf. The striking part of any of this is how common place it is and how it’s just part of our normal day to see people like this. Perhaps you have seen him every day and didn’t even notice anymore? Maybe you work with him, or worse yet, you are this individual?

Think about how often we meet or see people in various jobs working away just because it pays the next mortgage payment, next car payment or perhaps more commonly the next rent to own payment for the big screen TV? What happened to their dreams, their goals, and their aspirations? Or worse yet, what if they never had any and this is all that they know?

Goal setting and dream achievement isn’t exactly given high priority in school, it’s all about get good grades, get a good job, start a career. But what if you hate your job, or just don’t enjoy yourself? Welcome to the trap of the rat race.

This is kind of a personal retrospective right now as Karen and I are both trying to refresh our dreams, our life goals, our “Belize” to quote Don Campbell. Karen’s doing great as she has several goals and aspirations that have just exploded into her vision of what she wants to do, where she wants us to be and is busy working on how we will get there.

Me however, I’m struggling. It seems like I have lost some of the clarity I used to have. Don’t worry, I’m not the grumpy old man working behind a counter yet, I can work anywhere!! If you are reading along and this is really hitting home perhaps you need to work on your clarity and goals as well.

I know I am on to something as I have just been reminded for the third time in the last month how important it is to have some type of plan for your life. Twice in books, once in a podcast, and all from successful people, hmmm maybe its true success leaves tracks!

What are your thoughts do you have a purpose you are striving to fulfill? Do you have a “Belize” you are working towards as an end goal? Or are you just working for the weekend? I’d love to hear what some of you think about this. If you want to leave a comment great, but even an email to me would be wonderful.
Just don’t tell me you were that grumpy older gentleman, or I will be left with the impression these posts aren’t helping anyone!

I’m a huge Will Smith fan. I really admire what he has done and how he has grown from his start as a rapper to a fantastic actor and obviously great person. In the following video are some excerpts from various interviews he has done over the years that provide you with some insights into how and why he has become who he has become.

His positive outlook, his drive and his motivation are a great example of what you can do if you set your mind to it and have the right attitude. If you want to move to the next level in whatever you do, perhaps this little bit of inspiration will help.

I’ve recently been emailing back and forth with a reader who has some dreams and finding this video seems to be a rather nice coincidence. Big J, pay special attention to the last 40 seconds and may the chocolate gods smile on you!

I found this originally on Frank Kern’s site, so Kudos’s to him for posting it.

Think about that one for a moment, money makes Real Estate investing easy. When Karen and I started out, we had a small line of credit, a bit of cash saved up and some huge goals. Along the way, we created bigger piles of cash, extended lines of credit and created even larger goals, but it wasn’t always easy.

When we look back at those initial purchases, many months were a struggle, every purchase a creative process to stretch our dollars and expand our portfolio. We delved into vendor take back mortgages to learn how to reduce the amount of cash we needed. We came up with ideas to extend closing periods and obtaining early access to properties to get a head start on renovation projects. We leveraged our credit cards and other people’s money (OPM) to extend our ability to purchase new properties.

Along with this we learned about joint venture partners, hard money with obscene interest rates, RRSP second mortgages that we could apply to our properties and pay investors double digit interest rates and short term higher interest loans. We also became adept at educating friends and family about how they could utilize their own lines of credit to obtain returns of 10% or higher from us.

We continued this way for the first several years and as the market values increased and our hard work eventually started paying off, we saw more and more money start to fill our bank accounts. As quickly as the money would come in though, we would turn it back into back into more properties. Eventually as the money continued to flow in, it became easier and easier to make more money in Real Estate and to purchase property without being as creative.

2006 and 2007 were very heady times. It seemed no matter what you bought, no matter how slow your renovations, no matter how you set up your financing, it became too easy to make money. With values going up several percent per month if you couldn’t get contractors in quickly it just meant more back end profit as values increased. You didn’t have to work at buying smart, you just had to buy.

You didn’t need to be creative with vendor take back mortgages, you didn’t really need extended closing times, and it simply became easier and easier to buy just with money alone. Now, here we are several years later and many of the rules have been reset back to our starting days and perhaps even a bit further back!

The last couple of years have put a severe dent on the entire market and have managed to turn Real Estate into much more of a challenge for many people. We’ve seen deflating prices, the uncertainty of the economy and certainly a significant amount of fear in the market. The easy money has certainly disappeared.

All of this change though has created a new environment of opportunity for many investors out there and as one of my earlier posts mentioned; many new investors are starting to appear, eager to get into the Real Estate business. A majority of these folks will be coming in with lofty ambitions and some optimistic goals. I’m here to say with the proper amount of work and determination thrown in these same types of successes can be recreated by anyone.

Sure having access to cash makes it easier, but if it was easy, everyone would do it!

I have a few topics to cover all of a sudden and after an email from a subscriber last week, I will start with spam.

Strangely enough, when people subscribe to the blog, they get updates on new posts. True I filled in many of you automatically from my contacts when I first started up the blog, and many have requested to be removed over the years, but many have also been added on, my statistics show me that many of you read them and some never read them. Also, there have been a few glitches, where people received the same blog posting email two, three or four times and I apologize for that. Technology isn’t perfect, we all seem to understand that, we resent it, but we understand it, or at least I hope we all do?
Anyway, I have previously updated people on how to be removed, and it’s simple, just email me and ask to be removed. My point here is don’t be surprised if you register and get emails from me, really what did you think you were registering for? Sending me an email saying Stop The Spam is not necessarily the correct tact. Don’t worry, if you do, you won’t be getting anymore of the updates as soon as I can get to this computer and delete you, so on that account I guess it is effective. Anyway, there is that little rant, thank you for following along.

Rich Dad author Robert Kiyosaki, if you haven’t heard of him you haven’t looked at your front door in the last year or read any of the junk mail you receive from the post office. Rich Dad Poor Dad endorses a series of seminar’s that appear around the country and show you how to become wealthy. Or at least that is the premise of why you should attend.

Recently, CBC’s Marketplace had an expose on the seminars which you can watch here, Who’s getting rich off Rich Dad? Anyone considering attending one of these to become wealthy really should watch this. Now having said that, I am a big believer in the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of books and the concept Richard Kiyosaki is pushing. It has changed our lives definitely for the better.

You just have to take much of it with a grain of salt. Some of the techniques they talk about may or may not work. Mobile homes scare the hell out of me, they are a depreciating asset much like a vehicle and are not really Real Estate and it appears may not be as profitable as portrayed (you need to watch the video to understand). On the other hand, we have managed to make a considerable amount of money off of pre-foreclosures over the years, but it isn’t necessarily easy!

I really believe it’s true that anyone can become rich, but there is far more to becoming rich than just going to one of these seminars and then signing up for more and expensive courses as these types of seminars are famous for. To really become successful, you really have to buy into the idea that you can do anything you set your mind to, to find a real purpose that drives you. Yet the mindset of many of the folks attending these types of events is to attend the course, discover the secret code of the wealthy and watch their life change. Kind of like getting the winning lottery ticket, which is the ultimate seminar that people keep signing up for on a weekly basis.

I’ve actually attended some of the events like this and there is nothing you get from them that you cannot find in many of the books out there, except for the opportunity to meet many other people looking to change their lives. The opportunity to hang around like minded people, how golden is that?

We even started out by attending a three day weekend event that cost us $5,000. Sure enough, they had a few people selling things and surprise, we bought into several of them, but that was when we were just searching for the winning lottery ticket. We weren’t quite sure where we wanted to go, how we were going to get there and what it was going to look like. We just knew we were going to become rich through Real Estate.

Since that time we have learned a tad bit more, attended a few more events, and put a few miles on in the Real Estate business and the game of life. We have learned to plan a bit better (we still need plenty of work on this), we have seen how setting goals for ourselves works and more importantly how not setting goals provides you with exactly what you planned for. We have even met some people who have become great friends and inspirations for us. So is there a lesson buried in here about seminars, or is this another rant?

As much as I like to ramble, there is a point, the seminars may not be the answer for you, but they could be the catalyst to help you move forward. It could be that one ingredient to help push you to look for more answers and more solutions to get what you want or perhaps it allows you to meet the one person who can help guide you along. Most importantly, that solution may not involve the $5,000 three day course that you can purchase from the back of the room, or perhaps it does, it all depends on where you are in your life.

Perhaps many of you remember the book and the video called The Secret? It was all the rage and applauded by many as the ticket to changing your life. Unfortunately, too many people took the boiled down message to mean sit at home and focus on what you want in life and it will come true. Needless to say many people were very disappointed in the results as they were missing one of the key ingredients, taking action.

What are your thoughts? Have you attended any of these events and if so, did it work for you?

The Winnipeg based Frontier Centre released it’s report on housing affordability recently and proclaimed Calgary was ranked 23rd out of the 28 cities in their affordability index. The number one cities for affordability were Windsor and Thunder Bay.

Can anyone read between the lines here? At first glance this would suggest Calgary wouldn’t be the place to move to, but if you are looking for work, don’t you want to go where the jobs are? Perhaps there is a reason Windsor is so affordable, everyone is leaving as all the automaker jobs are drying up, so all the values are dropping. The future for Thunder Bay isn’t to glittering either.

Calgary, although unemployment is way up, still has significantly better opportunities for the people vacating other economically depressed areas. Even more importantly, the jobs also pay considerably more here, we have no PST and over all aren’t we just nicer people?

The study actually covered 272 cities worldwide and not surprisingly Vancouver topped the list as the least affordable.

The link to the full story is available here, Frontier Center – How Affordable is Your Housing?. Just remember, affordability doesn’t directly relate to desirability to live there. There are always additional economic and emotional reasons for certain locations to be more costly to live and these can be incredibly difficult to measure.

Wow, am I ever grateful it’s 2010. 2009 was a pretty brutal year economically, business wise and action wise for us. We still have a few headaches that have followed us over into 2010, but with some strong action and forward movement on our part, instead of waiting to see how it plays out this time, we should be on a much stronger footing for 2010.

What I have realized as I reviewed some of the mistakes and shortcomings of 2009 was how far we have actually come. Yes, we lost money in 2009 on Real Estate, in fact a considerable amount which pains me every time I reflect on it. However, Real Estate also put us in a position so we had money to lose. If we hadn’t have started purchasing properties back in 2003 I would probably still be working at my old job, making a comfortable living, but not very happy. This life is so much better!

Financially we are twenty years ahead of where we were back then, even after the slowdown. Lifestyle wise we have the ability to show up to our children’s recitals in the middle of the morning, pick up our children after school and make our work fit around our hours. Sure, I had flexibility at work due to a great boss and plenty of seniority, but nothing like this.

None of this would have happened originally though if we didn’t start crawling and make that initial purchase that started us moving forward.  That initial purchase led to the next one and the one after that and so on. Much like a baby learning to crawl, there are struggles and surprises as you learn. Unlike a baby, these struggles and surprises can be bumps and bruises on your finances instead of your body.

Surprisingly many people who run into these setbacks in Real Estate tuck in their tails and become the loudest mouthpieces about how Real Estate can wipe you out and what a bad investment it can be. It’s amazing these people are able to walk. If they had the same mindset when they initially started crawling, they would have never left the safe spot they started at on the floor. Obviously, they didn’t stop trying to crawl though and managed to not only overcome crawling, but also learned to walk, talk and run.

So what changes our mindset as we grow older and potentially wiser? If we really had acquired wisdom as we aged, wouldn’t we realize we need to crawl before we walk or run in many of life’s adventures? Do we simply get too caught up in the fear of making mistakes that could cost us money or could damage our pride? Why do we lose the gusto to reach for that brass ring that appears to be just out of our reach?

As more people come to me for guidance and mentorship about Real Estate investing, I am seeing a colossal difference between the people worn out by day jobs and the people just entering the Real Estate business. The excitement they bring, the willingness to not only learn to crawl with their Real Estate investments, but the desire to learn to walk the talk to move forward can be an adrenaline rush to me. It reminds me of how when we initially started we ate, talked and dreamed of Real Estate almost 24 hours a day and how crawling eventually leads to walking and running. So remember, you gotta crawl before you start running!