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Life by Design is a podcast that shares the experiences and tools to help couples align their wealth goals and reclaim their time, enabling them to experience freedom, abundance, and a life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to The Life by Design Podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We help couples fast track their financial growth by aligning their money mindset, developing transformative wealth strategies, and providing personalized guidance so they can confidently achieve a life of freedom and abundance together.
Brian Persson: [00:00:25] With the growing need for couples to find alignment and invest confidently in real estate, we created the 'Riches, Relationships and Real Estate' program. Our goal is to support you in achieving your financial and relationship goals together. If you want to know more about what's stopping you from building your wealth, make sure to go to discoverlifebydesign.ca/wealth and download 'The 3 Mistakes that Keep High Achieving Couples from Building their Wealth, Freedom & Living a Life they Love'.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:54] Today's topic, we're going to discuss our top three successes in real estate investing. We share openly and happily how we invest in real estate on all our podcasts, but today we wanted to share what successes we've had along the way and how real estate really just works for us.
Brian Persson: [00:01:15] When we were putting together the notes for this podcast, I was thinking about what most people think is a success in real estate. It's usually along the lines of, I have this many doors, or I have this many million dollars in property, and we actually are going to take a little bit of a different tangent on that, because we do have a few million in real estate, and we do have a bunch of doors, but that's not really the success of how we really got about to be successful in real estate. Would you agree?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:47] Absolutely. People will look at me and they were like, you own multi-millions in real estate? They just think, wow. It's like, if you only knew the 15 years and all the steps and mistakes we took to get here. Yes, it is 'wow', but it wasn't an overnight 'wow' or even a year 'wow'. So we broke it down into the smaller bites to say, what were our successes along the way? Our first takeaway was, we just got started. You hear this a lot on anything you want to do or decide to do is, the hardest part is getting started. But it was like, I want to invest in real estate, let's do it. And we just took action.
Brian Persson: [00:02:34] And that's what I'm getting at is, it's not really the number of doors or the millions of dollars you have in real estate, it's who you become, and what do you have to do to invest in real estate? Everybody knows real estate is a good deal, that's not what's at issue here. It's, who are you to become when you invest in real estate. That's what we found as our successes, and the first step of that was just doing it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:59] Getting started, buying one door.
Brian Persson: [00:03:02] I know we've been in a lot of rooms where people are just paralyzed by the amount of information that they're getting at a real estate conference where they're, three days and they teach you all about, right from the beginning to the end, of how to invest in real estate, and these people get paralyzed by it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:21] It's overwhelming, I don't blame them.
Brian Persson: [00:03:22] It was overwhelming for us, too.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:25] Yeah, absolutely. Exciting. Absolutely high energy exciting, and then you go home after the conference is done with all this enthusiasm like, I'm going to be a real estate investor, I'm going to have hundreds of doors, I'm going to have millions. Then you're like, I don't even know where to start right now. It's over, I'm just gonna go back to my day job.
Brian Persson: [00:03:43] Wait, I got to call my mortgage broker first? Then it all grinds to a halt. Would you say that we knew what we were doing when we first got into real estate? No, not really. We jumped and we learned on the way. That's a little bit of our personality, is to jump and build a parachute on the way down. I think, don't be reckless about it, but I think more people need to jump not knowing the parachute is fully together, that they're going to have a safe landing. Sometimes you just got to get out the door.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:16] For example, when we bought our first condo together, I knew I needed 20% down and I knew I would need a mortgage. Other than that, I knew nothing. From that little knowledge, I went, how much money do I have? What kind of a property could I afford? That's what we bought, a crappy little condo in not a great neighborhood, but that's how we learn. We just bought it there. Now, I'm not recommending everyone do that, there are definitely better routes and paths now we've learned. But that was our, just get in action.
Brian Persson: [00:04:49] Get a little bit more information than we did before you started investing. A lot of people ask me when I go to networking events, how did you do it? It's like, through the fire is usually my answer. If I was to rewind it all and do it all again, I would still start as early. You can't see the future, it's really hard to see the future in that sense, but I would hire somebody, a coach. Or have gone to many more real estate events before investing into it, and at least got my toes into what it seems like to invest in real estate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:25] Let's let the audience know, we bought our first property together in 2009. You didn't go to your first real estate event till the end of 2016 or 2017. This is how long it took for us. We listened to podcasts and read some books, but to actually get ourselves in rooms and really get educated, that's years before we figured it out.
Brian Persson: [00:05:47] I think about those seven years fairly often and it's like, imagine if I got in those rooms and imagine if I hired a coach in 2009 rather than 2016/17 when we started getting into those rooms. That seven years, oh my god, the amount of stuff we could have done in those seven years would have been insane.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:13] Aren't you glad I signed you up?
Brian Persson: [00:06:14] Yeah. With that education, look at what we were able to do. Unlocking our money mindset and understanding real estate. When we first started real estate, we just started doing things, and then later on we actually found out they had names, they were actual real estate investment strategies.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:34] You mean like 'buying a house with a friend is called a joint venture'? I want to do a little plug in there, just to note for all our listeners out there, that sometimes your partner can see things you don't. Be open minded. I know it can be hard, and it was hard for us back then when I signed you up, you weren't happy. But the incredible growth we both, and our family, has got because something I could see but couldn't articulate. I couldn't communicate it, I admit that was my little downfall there, but at least I was smart enough to figure out, if I can get you in somewhere to who could show you the right path, you just have the choice to jump on that train or not, and you did. So have those conversations with your partner and be okay speaking up. I know, again, it can be hard, but speaking up and saying, this is what I see, this is what I want, what do you think about this idea.
Brian Persson: [00:07:29] I think that is exactly why people don't get started, is that they can't see the whole picture. I know I was there, I came from the tech industry and in the tech industry, everything has to be exact. If you miss a period, your program just doesn't work.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:46] As a developer, fair enough, and website's broken.
Brian Persson: [00:07:48] Yeah, exactly. In my world, you literally had to know the whole scope of what you were doing, almost, in order to get started. It had to be quite accurate and perfect. So if you look at real estate like that, it does not work that way. Real estate is messy. Nothing is going to work out the way that you think it is, even if you've done it 100 times, there will always be little things that are going on that's different. I think the large majority of people have a mindset like that, like I had decades ago. It's very difficult, I think, for people to get started because we see it all the time. They want to know the whole picture and they want to see exactly what the end looks like.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:38] Even us, we could still draft out a whole plan and kind of see the picture, obviously we have experience so we can. But as a newer investor, there's always going to be something that can shift. The market changes, interest rates change, laws change. You don't have control over that, so if you sit there and plan forever, you'll just be paralyzed.
Brian Persson: [00:09:01] You'll nuance yourself to paralysis, you just won't go anywhere. We have friends, they want to invest in real estate, they've probably read more books than I have on real estate, and still they have not bought their first property. That's where you just got to go. It's the same old money mentality, you hear it with the markets and you hear it with real estate. It's 'it's not the right time to buy', and everyone buys high and sells low. Right now, Edmonton, where we are, is going through a massive boom and people are hunkering down, which is the exact opposite thing you should be doing right now.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:44] You should be buying. We always say, it's always the right time to buy. Even in a different market where some things may not be as favorable for you, there's always a deal you can find and other things are favorable. There's a balance in there.
Brian Persson: [00:09:58] That's 100% true. It'll always be the right time to buy in real estate, it's just a matter of how carefully do you need to buy. Right now, with Edmonton going the way that it is, you don't need to be careful all that much. Because in a couple of years, your property is going to be worth significantly more, all the economics say so. If you're worried that Edmonton's going to take a downturn right after this, it's like, yeah, it might. But also, you're hedging your bets to such a degree that you are really safe investing in real estate in Edmonton right now. People see the market's high and they go, it's not the right time to buy. It's like, they're going to be higher, look at the economics of it, get started.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:41] You're better to invest and make even a small return than to sit on it and have nothing.
Brian Persson: [00:10:48] Exactly. The people who have put themselves on the sidelines right now and haven't got started, they're going to be like, oh man, I wish I bought x, y, z.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:57] 'Do you remember that time in 2024 when I should have bought real estate because it's worth double now?'
Brian Persson: [00:11:03] I'm talking with guys who have multi-million dollar, tens of millions of dollars of real estate. They are in these rooms, they've seen these cycles several times before, they've been in real estate so long. They're telling rooms full of people, get on the horse now and get buying real estate now. Don't wait till tomorrow, buy it now. I guarantee you 80% of that room will not move. So takeaway, just get started. It doesn't matter how messy it is, doesn't matter how much you got to put all the broken pieces back together, sometimes you just got to get started.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:44] And of course, if you need help for that, we are here for you. You can go to our website, you can go listen to all our podcasts, and we will assist. Rolling in, what's our takeaway number two? We stayed consistent with our plan, that was a big win. Consistent, sometimes it's boring, I know, but my goal, as I've shared before, is that I want a new property every two years. For me, that came about in a realistic perspective of what I knew back then, which wasn't much. If it's going to cost me X amount for a down payment and closing costs, I could probably save up enough to buy another property about every two years. That was our plan, and we did stay that course until we got a lot more educated and decided we wanted to buy three properties in 18 months. By then we were seven, eight years in and had a lot of experience, education, and we had equity and stuff built up to help support that shift in our goal.
Brian Persson: [00:12:46] We started unlocking our money mindset so that we started to truly understand finances, truly understand money. Understood what it meant to us, that was big thing. Just being consistent on working on yourself. This consistency is what's going to save you from our first takeaway, just getting started. If you're a little bit bumpy and the road is a little messy, consistency after that is going to pull it all back together, and it's going to make it a really nice investment.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:19] Stay the course. Just because something shifts, don't just sell out, real estate is a long game. For us, our choice of course is, buy and holds. And that, when you ask any realtor, that's always a win for them.
Brian Persson: [00:13:33] It doesn't really matter what's happening with that property. Given enough time, it'll always win. Take that very first property that you were talking about earlier. Bought in 2009, bad neighborhood, little dinky condo, absolutely should not have bought it. Sold it in 2020, I think, so we had it for 11 years. It was negatively cash flowing at the end of it, and we had bought it for $117,000. Close your ears people from Toronto and Vancouver, because yes, it was $117,000. Guess what we sold it for though, $65,000, because the Edmonton condo market over that decade fell out, it was just gone. We sold it for $65,000, so pretty well half the price that we bought it for, and over time, we still made 6% on that deal. Not great in real estate standards, but we didn't lose any money. Imagine if we had been educated a little bit and took that same 11 years, we would have made piles of money. But even with that crappy little property, given enough time, we still made 6%.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:46] Exactly. That was just, of course, through when it did cash flow and mortgage pay down and tax write offs, it worked out.
Brian Persson: [00:14:53] This is not an endorsement to buy crappy property.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:56] No, it is not. We actually don't recommend condos because of condo fees. That's what kicked our butt in the end, our condo fees were higher than our mortgage on that property at the end, hence why the cash flow was negative. When we first did it in 2009, it was a positive cash flowing property. You can't predict condo fees or condo assessments, those are out of your control and you have no choice but to pay them.
Brian Persson: [00:15:21] Anyway, the point of all that is that if you stay consistent, you will always win. So get yourself educated, get started, chances are you'll do way better than us off the hop. You won't have to go through all the flame and the fire that we went through, and you will always win, given enough time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:43] Consistency with everything. Not just real estate when you're buying a property or how you wanted to. So if buy and holds is your game, which we highly recommend, make a plan. If you want to buy one every year or every two years and just consistently buy, it's not, I need to have ten doors tomorrow. No. If you want ten doors, maybe your goal is one a year, and in ten years you have ten doors, but be consistent with making sure your financials is up to date for your mortgage, that you're watching the market, that you're investing properly, that you're managing them properly so you're not losing money and it's not a big stressor for you, but it's that consistent and it's the long game. With real estate we say that, but that's anything, even life. With health, it's consistent, people are like, I want to lose 100 pounds and it's like, that's not going to happen tomorrow.
Brian Persson: [00:16:28] They stop eating for one day.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:30] Or they work out for two weeks and it's like, if you do work out every day and again, 15, 20 minutes if you have to start, just start and then be consistent with your eating. If you fall off the wagon, which we all do, get back on and just keep going and you will see the long term gains and rewards from it.
Brian Persson: [00:16:49] Real estate's a business when it comes down to it. We know lots of real estate investors who have exploded quite quickly, and what happens in every single story where they, all of a sudden, go from 0 to 100 doors.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:07] There's overwhelm and chaos.
Brian Persson: [00:17:10] Almost always, they nearly lose their shorts. I'm currently in a business group right now, lots of very experienced business owners in that group. A lot of them have stories where they grew way too fast and the company nearly blew up. Because they weren't consistent, they didn't stick to a nice clean growth plan. Real estate business, like you said your health, everything, keep it consistent, keep it clean, and you will do much better growing properly than you will if you just try to explode your real estate portfolio or your business.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:49] Slow and steady wins the race, as they say. Whether it's your business or your real estate that you decide to blow up and it explodes and suddenly you're managing all this, and sometimes it's your business that takes a hit, but I've also heard of entrepreneurs where it was their health. It's like, 'I was rocking, I was making X million, had 20 employees, and then 'poof', I had to deal with', whatever illness it was that came their way and it put them right under, they had to start over. It's like, I wonder, obviously you will never know, but if they had gone slower and actually kept their health in check while building their real estate and while building their business, if they would have had that blow up or that exchange of what all went down. So just keep in mind health is extremely important regardless of what you're building.
Brian Persson: [00:18:39] Some people, it's just the way that they're built. They have to move that fast, but often they're moving that fast, as you were saying, you wonder what it would look like, but they're moving that fast because they didn't have the information to start with. So this is what we're putting out here, is slow down now.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:56] Get the information.
Brian Persson: [00:18:58] Hear the message now that you should start slow, even if you're built to move fast. A lot of people out there are. But, again, look how fast you moved. Especially when you were in the consulting world, you moved really fast and what happened? You burnt yourself out.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:16] I was a whirlwind, and I left people in the dust and I know it, I've been told it. You're right, I had extreme burnout where I was in the house for two months straight, couldn't barely leave bed because I was so sick. Not worth it.
Brian Persson: [00:19:26] So go in armed with information of knowing that you can grow slow and you will ultimately get farther than if you try to grow fast.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:38] 100%. That's going to roll us in to take away three. For our top three successes in real estate, our third one is, we kept upgrading our skills.
Brian Persson: [00:19:50] This is the information I was talking about in the previous takeaway. Get upgrading your skills all the time. We, as I kept saying, we kind of went through the fire on the real estate side of things, but we never stopped upgrading. We were constantly listening to podcasts. In the early years, there was a lot of education on laws and mortgages and everything to do with real estate. Even at our experience level now, we still read books, we still go to networking events and learn new things, because the instant you stop moving and you stop upgrading your skills is probably the instant that you're going to start contracting. You got to keep expanding.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:35] As we shared, we already had our real estate portfolio. Then it was in 2016 when you came home from work and you had said you were done. You couldn't manage any more doors. I was like, our real estate is going to keep growing, we're not done yet, and that's when I signed you up. While you were upset with me at that moment, the night you went changed your perspective, mindset and our portfolio. The whole trajectory of our family has changed because of that. From that incident, there was a shift, I think, in both of us to realize, we've got to keep going on the learning side, not learning necessarily all about real estate, but upgrading our mindset and how we think about things and how we view things and who we talk to. I don't think it was a year later where you went and got your real estate investment advisor certification to help others invest in real estate. You just kept growing and we kept going into rooms, and then eventually you and I got our financial life professional, which of course is around money mindset. We saw what was happening in the rooms and we wanted to be able to help people as much as we can. We just kept growing and learning to become better, first for ourselves and our family and understanding each other and our portfolio, but ultimately to help others as well.
Brian Persson: [00:21:57] It's, what you don't know, you don't know. You really got to get out there and start expanding your horizons so that you can figure out those new things that aren't even in your view at the moment. Getting into the real estate investment network, that networking room, was huge because there was tons of people in that room who knew all kinds of stuff that I'd never even heard the name of. All kinds of real estate investment strategies. By, all of a sudden, knowing what I didn't know the night before I went into that first networking room, it's like a whole new world opened up because there was all this stuff that I didn't even know existed.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:40] Not only, of course, did we build our portfolio through getting into rooms and getting more education, but we shifted our career and our family and how we do things, including coaching others on building their wealth. You then later got certified as a dealing rep, which is investments backed by real estate, and you slowly moved, moving right out of technology, which is where you wanted to go, but back in 2016, you didn't know that.
Brian Persson: [00:23:13] No, not at all. The real estate investment advisor certificate, that was the first step. That was where I realized that, even though I'm walking into a room of really experienced people and they have this certification I can get, I actually know a fair bit about what I'm doing, and I can use the certification to generate myself a new career. Ultimately, I started teaching other people how to invest in real estate, and that's really where you upgrade your skills, by teaching other people. I think the saying is, 'you don't really know something until you teach it'. It's totally true, because when you start teaching other people stuff, especially when it comes to real estate, you start realizing all your holes and all your flaws. You start seeing that because you're trying to help them fix their real estate or create a nice, stable portfolio, and by going through that exercise with them, you learn so much more than you would have if you just tried to do it on your own.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:15] Absolutely. Teaching it opens up, like you said, some gaps of things you didn't know. Plus over time, things shift, rules, laws. We keep up partly because we teach other couples on how to do it. So we want to make sure we're up to date with our knowledge and what we're sharing and sometimes I share things with us where we go back like, that's a really good idea, and we'll incorporate it into our learnings or our portfolio.
Brian Persson: [00:24:41] Doesn't matter how experienced you are, if you have your ears open and you're listening very carefully to the people around you, they can be a newbie at real estate, and they'll have different ideas that you've never heard of before, and ultimately you'll figure out how to monopolize and use those ideas. Teaching is really where your skills, the rubber hits the road.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:04] It's an incredible feeling, I can tell you that.
Brian Persson: [00:25:07] You're totally changing someone's life by teaching them what you know. So not only are you benefiting from it, but their whole trajectory of life is altered.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:18] So to recap our takeaways from today, the first one is, we got started. So just get started, take action. Number two, our success in real estate is, we stayed consistent with our plan. So create a plan, whatever that is, that works for you, and make sure you stay consistent, slow and steady. And thirdly, we kept upgrading our skills, whether that be through books, podcasts, absolutely getting into a room with experts, that was definitely one of our biggest game changers, and finding masterminds that work with you, but just keep upgrading your skills. Our next topic is going to be the top three real estate investment pitfalls we encountered. Don't forget to go to discoverlifebydesign.ca/wealth and download 'The 3 Mistakes that Keep High Achieving Couples from Building their Wealth, Freedom & Living a Life they Love'.
Brian Persson: [00:26:06] We release podcasts every two weeks, be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app to journey with us and create your life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:26:14] Thanks for listening to The Life by Design Podcast with your hosts, Jessilyn and Brian.