Your Financing Application Goes Into a BLACK HOLE!
When you apply for financing for apartment buildings, whether for CMHC-insured financing or conventional financing, it's almost like your financing application is going into a BLACK HOLE and you're never sure what's going to come out of it!
You cannot predict with exact certainty how the bank and/or CMHC will treat your financing application.
There is no cookie-cutter approach for all deals!
You won't know for sure what loan amount they'll give you, what cap rate and vacancy rate they'll use in their pro forma, etc., and they won't commit to anything in advance until you've submitted all your supporting documents and each deal is underwritten on a case by case basis on its own merits.
In this post, I share with you four tips on how to somewhat reduce uncertainty and build your reputation in the business.
For your convenience, I've attached below the link to CMHC's Underwriting Reference Guide which I refer to in the post.
LINK FOR CMHC'S REFERENCE GUIDE
Wishing you well!
...
The Truth Behind Knob and Tube Wiring! What you need to know!
Knob and tube wiring is very common in older buildings. If you find knob and tube wiring in an apartment building it can have serious consequences. For one, it can be a fire hazard and you may not be able to get insurance for this property until the situation is rectified.
Rectifying the situation can be extremely costly as it entails opening up walls.
In this vlog post, I discuss knob and tube wiring with the amazing building inspector, Allan Spisak of ACISSS Home and Commercial Inspection Consultants (www. aciss.ca). I guarantee you you will not find a better and knowledgeable inspector in Canada.
If you want to explore this topic further, below are some links on knob and tube wiring!
Pierre-Paul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob-and-tube_wiring
https://www.canadianhomeinspection.com/home-reference-library/electrical/knob-tube-wiring/
Consider Appealing Your Property Tax Value Assessment!
When I teach my multifamily investing workshop for a couple of days, by the end of it my students know who their best friend is:
NOI! Or Net Operating Income!
That's not your net cash flow. I'm talking about the income generated from operating the apartment building (income minus operating expenses) before you service the mortgage. Your net cash flow is the money left after you have paid your mortgage.
NOI is a multifamily investor's best friend because every time you increase the NOI, there's a huge BIF LIFT EFFECT or WEALTH MULTIPLIER EFFECT, that is the value of the property increases exponentially.
One of the ways that you can increase the NOI is by successfully appealing your property tax assessment if you feel the municipality has over-inflated the value of the property and therefore has inflated your tax bill.
Your Banker May Lie To You Sometimes!
In this post, I share with you a story of mine where a lender pretty much lied to me or at least was telling me something that was significantly inaccurate.
It pays off immensely to be an educated and sophisticated real estate investor, especially in my world of investing in apartment buildings of plus five units because there are many more moving parts than when you invest in small rental properties.
Lenders are sometimes lazy and the law of least effort often applies to their behaviour. Accordingly, they'll tell you stuff just because either it reduces their risks or it makes their lives easier and they think you don't know any better!
In the video, I mention CMHC's Reference Guide. Below is the link for it. Just keep in mind these are just that, guidelines. At the end of the day, lenders and CMHC can do whatever they want. But at least, guidelines are a starting point that enables you to know what the expectations are.
MASTERCLASSES COMING UP
I...
Investing in Smaller Markets and Not Enough Parking Stalls : Yes or No?
A recent graduate student from my Canadian Multifamily Investing Blueprint workshop asked me whether it was a good idea to purchase an apartment building in a smaller market and whether the fact that the property had less parking stalls than the total number of units was a problem.
In this short vlog, I answer those two questions.
Regarding investing in secondary markets, the bottom line is that in my opinion, there's nothing wrong investing in smaller, perhaps remote or rural markets as long as you understand the investment risk may be greater and you mitigate that risk accordingly.
For one, you'll probably acquire the asset at a higher cap rate. In other words, you'll pay less for a multifamily property in a smaller market than in a large centre, which serves as mitigation to a significant extent. Assets in the smaller markets are less desirable because there's less demand for them and rest assured your lender and/or CMHC would look at it this way too.
In my days as a former...
Why Investing in Apartment Buildings Makes Sense Especially During COVID-19!
Apartment buildings have been known to be counter-cyclical during times of crisis. I personally saw this phenomenon during the Great Recession of 2009 while I was a multifamily underwriter at CMHC.
It's no different during COVID-19. Apartment buildings continue to perform and as a hard asset, they will benefit from the inflation that is sure to come. Hard assets appreciate in value during inflationary times.
The Black Friday sale is on for the on-demand Canadian Multifamily Investing Blueprint. It's the biggest discount I've ever given. The next virtual workshop will be on February 26-28, 2020 and you can use the cost of the on-demand course as a credit toward the virtual workshop if there are spots left.
Click below for the BLACK FRIDAY OFFER.
BLACK FRIDAY OFFER! 50% DISCOUNT ON ON-DEMAND COURSE!
Wishing you and your family well!
PP
A 735% Cash on Cash ROI on his first apartment building! A GRAND SLAM!
I wanted to share another success story with you from a graduate student of mine, Tony Dinh, who took my very first 2-day live workshop back in 2011.
The above video is an excerpt from my interview with Tony. He and I had not connected since the workshop.
All pumped up after attending my workshop, Tony Dinh went out and bought his first 8-unit apartment building in Calgary with a $100,000 in down payment for a purchase price of $576,000 with seller financing. At $72K/door, the property was well under market value for the City of Calgary and I know many investors looking at that property might have passed on it!
Not Tony!
It resulted in an 735% cash on cash return on investment (including principal paydown and cash flow) in just seven and a half years when the City bought the 8-plex for $1,260,000 as part of an expropriation process to build a light rail train system.
This is a game-changer for his young family!
Tony is a first generation Canadian from boat people from...
The State of the Mortgage Market for Multifamily Properties - Interview with Mortgage Broker.
In this post, I talk to Nadeem Keshavjee, a mortgage broker with Canada ICI, about the state of the mortgage market for multifamily properties during COVID-19.
Nadeem will be attending my upcoming virtual workshop from October 30 to November 1, 2020.
He indicated that since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, more funds were available for apartment buildings for CMHC-insured financing than from conventional lenders (non-CMHC-insured). Because of that, CMHC was hit with an immense surge of financing applications which resulted in very long turnaround times up to three months.
As a result, last summer, CMHC issued guidelines restricting the use of funds on refinancing applications, or equity take-outs (see our blog post dated September 22, 2020) as a means to reduce the volume of applications.
Interest rates for CMHC-insured financing for quality borrowers and assets and in large centres for loan amounts in the range of $5M to $10M can be in the low 1% range and around...
SUCCESS STORY! Young Family On Their Path to Financial Freedom with First Multifamily Investment!
Recently, I just reconnected with one of my graduate students Zorya Belanger, who took my live Canadian Multifamily Investing Blueprint workshop three years ago.
Using the knowledge I shared with her and armed with courage, she and her husband took action and acquired their first multifamily property, a brand new six-plex.
Above is an excerpt (6.54 min.) of my interview with Zorya.
Click HERE to listen to the full interview. I highly recommend you watch the full interview, especially if you're starting out to invest in multifamily properties. There are a lot of gold nuggets!
Although they initially set out to look for a larger existing apartment building in the range of a ten-unit or so, a different opportunity came their way with this brand new three townhouse project with each one having a separate one-bedroom suite below, but all units are above ground.
There are many things I like about their strategy, namely they remained nimble and seized a different...
Big Fire in my Apartment Building! Let's talk insurance coverage!
Can you believe that last summer, I had two fires in two separate apartment buildings of mine just a month apart?
Crazy!
One of those fires led to a spectacular rescue of one of my tenants by a couple of utility workers who happened to be driving by my property with a ladder on the back of their truck. They grabbed their ladder and saved my tenant who was about to jump off her balcony to escape her unit which was engulfed in flames and heavy smoke!
The rescue made the tv news headlines that day!
Out of twenty units in my property, sixteen of them have to be completely redone!
So in today's post, I'm talking about insurance policy requirements for your multifamily properties.
Cheers!