Hello, and welcome! Well here I am! I decided to start a blog about my passion for real estate. I'm pretty small-time right now, but have aspirations to become a lot bigger. Right now, I calculate my real estate worth as what percent of my full-time job's take-home my real estate cash flow replaces (not counting maintenance). I don't know how valid such a measurement is but it seems a good enough rough-order-of-magnitude test for me. Right now the ratio is about 30%. I constantly look at ways to increase this number. Of course my future can not be decided by me, so there's all sorts of risks and obstacles to increasing this ratio, or even preventing this ratio from decreasing. I'm a firm believer in not knowing what tomorrow will or won't bring, but I figure I'll do my best today.
About me
I live in the Kitchener/Waterloo area, the "Alberta of Ontario" as so many realtors wish to tell me! And I believe them. I'm quite fortunate to live here: very smart people (WLU and U of Waterloo), economics not tied in a large to degree to any single industry, increasing population, good per-capita income, and all sorts of other pluses that I'll enumerate some other time.
Now, real estate can mean different things to different people. To me, my current interest is the rental market and, possibly surprising, I am not renting to students. I'm finding that landlords seem to enter a comfort zone where they rent to a certain group of people, and I sort fell into renting to non-students. I've explored student rentals and haven't convinced myself to jump in. Conversely, other landlord I talk seem deathly afraid of renting to non-students.
Of course my investment interests continue outside of rental. I'm pretty interested in stocks, mortgage lending, RRSPs, bonds, and the like. I have a huge amount to learn. My inspiration in matters of investing is by far, and by far I mean that no one else comes close, is Warren Buffett. I simply put a heavy weight on anything and everything he says. He made his billions honestly, sans ego, and apparently without lawyers! It's a dream of mine to meet him one day. Other's that I like to read about are George Soros, Paul Volcker, Paul Tudor Jones, Walter Schloss, Charlie Munger and others. I've read the Intelligent Investor, and am re-reading it. I'll admit I didn't follow alot of it the first time I read it but if Warren Buffett says it's the best book on investment ever written, so be it!
