Welcome to the Wisdom Lifestyle Money Show. I'm your host, Scott Dillingham. Today, I've got a special guest with us, Paul DiBruzzo. He is a investor focused realtor, and he's also a developer in and around the GTA. So welcome, Paul.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Thanks for having me, Scott.
Scott Dillingham:No worries. No worries. Paul, whenever I start these shows, I always like to find out a little bit about your history and your background to find out what made you so successful and who you are today. So do you mind sharing some of background and how you got to where you are today?
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah, no problem. I'll let you know what I'm doing today and then maybe we'll go back in time a bit. We're an investor focused realtors our bread and butter in what we do. Basically what that means is we're realtors however we focus on working with investors and there could be small ones, small investors, big investors, small properties, big properties. Anything from single family homes and pre construction condos all the way up to small multifamily, large multifamily land developments.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Anything to do with investment is where our specialty is, and we have a lot of resources and expertise in all these different sub strategies and student rentals and infill developments and all kinds of stuff like that, where investors find us helpful, and they want to stay with us and use our mentorship over the long term. But to get to that point, we had to grow our own portfolios also. In this business, and in this niche, let's call it, you have to walk your talk. You can't be an investor focused person, at least in my opinion, without being an investor yourself. I think you believe that too, Scott, which is why we get along.
Paul D'Abruzzo:I know you work with a lot of investors, but you're also a real estate investor yourself, and that helps you have a proper authentic conversation with people. So authenticity is really important to us. In our own portfolio beyond all the rental properties we have, we've gotten involved in development. In order to achieve a place of financial freedom for us, it was important that our portfolio created future income, say cash flow and wealth generation with all these rental properties, and now income. Money goes in, money comes back out with profit.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And some people do that with flips or private mortgages. We decided to specialize in developments. It could be small, infield type developments or medium sized developments, building six units, which we're doing now, nine units. I have two projects that are nine units. We just finished building 18 townhouses.
Paul D'Abruzzo:We're about to build 26 townhouses starting later this year. And those are projects that create now income for us inside our portfolio. And if that's somewhere, if you're listening to this and that's somewhere you want to get to, we didn't start there. We started with one single rental property. So if you're starting from scratch, you have to work your way up there.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And when I was younger, I had no, zero aspirations to become a real estate investor, to be honest. When I was younger, my biggest dream was to become a firefighter, believe it or not. And at one point, I did do that. I was a fireman, a firefighter in the city of Toronto for ten years. And I retired a few years ago now.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life, because I really like that job. I think it's the best, one of the best JOBs in the world. And, but it was getting a little bit too much for me and nothing bad to say about the job itself. It was, I was a full time fireman. I was a full time husband, a full time father to three daughters.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Never mind a full time property investor with multiple, multiple rental properties, then becoming a developer and being an investor focused realtor, having a team to manage. It was a lot to take on and I had to give up. In order to move forward in my life, I had to take one step back before taking three steps forward. And after a lot of hard thinking and contemplating, I decided to give up that part of my life, to focus on being an investor and helping other people do the same, if that makes any sense.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah, for sure.
Paul D'Abruzzo:I didn't have any handouts, I promise. I bought my first property in Hamilton, Ontario. I live in Oakville now, I bought my first property in Hamilton in 2000, it was 2009 or 2010, something like that for 238,000. And that one property turned to two and then three and then four and then six and then eight and then 10 and then, you know, on and on. I just kept accumulating properties.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And I really didn't have any help from my parents, God bless them, but my parents were split up, divorced when I was six months old. I grew up for the most part with my mom and my grandparents my grandparents house. They were old school Europeans, Italian, really no English speaking in the household. And they taught me about hard work and that's what they did when they came to this country. They just worked their tails off to make a better life for themselves and their kids and that's what I took from them.
Paul D'Abruzzo:So that's why I wanted to get a JOB and become a fireman. There's nothing wrong with that, but if your goal is financial freedom and if your goal is to not be tied down to a job and have options in your life, Having a job in our current society is going to handcuff you in a lot of ways. You can still definitely start by getting rental properties, but for me, I had to let myself go and be have the freedom of being in business to to get to where I wanted to go. So that's kind in in in as quick as I can tell you where I came from.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah. Know. That's awesome. And you know what? That is one of the things that I really respect about you is I remember when I first met you, like you said, you, you were a full time fireman, full time husband, full time investor, full time realtor, like you were going at it from all angles and you still have that, but now you don't have the full time fireman, right?
Scott Dillingham:So you can really focus on the real estate, whether it's development or working with clients as a realtor. I do really respect that about you because not a lot of people have that same drive. So I think that's a really cool thing. And one
Paul D'Abruzzo:thing to add to that, what I ended up learning the hard way was that you, regardless of what your business is or what your investing style is, you have to have an ROL. Why is important, but without the ROL, without the return on your lifestyle, what's the point? Right? And that's a term I coined about five years ago when I started, when I learned the hard way myself that I wasn't getting a return on my lifestyle. I had all these assets, I wasn't enjoying my life anymore.
Paul D'Abruzzo:I had to get a return on lifestyle. So if you're starting out, just remember, it doesn't matter whether you have five or 10 or 20 properties or what kind of cash flow number you have. Whatever investments you're doing, they have to improve your lifestyle. They have to help help you spend more time with your kids or your wife or help you work less so you can play more. Whatever that ROL definition for you is, I think that's what your ultimate goal has to be and should be.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah, no, I agree. I love that. I love that philosophy. Now, what was it like? What was your turning point?
Scott Dillingham:I remember mine clearly, but what was your turning point when you decided, hey, I want to invest in real estate. I want to do this. Can you describe that?
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah, I know. I'll make the story as brief as possible, but like I was 23 years old. And back then I was reading books. I probably read 150 books between the age of 20 and 23. You can see some of my favourite ones still on my bookshelf here.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And I was just in the phase of learning and absorbing information because I knew I didn't want to work for fifty years and hopefully retire on a pension kind of thing. So I was attending conferences and I attended this conference called Millionaire Mind Intensive in Toronto from a guy I put it on, his name was T. Harvicker. And some of you listening might know this one. He has a book called The Millionaire Mind.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Great book if you're getting into that law of attraction and how to attract kind of money into your life. Anyway, so I attended this conference and very good, very eye opening for me at that time, at that age, and he was of course, he's a big time salesman and he was selling other courses at his conference. And there was one that stuck out for me. Conference was called Never Work Again. And it was a conference in California where you would go and you learn about all kinds of different passive income strategies, so you never have to work again.
Paul D'Abruzzo:That was the premise. That just like, my eyes lit up, and I'm like, I paid for it on my credit card at the time, and then figured out how to pay back my credit card because I was poor. Went to California by myself and I remember being there and there must have been like seven hundred-eight 100 people there. I remember in this big conference room in Santa Barbara, California. They started to do this thing like everybody under 30 stand up and everybody under 29, under 28, 27, 26, 25, 24.
Paul D'Abruzzo:When he got to 23, it was me and one other kid at the other side of the room standing up and I'm like please don't let me be a little gun. He said 22, and I sat down. This kid who was 21 or 22 was the youngest person there, and he got pulled on stage, and he did this whole thing. And that was a turning point for me. I'm like holy shit, like I have an opportunity here, that if I learn these strategies and I start implementing them now, by the time I'm 30 or 32 or 33, you know seven, eight, nine, ten years, I can really set myself up for the rest of my life.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And that's the journey I embarked on at that point.
Scott Dillingham:No, I love it. That's an awesome story. Super cool. Mine is so much more basic. I just read Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Paul D'Abruzzo:I love
Scott Dillingham:your story. It's such a good book to get started. That was the catalyst. And then obviously I read a whole bunch more and then I learned best by doing. So I started getting out there and just doing, and then here we are.
Scott Dillingham:That's awesome. Cool. So I wanna talk and spend the rest of our time here talking about some of the development opportunities that you have. Now I know for the listeners here, they're probably curious about returns and how much they can make and stuff if they decide to invest with you. And I know that we can't go over those details and it's property by property, project by project, it's different.
Scott Dillingham:But I'd like to talk about the opportunity and how you can use investors' money to help grow their money and grow the development portfolio.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah, got it. In some of these bigger projects, it takes a significant amount of capital to put funding, money, cash to, it needs to be infused into the project to get everything going and make sure we have enough funding to make everything go forward. Development is capital heavy at times. And of course some of the smaller ones we've been able to fund ourselves, like I've done it, or just me and a partner. But some of these bigger projects where, you know, we built 18 townhouses and we're building 26, we needed a cash infusion of about 3,000,000 point dollars And that's not always, even if I did have the money, it's probably not always the best use of the money.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And I think when you get to that point where you're doing projects of that size, it's just natural to want to collaborate and get more people involved. So we created, not we created, but we're using a very simple structure called a GP LP structure, where myself and my development partner, Mr. Drutath, and I are the GPs, which means a general partner, and we have investors who are funding the $3,300,000 and they are called LPs, are limited partners. So, the real difference is that we're equal, we own equal shares of the project, of the corporation. The big difference is that Drew and I are general partners, which means we call the shots.
Paul D'Abruzzo:We drive the development because we're experienced and we know what we're doing. And the limited partners have an equal share. They make as much money as we do. Equal share, equal risk too. They're passive in a sense where they let us do the work and they collect the cheque.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And the benefit of doing that is that, what I just touched on, is that you get to participate in returns at the developer level. And I can tell you development is profitable, or nobody would do it. And it's got to be profitable because there is risks involved, and it is a lot of work. And so you get to participate at our level of profit, but mitigate your risk tremendously. Although you're participating in the same risk we are, we know what we're doing, And we're not about to put our entire reputations, our entire portfolios, our entire lifestyle at risk by going overboard and screwing up an investment.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Because when we go and get construction financing with these developments, we're putting up our own guarantees, not yours. It's just your money is in there and you're participating with us. It's like a big joint venture if that makes any sense, Scott.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah. I know for sure. For sure. It does to me and I think the way that you explain it, it'll make sense to even somebody just getting started. So can you work with anybody?
Scott Dillingham:Can anybody give you money? Is there a minimum? Do they have to have so much net worth? Can you touch on that?
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah, it depends on the project. If it's, if I'm doing, we're doing something smaller and we're participating in a, it's more of a joint venture, then yeah, can be anybody. And we need enough money to do the project. But on these projects, some of these more lucrative ones that are, we have this GPLP joint venture structure, yeah, we've taken minimum investments of 50,000 to $100,000 so in that range most people are in, and in the contract, have to fit into a category. You either have to be an accredited investor, or you need to have a previous personal or business relationship with me or any of the other general partners.
Paul D'Abruzzo:So we have to know each other from a business perspective. Maybe we've done a real estate deal in the past before, or we've attended meetings together. We have a documentable relationship. We've been communicating for a while, or we're personal friends of that nature. And even if we're not personal friends or business associates, that's documented, we might have to become friends on that level before you can invest in it.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Those are the rules that are set out, and we want to follow them. We don't want to skirt the rules and get ourselves into trouble over one project.
Scott Dillingham:No, yeah, that makes sense. I fully agree. So what we'll do is like at the end of this, we'll have a link or something and we can discuss this after on how a client who might be interested in investing with you, how sort of get started. We'll put that in the bottom of this video. And if you're listening via any podcasting platform, put the link there.
Scott Dillingham:So I don't wanna still date this, but is there a project or opportunity for if somebody is listening to this now that they could invest in? Could you tell us a little bit about what that looks like?
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah, absolutely. There's, we have a few projects, or one larger project happening in Ontario. And briefly, we purchased the north and the Northwest parking lots of the Seaway Mall in Welland. And we're repurposing that empty parking lot into a very dense residential development. And we have a presentation on all this and I get from what Scott's saying, we can link a recording to the presentation or you we can even, Scott, if you do have enough demand and and people wanna know about what we're doing and wanna participate, we can do a live call just for your people.
Paul D'Abruzzo:I'm happy to do that. We can talk about this. But if you're picturing it in your mind, you've taken this large space, I think it's about five or six acres, if I'm not mistaken. We've, through the development of the land and the site plan approval process, we've carved that up into fifteen, one five, different blocks of residential development. And each of those blocks has some unique characteristics and there'll be different developments on them.
Paul D'Abruzzo:So our first foray or the first building we're going to be doing on this entire site is gonna be on Block 4 Of 15, and it's gonna be 26 townhomes we're gonna be building. And we're raising capital for that. We're almost done getting very close to $3,000,000 raise, to be honest. But because we have so many blocks, we're probably going to do a second one in tandem, either a block five or a block two, whatever one makes the most sense, and do another 26. So we have the capacity to raise another $3,000,000 or so and have more people participate in the profits that this development will take in over the next couple of years.
Scott Dillingham:That's awesome. I love it, Paul. And you were discussing this project with me prior too, and it seems exciting and Welland's got a lot of good stuff going on. So I'm excited about the project just like I'm sure you are.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah. It's, we're very excited. It's a fantastic location. I guess I'm biased, but it's one of the best locations in all of Welland and one of the best in Niagara too. They're very pro growth there and we're starting from scratch and so there's lots of money on the table for everybody to participate and earn a good return.
Paul D'Abruzzo:And it's been popular for some strange reasons where even I couldn't predict. And given what's happening with interest rates in the last year, a year and a half or so, and it's become challenging for a lot of people to qualify with residential financing. People with some cash on the sidelines still want to invest, but if the qualification is not there, they've been able to invest with us and still get a good return on their money and not leave their cash in a bank account getting killed by inflation. So that was a very unique piece of feedback we've gotten from a number of people who've invested with us. And so that's something to just take into consideration, because the economic climate is what it is.
Paul D'Abruzzo:There's such a demand for new housing in Ontario, it's almost insatiable, but with inflation the way it is and interest rates the way it is, people still need to have a good place for their money to live and grow. So I think that's important to mention to everybody.
Scott Dillingham:Yep. No, I fully agree. Now we keep these episodes short on purpose. We've done some research about listening and people listen around twenty to thirty minutes. So we have to wrap up, but is there any final message or anything that you'd like to say to the audience today that maybe you could inspire them or a call to action or anything like that?
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah, maybe a couple of things. One other thing that's, and I'm getting this feedback from some of the people who are investing with us in the project is that this is a very unique opportunity to also learn about development also while getting involved and profiting. Now that's how I learned when I was learning development. There was no university course or college course or even book to read about how do I do this. It was I met a developer, actually, Drew Toth, my partner now, and he was doing this small, very small development.
Paul D'Abruzzo:I said, Hey, you know what? I'll put up the money. You do all the development. I just want to follow you along and learn what you're doing so that I can do it myself in the future. And that was probably one of the That was my university course on how to develop.
Paul D'Abruzzo:So what we're doing for investors who are joining us is we're having a monthly call. Last Thursday of every month, twenty-thirty minutes, we're just sharing the progress as we move forward in our site plan process and fulfilling conditions. You see what's going on and you learn. And if you want to get started and do a small infill project or sever a lot or something very small, that you know the process and it gives you some confidence. And I think if there's a call to action, Scott, I think it's, if you have a few people who want to learn about this and learn what we're why and why it's important and why it would be a good investment that we maybe we host a call for people.
Paul D'Abruzzo:So maybe you can put a link to for people to register their interest, or if there are just a few people who wanna know more, we can send them the recording and we have a presentation recorded where you can get all the information you're ever looking for.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah. No. That's perfect, Paul. We will do that, and we'll even put this in our email marketing system, so we can reach out to the investors through there that are looking for these types of opportunity. But That's awesome.
Scott Dillingham:Paul, I really appreciate you for coming on and sharing your expertise and talking about what's new. Because you said it actually, there's a lot of people that have money in the bank and they don't know what to invest in right now. And I do see this as a great opportunity. You know, there's lots of great opportunities out there, but you have to work with experts and people you trust and understand the process. Right?
Scott Dillingham:You don't wanna invest in something you don't understand. So I think it's super cool that you guys have the monthly videos about this as well so people can pay attention and learn and grow. So it's super cool. But so thanks so much, Paul, for for coming on. I look forward to airing this.
Scott Dillingham:It should be live next week and we'll chat soon.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Yeah. Absolutely. Scott, look forward to having a call with your people. Awesome.
Scott Dillingham:Thanks, Paul.
Paul D'Abruzzo:Take care.