Welcome to the Wisdom Lifestyle Money Show. I'm your host, Scott Dillingham. Today, I have Reese Trenhill from the Vanguard team at Manor Realty with us talking commercial real estate in and around Windsor Essex County. How's it going, Reese?
Rhys Trenhaile:Yeah, good. Good, good. Got my coffee ready, Scott.
Scott Dillingham:Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, me too. And I'm excited to chat because not only are we talking about real estate and everybody can talk about real estate, but I think what's super important about what you do is you actually specialize in working with investors. Not only are you a commercial investor yourself, right?
Scott Dillingham:You sell to clients. So I think that's super important for any client or person who's listening. You always want to work with people who are doing what they sell because if they're not, there's a lot of risks involved with that. So how did it start? Like, how did you get into the commercial real estate space?
Rhys Trenhaile:So before I was a real estate agent, so I was in the university. And a very long story short, I ran track and field at the university, and one of the guys bought a student rental property. And we would go on these long runs training together, and we would ask tons of questions. So by the time we won a national championship and I'm gonna date myself here, but but we won a national championship in 1998. And by then, five guys owned seven student rental properties and two racehorses at the racetrack.
Rhys Trenhaile:Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. So I got the bug early, to be a landlord. I was literally in university renting out the university students, which is a bit weird.
Rhys Trenhaile:But a bunch of us were doing it, so it didn't feel so weird. And a lot of those guys had gone on to create wealth with real estate investment. Like one's already retired at 48 years old, you know? Nice. So the, that's where it started.
Rhys Trenhaile:And then I went through university. I became a lawyer. I never practiced. I got called to the bar and I was going to go work at this law firm. And long story short, they gave the job to somebody else because they had to wait for me to get called to the bar for four months.
Rhys Trenhaile:I looked at it as, Don't worry about it. There's a reason why. Right? There's a reason why. And a lot of it was my buddies were all tradesmen.
Rhys Trenhaile:They didn't have to go to school for seven years. And they were already making at the time between $60 and $120 a year, which would be like a $100 to $200 a year now. And I'm like, they wanna start me at 42,000 as a lawyer. I'm like, I can't make less than my buddies. Do you know what I Work at CNC machinist.
Rhys Trenhaile:It's not because it's a that's a bad profession. I love those professions, but I'm a lawyer. Hear the
Scott Dillingham:end of it. I'm a lawyer. I would never hear the end of it.
Rhys Trenhaile:Oh, I know. So that's when another lawyer suggested he was already selling real estate. He said, Reese, you should you're a natural salesperson. You should sell real estate. I was like, I'm already really interested in real estate.
Rhys Trenhaile:The real estate law, when I was articling at McTague Law Firm, was really interested in it. You know, I own student rental properties. Do you know what I mean? So that led to me getting my real estate license and people don't realize that you use that law degree every single day, as a real estate agent because you're able to negotiate more complex transactions than the average agent, right? That's what you're trained to do, you know, for three stinking years, you know, plus Articling for another year.
Rhys Trenhaile:So that's how that all happened. That was the, the evolution into that guy. And then over the last twenty one years, I've become a better and better investor. I, we pass on that information to the client base to make them better investors. And essentially everybody that invests with us, you know, one of the property managers that we use, one of the contractors that we also use, one of the mortgage specialists like you that we use, right?
Rhys Trenhaile:Like Steve Druzh on our team right now is getting some stuff done with you. In essence, and this is hard, this is harder, I think, for Windsorites than the out of town Toronto investor to understand is that we practice what we preach, you know? So we now have clients, because I've been doing this for twenty one years, we now have clients that are retired. They've sold off all the income properties. They've bought a multimillion dollar house on a lake and they're done.
Rhys Trenhaile:And that's plural. There's more than one of those guys that has just done that. Right? And for myself, yeah, like I'm living quite well, but I'm not living quite well because of my real estate commissions. It's because of how I converted my active income into passive income through real estate investment.
Rhys Trenhaile:And again, Steve Druge on the team, and I know Steve doesn't mind me saying this, Steve's got a Lamborghini, right? Was the first guy in town with the new Lotus. Like, we practice what we preach. So when somebody on Facebook goes, all, all you real estate agents say the same thing. It's just I just wanna go whack.
Scott Dillingham:Yep.
Rhys Trenhaile:No. We don't.
Scott Dillingham:Give them a little smack.
Rhys Trenhaile:Well, so one of my posts one of my videos I just did with Sadie let me see if I can find it here. On Facebook, when I just did a I just did a video with Sadie and I posted it. Sadie Moro and her team, guys, she sells more high rise condos than anybody because of how many she sells to investors. She also does new builds. You wanna do a new build, one of these federal preapproved six plex designs, you go to Sadie.
Rhys Trenhaile:Right? Sadie's in the the famille. She's like, her whole family's construction. Everybody knows her down at city hall or Amherstburg's town hall. They all love dealing with her.
Rhys Trenhaile:That's how you get things done and built. Yeah. Let me see if I can find this here. Because the point I thought I talked to her
Scott Dillingham:about the CMHC stuff, just thinking out loud. Because if she's building six units, we can do up to 95% loan to value.
Rhys Trenhaile:Well, there so we're trying we're trying to find enough people that want to build those on the infill lots. I don't think people realize how easy that's getting now. Right? Like even dealing with the bureaucrats down at city hall, when I started doing some major, major projects guys, I got about a $100,000,000 in projects going on Downtown Windsor right now, converting old buildings from commercial use to residential use on the upper floors. Lot of money for it at the three levels of government.
Rhys Trenhaile:But boy, oh boy, Scotty, when we had to start dealing with the bureaucracy, you know, you talked to them four years ago, you had to submit the same document five or six times and you never knew who was holding up your file. You couldn't tell. It was insane. Now it's all cloud permitting. Now you have a development assistant coordinator.
Rhys Trenhaile:Not only can I not only do I have to only submit the same documents once, I can see who's holding up my file? And then I can tell my development assistant coordinator, he's an awesome human being, Can you see why this guy in public works, this person in heritage hasn't done their job yet? And I tell you what, Scott, eight times out of 10, I got a response and that bottleneck's gone within twenty four hours. Like, and people didn't believe me.
Scott Dillingham:That's incredible.
Rhys Trenhaile:I'm like, it is way back. It's still got a lot of work to go. There's still a ton of work to go. Like, the nimbyism that's embedded into these the zoning and stuff is ridiculous. It's causing the homeless.
Rhys Trenhaile:Like, it's just so dumb. But they probably sped up the process, I would say, by half. Used to take two years to get something like that done. Now it takes a year, which is totally reasonable, you know? It's not bad at all.
Rhys Trenhaile:Awesome.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah. That's incredible. And what we're gonna do for everybody who's listening too is we're gonna have multiple segments because Reese and his team collectively, there's a wealth of advice from different different aspects. But I think that it's really cool just to talk about your story in the sense, Reese, as as sort of the starting episode with with you and your team, is just that, like you said, right, you're running track and considering and talking about rentals. Right?
Scott Dillingham:And then it goes from there to how many units, like, is the Canada Building just for fun for people listening?
Rhys Trenhaile:67 residential to retail. Yeah.
Scott Dillingham:See, that's massive, right? So anybody can get there, right? If you've got the right team and the right expertise and experience there. And so I love that story, right? Because people just getting started, you know, they're discouraged about buying property number two.
Rhys Trenhaile:Oh, yeah.
Scott Dillingham:You're on a completely different level, but it's years of persistence and not
Rhys Trenhaile:first getting one's the hardest one, though, I find for investors, especially if they've never taken a calculated risk in their lives. If they've be if they've been an an employee their entire adult lives, that it's the mental side that they struggle with the most, which is learning to take small calculated risks with your money. They really struggle with it. Unless you point it out and they become conscious of it, that's a big one. I'm surprised you said the second one, because really we find it's the first one.
Rhys Trenhaile:If we get the first one done, we get them settled in and the fear goes away, the questions go away, and now they can focus on building up the portfolio. And usually it's like the third or fourth one where you get your first steal. And people go, oh, why can't I get a steal the first one? It's because you don't even know what a steal is yet. Even if you do know it's a steal, you can't move fast enough.
Rhys Trenhaile:You're scared. You got a million questions. This the the veteran investor, he's gonna go, oh, steal. Reese, write it up. Being conditional for a day.
Rhys Trenhaile:I just gotta make sure I get my financing. You can't compete with that as a rookie investor. Yeah. So you're not gonna get a steal 99 times out of a 100 as your first property. Probably not your second property, but by your third.
Rhys Trenhaile:You should start because now you're ready. You know what to look for. You know what a steal is. You're mentally ready. You're financially ready because you've already been dealing with Scott.
Rhys Trenhaile:Scott likes you. He trusts you. You trust him. You trust your real estate agent because they've been making you wealthy. Boom.
Rhys Trenhaile:That's when it starts kicking in. Everybody wants to hit a home well, not everybody. But a lot of people wanna hit a home run their first time. It's like you're dreaming. You're dreaming.
Rhys Trenhaile:You're not gonna be be on the steal. So I've been doing this for too long. I'm too quick. I'm too qualified. I'm ready to go.
Rhys Trenhaile:And I'll get back off my soapbox, Scotty.
Scott Dillingham:No. No. No. You're right, though. But you're the mindset.
Scott Dillingham:You're right about the mindset. I see that a lot. But I think the reason why I'm saying deal two is the hardest is because sometimes we see a lot of investors that will say, you know, maybe they'll move into a duplex. Right? And that's their first investment.
Scott Dillingham:So they're renting out one side, they're offsetting, then they're going to move into another one. So leveraging the 5% down programs that are available.
Rhys Trenhaile:Yeah.
Scott Dillingham:Right? But once you're on deal two or three or four, right, and those 5% options disappear.
Rhys Trenhaile:Oh, I see.
Scott Dillingham:Then it's now you need to bring money into the deal, right? And then that's where we're seeing the traction slow for
Rhys Trenhaile:Well, see, but this is where I think a good partnership between real estate agents that know what they're doing with income properties and, financial experts like you guys with income properties comes in handy because we can avoid those roadblocks. If we know you're gonna roadblock by the second one, we're not going to want to sell you a traditional duplex if we know that's gonna be it for the next four or five years. You're stuck at that What point, we would suggest instead is you buy a house where you can put a mother-in-law suite into the basement, right? There's four different types of additional dwelling units, guys. There's the basement one, that's the cheapest.
Rhys Trenhaile:The second and third cheapest are the addition on the back of the house or the detached garage. The most expensive one, which everybody wants to talk about until they're blue in the face, is the detached unit in the backyard. I don't know why that is the focus with ADUs. Like it is the most expensive of the four options. You wanna find a house that's got a good basement with a side exit or a backdoor exit.
Rhys Trenhaile:You pop a mother-in-law suite in there. Now you've juiced your property value up and you can refinance. You can rent out both units. Now you're cash flowing over a thousand bucks a month. It's beautiful.
Rhys Trenhaile:Way more in a duplex. And now you can refinance that sucker and get most, if not all of your money back out to do the next one with Scott. Right? Yeah. And you can it's called BRRRR strategy.
Rhys Trenhaile:You buy, you renovate, you rent, you refinance, you repeat. It's just a circle.
Scott Dillingham:And to further add to that, and you nailed it actually. And that's what we tell investors to do. And from the financing standpoint, we'll structure it as a mortgage plus improvements. Yeah. So we'll actually have the lender give the client the money for rentals.
Scott Dillingham:So they're not using it all themselves. Yeah. And so by forcing that appreciation, like you said, you can then refinance faster and you've got funds.
Rhys Trenhaile:And by the way, I wanted to prove that I wasn't just another Johnny come lately real estate agent saying the same damn thing. So we just did a video, me and Sadie, on YouTube. And one of the guys said, hold on. One of the guys said, it's a doctor, doctor investor. I'm and he's not our we're just winning him over from another group.
Rhys Trenhaile:I'm not gonna say, but this was his comment. And this won him to us earlier this week. I'm more impressed with the flat out honesty. I don't buy condos. There are don't buy condos is something I never thought I'd hear from a salesman, period.
Rhys Trenhaile:What he's talking about is we identified only three good condos to buy as income properties out of 179 currently for sale. Okay. So what he heard in that message, which was what not, what I was trying to convey was most condos don't invest in them. Talk to Sadie, you wanna get one of these three. And it's like that on a regular basis right now.
Rhys Trenhaile:So what I was trying to convey was Sadie really knows what she's doing. She really knows what properties to put you in. Like there's a of condo buildings you do not wanna invest in. They're not run well, right? Yeah.
Rhys Trenhaile:They're behind on the reserve funds or, you know, there's a huge engineering thing coming up. But also like which one's actually cash flow? Which ones are gonna be nice, steady investments for that doctor, for that account? The professionals, they gotta be able to sleep at night. You can't sell them to fourplex in a poor area of town.
Rhys Trenhaile:Just can't, you can't do that to them. So anyway, I just wanted to point out, right, that, you know, that's what it is. And I said back to this guy, I said, if you invest with us, you know, we treat you like an adult. We give you the good, the bad, the ugly. We make you we let you make a sound decision.
Rhys Trenhaile:We provide the same advice we use ourselves. And well, we now have teammates with Lamborghinis. We have clients retired on Mansions and Lakes. And yet people will still get on Facebook and tell us we don't know what we're talking about. If you want get wealthy with cash flowing properties in a major city in Ontario, I'm telling you, this is it.
Rhys Trenhaile:You got Scott for the finance and you got us for the sales. And we're not gonna lead you astray. We even have a human greed factor in you getting you wealthy. The more income properties you buy, the more commissions we get to buy your own income properties. So your success is more money for us.
Rhys Trenhaile:So why on earth would we wanna sell you a junker? As soon as we sell you a junker, it's over. We won't be able to sell you anything else even if you stick with us for another four or five years because you're stuck. We don't want you to get stuck. We want you to get wealthy so you're buying more and more and more faster and faster and faster, bigger and bigger and bigger.
Rhys Trenhaile:Yeah. So there is a capitalist pig greed interest there as well, man. So we're here. We're here. Scott's here.
Rhys Trenhaile:Guys, I don't know. Not too many people don't get it, buddy. Too many people don't get it. That's why I may be yelling a little bit. Try to get through to
Scott Dillingham:these That's people on your podcast, okay, but it's true. It's true. There's so many realtors that are just looking at getting, you know, as bad as it sounds, you know, food on their table now. They're
Rhys Trenhaile:not Oh yeah, the building those long term relationships. Well, we just, got, yeah. I'm not gonna get into it, but yes.
Scott Dillingham:You know, there's people out there that are like that, right?
Rhys Trenhaile:Yeah. I don't wanna call you higher higher than that. But yeah, it's far too common. Far too common. Yeah.
Rhys Trenhaile:Yeah. And
Scott Dillingham:a realtor will never they'll never tell you that. But I know just from your team's track record and how long you've been in business.
Rhys Trenhaile:Well, and I can tell you there's only, like, one other real estate agent doing income properties in Windsor that doesn't bleed out clients to us. Because they're doing that to their clients, either through their own sort of inexperience or, you know, maybe they're not landlords themselves, so they don't know the nuance. But yeah, I mean, and it's constantly like, the only time we see that bum tenant, you know, that's not paying rent for six months, and then we gotta unravel that. The only time we ever see that is when we inherit a client from somebody else we gotta solve the problem. We didn't create the problem, man.
Rhys Trenhaile:But then we gotta solve it. And, you know, if you can pull the thorn out of the tiger's paw, then they're clients for life. Right? So we always work hard at those.
Scott Dillingham:That's it. That's awesome. No. I love it. I love it.
Scott Dillingham:So what we're gonna do, we're we're gonna cut for today because we we are overtime a little bit. But, guys, we're gonna have Reese on. We're gonna have him bring his energy, his team on again. We're gonna talk more about the commercial properties, stuff about the team. I'd love to hear about Sadie's six plexes she's doing, right?
Scott Dillingham:Because again, those programs, you can finance up to 95%, which is just massive.
Rhys Trenhaile:Oh, we'll get Sadie on, know? Yeah. Now that you have those pre approved designs from the federal government, what that ultimately means, guys, is the local bureaucrats can't stop you from building it. If you're zoned for it, step aside, boys. Yep.
Rhys Trenhaile:Yep. I got my preapproval from from the federal government. Right? What are they gonna do? Nothing.
Rhys Trenhaile:They can't do anything. Yeah.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah. I I just got one client confidentiality, so I won't give names or addresses, but triplex in Southwood Lakes. And you know Southwood Lakes, they don't have triplexes there. No. But he's he's got it approved, he's starting to build.
Scott Dillingham:And I'm like, wow. So that's because government. Right? Doug Ford saying, yes. You can build three three units now, right?
Scott Dillingham:Everywhere. And that is
Rhys Trenhaile:It's only a matter of time before the provincial government has fourplexes of right because we tend to follow British Columbia. And British Columbia brought it in, I think, about eight months ago. We tend to lag behind BC, but we tend to adopt and hopefully, this is a story for another podcast. Hopefully, we adopt what British Columbia did with their landlord tenant tribunal.
Scott Dillingham:Hopefully.
Rhys Trenhaile:Let's talk about that next time. That's a really good If anybody wants to hear more about that, guess, Scottie's gotta hang up the phone here, guys. You know, just message me and I'll send you the video we did on that recently on our YouTube channel. Yeah.
Scott Dillingham:Perfect. Yeah. So you're right. We do gotta run, but how do they message you? How does somebody reach out to you?
Rhys Trenhaile:Well, I don't know how this works, man. Can you link our YouTube channel and our Facebook
Scott Dillingham:I'll link it in the show notes. Yeah. But you can you can state it here as well for those that are listening in
Rhys Trenhaile:the car. Yeah. So anybody who's listening verbally, the the easiest way to reach out to us is through our website, thevanguardteam.com. Right? The t h e, van, like a car, guard, stand on guard for the team, there's noin,team.com.
Rhys Trenhaile:There you go. Have said it like that before.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah. Well, I've got a son who's, like, 10 and he's into anime. So whenever I hear Vanguard, I think of like these robots with shields and massive protectors.
Rhys Trenhaile:That's right.
Scott Dillingham:I feel like, that's what you guys are for the investors.
Rhys Trenhaile:It was. So the Vanguard is also the lead ship in a convoy. Okay. So I do like to think, I mean, we were the first sort of modern real estate team in the city, which somebody reminded me of the other day. I hadn't thought about it in a while, but yeah, like we've been a team in a modern sort of North American sense for twenty years.
Rhys Trenhaile:You know? That's awesome.
Scott Dillingham:Yeah. Incredible. Yeah. Incredible. Awesome.
Scott Dillingham:Well, sounds good. Thanks so much, Reese. Great having you on. We'll put your details in the show notes as well for everybody. And stay tuned for the next episode, guys.
Rhys Trenhaile:All right. Thanks for having me on, pal. Appreciate it.
Scott Dillingham:No problem.
Rhys Trenhaile:All right.
Scott Dillingham:Take care.
Rhys Trenhaile:All right,