Hello Everyone Investing in Hamilton Real Estate!!
I hope you all had a fabulous weekend!! We certainly did with the wonderful weather and off the charts guest speaker Donato Cascioli. Don bought his first investment property right out of high school at the age of 19 when interest rates were 8.5%!!!
To do the math, a typical mortgage for a Hamilton Investor can be around $250,000. The monthly mortgage payment at today’s variable rate of 2% (free money, by the way) is 1,059.64 per month. At 8.5% interest when Don first invested, the mortgage payment would be almost DOUBLE at $2,013.07.  Even at 8.5% interest Don was able to make a profit investing in real estate. Note that Don’s strategy is different than most as he bought houses with acreage, held them for 20+ years and now large developers make him offers in  millions for his land.  Not bad, eh?
Some other notable lessons from Don:
- He ignored the news. Can you blame him? Don has been through two market meltdowns yet here he is, financially independent. Don said if the going got tough, he would put in 16 hour days to pull through.  The spoils go to those who hustle.  How many people do you know who can’t be bothered to invest in real estate because they work a 40 hour day, commute for 1-2 hours and yet watch hours of TV or play video games.
- What financial independence means to your health. While preparing to undergo chemotherapy to go to war with Cancer (Don gave Cancer the fight of his life), the medical staff asked the typical questions: do you drink? Do you smoke? Are you financially independent? The last question puzzled Don (I didn’t expect it either). Supposedly being financially independent is an important factor to beating cancer. As Don was undergoing chemotherapy, his job was to allow his body to recover from the treatments and that meant sleeping ten hours at night, 3 hour naps during the day, and NO WORK or STRESS.  Not exactly an easy thing to do if you are living paycheque to paycheque.
- The one that got away. Don has done well but as with all investors, we all have that deal we’ll always remember as the deal that got away. Â This one would have profited Don EIGHT MILLION Dollars. In a nutshell, Don had a good relationship with these land owners, half of the lot was ideal, the other, not so much. Â Don made them an offer on the good half. Â Competing investors offered the sellers double the amount for both halves and won the deal for about $630,000. 15 years later, they sold to a large builder for about $8.6 million. Â OUCH.
Thank you so much to Don for coming out on a summer Saturday to give a talk to the gang and all the attendees raved about the meeting. For those of you who have yet to check us out, you can register for the next one here:Â http://www.mrhamilton.ca/innercircle/
I hope you’re all having a great summer and remember, the best seasons of the year to acquire investment properties are summer and winter. Also, we have lots of investors looking for property so if you or anyone has an investment property they are looking to sell please let us know!
Thank you for reading and Happy Hamilton Real Estate Investing Everyone!
Erwin |Â MrHamilton.ca
This is awesome! Believe it or not it’s difficult to find a trusted source of information relating to real estate development. I appreciate you sharing your wealth of information with someone like myself who really needs it. Thanks!!