Daniel St-Jean was born and raised in Montreal. Still, he has also lived in Whitehorse Yukon Territory, Vancouver BC, Ottawa, and now home is in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
He is an entrepreneur to the core, and the last time he received a paycheck as an employee was in 1986.
Over the 34 years since, he has owned several businesses, including an art gallery and framing shop and a publishing company. As well, he wrote and published two Canadian bestsellers.
He started investing in real estate in 2010 with his wife Laurel because they needed a source of income that was not tied to them living in Ottawa, where they were working as consultants.
They wanted to move to Ontario’s wine region, so Laurel could pursue a life-long dream of becoming a winemaker.
It took them only four years to be in a position to kiss Ottawa goodbye and move to Niagara-on-the-Lake.
In their 11 years in the real estate investing business, they have acquired 62 properties worth over $25 million. The fantastic part is that to date; they are yet to invest one dollar in that portfolio—100% financed with OPM–Other People’s Money.
How to do that is one of the many things they teach the members of The REITE Club that they co-founded in March 2017.
“We are now following our investing system to the letter, no exception for any reason whatsoever. Now we’re successful.”
Daniel St-Jean
Daniel and his wife kicked off their real estate investing career with the rent-to-own strategy. They built on it slowly and got some real success out of it. In 2012, they went to Nova Scotia to expand their market. They found some cool people who wanted to do a rent-to-own deal, and they decided to get into business with them.
Daniel and his wife had a couple of rules that they followed when looking for property to invest in. One was to pick a house that they could quickly sell should the people renting it walk away. The second rule was always to take a deposit. However, they broke these two crucial real estate investing rules.
After two months of renting the house, the people moved out unbeknownst to Daniel and his wife. They were now stuck with a house in the middle of nowhere with snowbanks so high. It wasn’t the easiest house to sell, but they managed to, albeit making a loss of $25,000.
After that loss, Daniel spent the next three or four months, setting up an investing system. This system had about 52 points, and this was the system he would always stick to when making investment decisions.
In the Fall of 2013, Daniel did a refinancing deal with a family that he felt needed his help. He didn’t like the house much, and he also didn’t take a deposit, but he went ahead and bought the house because he wanted to help this lovely family.
The family, however, panicked and moved out just as the purchase was being closed. Now Daniel had this rundown empty massive house in a little town outside of Ottawa. The empty house cost Daniel $2,500 every month to maintain.
In the Spring of 2014, someone approached Daniel...