Toronto real estate broker Christopher Seepe has created Landlording in Ontario, a 42-hour in-class course for would-be and first-time investors, Realtors who are unfamiliar with commercial investment properties, and existing small portfolio real estate investors looking to increase their property value and maximize their return on investment.
“‘Landlording’ isn’t a verb but it ought to be,” says Seepe. “It’s everything from finding an income-generating property and managing its financial viability to protecting the landlord against tenant abuse and government bias, setting up property legal and accounting structures, embracing the power of digital management and extracting value to finance the next property acquisition.”
The course includes more than 20 digital tools to manage and make better-informed investment and property management decisions including a highly refined, proprietary investment analysis spreadsheet; a robust rental application form and agreement; Seepe’s list of important commercial investment APS clauses; and more, he says.
The class, limited to 18 students, features “significant individual hands-on personal computer time working with the spreadsheet, analyzing many current real-life “what-if” scenarios to determine financial viability (money in your pocket), prospects of financing an acquisition with today’s very tough lenders and implications when refinancing later at a higher interest rate,” Seepe says.
Other topics include whether to be a landlord, understanding what capitalization (cap) rate is and isn’t, getting past the financing clause, avoiding the eminent danger of over-leveraged properties, empowering technology to maintain a fully functioning one-person operation, understanding MPAC’s new multi-residential tax assessment methodology, structuring thousands of property-related digital and paper file folders, dealing with troublesome tenants and the Landlord-Tenant Board, collecting rents fast with no NSFs, creative alternatives when obstacles arise in traditional financing, uncommon methods to increase equity and value and extracting value to finance the next property.
Seepe is a commercial real estate broker of record and was president of the Landlords Association of Durham for years. He is also an author and speaker and has written many articles for REM. He owns several multi-unit rental properties.
