Private Real Estate Investing in Canada, Struggles of Being a Landlord, How to Get Better Tenants (W/ Equiton Senior VP Geoff Lang)

Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Inside Canadian Real Estate. I'm here today with my friend Jeff Lang, and he is the Senior Vice President at Equiton. Equiton is a private equity investment company specializing in providing various real estate opportunities and investment vehicles to individual investors, institutional investors. It's a really exciting thing, especially if you've never explored this. It's a great way that individual investors can get into some of these larger projects, larger apartment buildings, development projects that you normally wouldn't have access to.

It's a great company with great opportunities, but I'll let Jeff get into that more on today's episode. So without further ado, enjoy the show. Awesome. Jeff, thanks so much for joining me today, man. I appreciate it. Darren, great to be here.

Thanks so much. Thank you, Sir. Why don't we start out by having you at tell everyone a little bit about you and what you doing at Equiton? Yeah, absolutely. Full name's Jeff Lange. I work at Equiton on the Senior Vice President.

On the Capital Race side, handle all the investments for Equiton. We are a private equity. Real estate investment firm that specifically invests in private Canadian apartments. And you know, when we started, we wanted to democratize private equity in the real estate space, so to make it available for all Canadians. And that's what we're doing. I love that.

So why don't we start with that? Let, let's assume, I mean we, we probably have a good pool of investors listening, some experience, some not. So why don't we give a little bit of background to what is private equity? What is that worth? You know what? So we we just raised capital into a private.

Private firm, right. So we're a mutual fund trust at the end of the day. I'm sure a lot of the audience has heard of private Reit's as well real estate investment trusts. So we're a mutual fund trust at the end of the day. And what that means is you can invest in a variety of different vehicles. So I'm sure a lot of the audience has heard of TFSASRSPSRESPS riffs, non registered accounts.

That's a way to participate in our. Private equity funds that specifically invest in the real estate sector, right. That's awesome. Yeah. So pretty much it's a vehicle. If you're looking for an investment return if you want to get your money to work.

This is another option that's alternative to some of those traditional lock in my GIC, lock in my mutual fund. This is more real estate directed and you guys are. So how do you put that money into, Let's talk about that. How do you put money to work in real estate? What do you guys actively in right now? You?

Know what, I think we can take it a step back when we're talking about the investment landscape too from the standpoint of. The reason why you'd invested us is to be non correlated to the major asset classes. You know everyone's familiar with equities, bonds, fixed income, whatever it may be. And obviously 2022 and so far this year it's a volatile marketplace. So it's it's tough to deploy capital these days. And so we wanted to, when we launched our fund in 2015, we wanted to be an asset class.

That's non correlated to the majority of the asset classes that individual Canadians invest in. So real estate is that opportunity. And so to your question, we specifically invest in private Canadian apartments across the country, specifically in Ontario. That's our major largest exposure and it's a pretty simple investment model. We bring in the capital, we deployed in private Canadian apartments and then we distribute out the rental income. But it's a return of capital, so very tax efficient which is nice and then we hope for a little capital appreciation on the valuations of the property makes sense.

So you guys are primarily in residential as you mentioned that's pretty much what you guys are focused on, correct? Some of that is I I have. To my multifamily. Multifamily, yeah. And so when we say multifamily for those, again, I'm always going to assume someone doesn't know we're talking about, what are you saying, Multifamily. I agree.

What is that? What's multifamily? So for us, we're investing in you know either. Large townhome communities or private key and apartment buildings, a lot of our apartments minimum 100 units in our portfolio. We hold about 33 properties at a little under 2700 units, so quite a few across the country, but the majority are. Private apartment buildings, right, right.

And so some of these I'm guessing are a mix of buildings guys have acquired that existed and some are developed. Are you guys developing? Yeah, we do a little bit of both We do, We've done a few development offerings. One of the Etobicoke's underway currently called vicinity condos, another one sandstones condos right downtown Toronto and we have a big project going on right now in Ottawa. We're building up three buildings for around 1100 units. Oh, I love that.

That's. Awesome. But our bread and butter is acquiring properties that are already in existence. That makes sense. Is there? I mean, I know this is more to the investment side, but is there, is there a thinking there of why that maybe makes more sense than building right now?

Depending on the cost, right. And if we think we can put capital to work that would be discounted where we could buy an existing property and we can add value that makes total sense and it's a faster turn around too. It's there. Oh yeah, It's definitely a market changes totally if you're buying a building where it's already there and then we look at you know, do we have to put capital expenditure to work or you know is it a newer build where it's less expense but probably less upside from a revenue gap to market standpoint as units turn over. So we go through our full due diligence, we look under the hood and we make sure it makes sense. I love that.

So it it's basically you guys are in a very secure asset because I think residential most people agree it can be management intensive to a degree. It's a lot of work to do. It's not necessarily something an average investor wants to manage on their own. That's a lot of work. But it's arguably one of the safest asset classes in the real estate market, something that we know we need. There's a ton of demand for.

There's always a shortage of. Is that kind of thinking of why you guys went residential versus maybe more commercial? That's exactly it, right. So private Canadian apartment index has been around for 38 years, never had a negative year. Very. Stable asset class, consistent income and that's primarily why we make the investment across the country.

We see you know, good buildings out there, good tenant base and we just want to provide our investors a smooth stable ride. Yeah, that makes sense. And asset wise you guys are somewhere right around the billion dollar market at this point, correct. We just crossed. A billion AUM. Congrats.

There you go. That's huge. Man, not bad. So you guys, I mean from. From a From a standpoint of growth, are you guys looking to hold around there? Are there big targets for the future?

Can we talk about any of those? You know what, we're proud of what we've achieved so far. Obviously, we want to keep going. We're going to follow the same due diligence process. The methodologies, methodology is not going to change, Darren. But you know, we have some lofty goals ahead of us.

And something to be said, everyone's familiar with the stock market, but there's something to be said that you could jump in my car in Toronto and see 30 properties that we own. It's a tangible asset class. Something to be said for that, but we're looking forward to the next 2-3 years for sure. No, I love that. And that's something definitely to talk about because obviously this is a real estate show. I'm a real estate guy.

I'm on the sales side, the investment side. I love real estate. And what you just said is one of the biggest reasons I like to be in it because it's physical, it is tangible. So do your investors, actually, that's a great question. Do you and your investors know physically what buildings they're in, or is it all just pooled together and they have? No idea.

Oh, they they would know. They know exactly. Know. That's. Exactly like we just purchased a building in London ON closed last week. You get 115 units close for 21 and a half million.

Do you see that? They can go see it if they want to. We can arrange tours, whatever it may be, for our clientele. But they see absolutely every single building. Yeah, I I love that because you're you're giving investors a scale, the same control and visibility that an individual owner would have without the same responsibility. They're getting their money to work, but they can still see the asset, they can touch the asset, they can drive by with their kids and say, hey, we're invested in this building, right?

Absolutely. Like pretty neat. Everyone understands real estate from a certain perspective, but. And everyone wants to own many properties, we all know that, right. But it's so difficult to be a landlord, It's time intensive, capital intensive. It's very difficult.

It takes a special person to be able to do that. We take that headache out of it. You can invest in multiple buildings across the country without the headache of being a landlord and just getting that that income on a monthly basis. I agree because especially if you're starting out because some people might argue, like, well why not just buy a little duplex and I'll rent it out myself. And I can tell you from experience, that's not as fun as it sounds. And you become the everything person because you're not at a scale where you can easily hire, like, yeah, you can get management, but the management is never the same.

You don't know what you're doing. It's only two units. They don't really care about it. It's really hard to get good management for like 2 units or be a small landlord. You end up doing it yourself to be profitable because the cash flow is never there. You get the calls at night, you get the calls on the weekends.

It's a pain in the butt. And by the time you actually do your financials year end, it's like did you actually make anything versus what you guys are offering? Is this hands free approach where if I have some capital I can just plug it in and I can just reap the rewards without all the stress and the worry and the the calls and the management? I'm just getting my return right? Absolutely. And when you start outsourcing property management, it's expensive.

So to your point, you start looking at all your costs and you're like, did I actually make money being my own landlord, right. So at Equiton, A subsidiary of Equiton is Equiton Living. We're our own property management. So the Superintendent, regional manager, for lack of better terms, that's an Equiton employee. So we have boots on the ground and all through throughout our buildings. So that's important, helps retain costs, keep expenses down and that's obviously a creative to the fund.

And you know we're just trying to be plain and simple Darren, we're targeting an 8 to 12% net of fee returns. We've done so since inception of 2015 and we hope to continue that going forward. Yeah, That's what you want to hear when when you, when you learn about investment, you want to hear that we want to be simple. Boring. We're not boring. We're not trying to be crazy and exciting because that usually correlates with risk.

And I think when you're investing in real estate, especially in this kind of vehicle, you want safety. I just want security. I don't want anything nuts I don't want. And I mean, you have all those elements of it because when you're as safe as things like mutual funds seem and GI CS seem, there there's an element of a lot of unforeseen risk. You don't know what's happening with the companies in those portfolios. You have no control of them.

You don't know what management's doing. You don't know where these assets really are, what's being deployed, what's going to change, what? What headline is going to come out tomorrow? But one of the executives doing XYZ, that's going to kill your portfolio. This doesn't have that. This is a building.

People live in it. So long as people need to live in buildings, this will perform and pay. That's the only thing you're counting on. Do we have people that will live here, right? And so long as they do, your return should show. Yeah.

And there's a massive supply demand imbalance in this country. We all see it. It's on the headlines and that's that's a nice tailwind for our fund. You know, there's just so much demand, not enough supply. We can touch upon that, but but we we also want to ensure we have good tenants in our building. So as units turn over, we want high quality tenants that pay their rent.

That's imperative, right. So we can continue to pay out that monthly distribution to our clients. That's the curveball I can throw here that we can discuss. I'm sure people want to know. But like, yeah, of course the biggest risk you see headlines now like rent strikes and these and obviously they seem to be mismanaged buildings, they seem to be attracting very low quality tenants. They don't seem to be screening properly.

They don't seem to be even keeping up their end of the bargain as landlords. I want to name names of what companies own these, but they're making news headlines so people will know. It sounds like you guys avoid a lot of that by starting with the quality of tenant that you actually choose. Is that the way you guys mitigate that risk? Absolutely. And when we're making a purchase, we want to go through the tenant roster.

We want to see the units as well. And then, as people move out of their units for whatever reason, they get married. They get separated, a new job, whatever it may be. We can go in there, do a renovation on the units, increase rent to market market rents and then we're bringing in high quality tenants. We're fortunate from the standpoint there is so much demand, so we can be pickier with who's coming into our buildings and that that helps clients at the end of the day 100%. I think that that's the way to do it.

That's the best way people ask all the time like how do, how do you mitigate that risk of tenants not paying. I think you just start with a better tenant. That's the best way. Because people that work hard, that have these careers, they need a place to live. They want a place to live. They're not going to jeopardize that.

They make their payments. They care about their own reputation. I mean if you go for those high end tenants, you're going to mitigate a lot of that risk. For sure, Yeah. And we've been, we've been successful just from the due diligence process behind the scenes, our acquisitions team, you know our leadership team led by our our CEO and CFO, it all starts there and that's why we've been able to you know acquire such. Profitable buildings that's benefited the portfolio.

Yeah, no, I love that. So let's talk about process. So like, if someone's listening right now and they're saying, OK, yeah, that sounds cool, I'd love to invest in apartment buildings. I'd love to get this kind of passive return. You guys have some different outlets, different channels, ways that people can access this. Why don't we go through some of those?

Yeah. So first and foremost, if you like what you hear you go to equiton.com, you can look at our apartment fund income and development opportunity and development opportunity which is shovels in the ground. So we have three different ways to invest through us. If you like what you see, you can contact your financial advisor and they would be able to invest in our in our portfolio of of apartments. And you know depending on obviously the risk tolerance for the clients and doing the you know the advisor client relationship in the the KYC. But if anyone was listening equiton.com and they would be able to look into our funds.

The one thing that. We consider as advantageous because, as I said earlier, democratize private equity for all Canadians. Minimum investment is 10K and it's available for registered assets. So we want to make sure that there's limited barriers to entry and that's through the advisor, correct? And is that so you say talk to your financial advisor to do like all major advisors, major banks all have access to this product? Not everyone all-encompassing across the country, but.

The major dealerships would have access. The big ones have it, yeah. So good chance if you bank with a major bank institution or advisory firm, they're probably going to have access. Through the non bank IROC channel, yeah that's our, that's our majority of our client clientele and exempt market dealers got it. OK. And is there any other channels outside of that that you guys can receive capital, probably different criteria?

Different criteria. And they they can reach out to myself, that's for sure. And I can. I can lead them in the right direction. So if you have some listening right now, that's kind of like a big dog out there and they're like, no, no, I want to do some serious work here. I got some serious capital.

They can reach out directly and you guys have other channels. We do have other channels, but we if someone was to reach out to myself, I would partner with them through an investment advisor. Makes sense. So if in doubt, they can always reach out and you guys will point them in the right direction if they're not sure. Or maybe their advisor for some reason doesn't know how to get in touch. Yes, the and then their advisor can reach out to myself and we can make sure the product gets on their shelf the right way.

OK. That's yeah, that's pretty cool. So it it's it's a pretty institutionalized investment. The sense that it it, it's accessible like you can get to it through existing channels. It's not like a one off thing, it's not just through you guys. This is something that advisors are selling and I guess that's probably one of your main distribution methods is through those advisory.

Channels, that is the main distribution method, yeah, through the advisor channel, I run the capital raise team and you know we want to partner with advisors across country. We think it's a great fit for their books of business to get alternate. And taking a step back like this, traditional sixty 4060% equities, 40% fixed income, that's it's the way of the past, right. And we see the, the volatility in the markets and an alternative sleeve. I don't like using the term alternative because we're just investing in private Canadian apartments. It doesn't seem that alternative, but we want to, you know, give Canadians access to a little different piece.

Yeah, 100%, I think. I think that that is a big missing piece too. In the average person's financial strategy. They don't have that because real estate has had barriers to entry for a long time. And either there's very big options like there are the large REITs of the world, they're great. But again, you, you give up a lot of that control, you give up a lot of that.

Like, I mean, you guys are Canadian owned and operated. You're very hands on. You have a great team. You'd like you said like if if I call Reocannon say I'd like to tour your property, can your team arrange me a tour? Like, is that going to happen? Probably not.

I don't know. Right. Probably not. So I I love that you guys are given this option of like hey it's still big real estate. We're in apartments we're in the stable asset class. But it it's very much still a boutique feel like we we are working with our investors.

We're we're there for you. We're there to fit your needs. These are physical buildings you can come visit that you can touch that you can come bring your family to this is this is real but without all those headaches. Like that's the coolest part to me because that's a big part of the missing market. Not everyone wants to get their hands dirty. Everyone knows very few people I've ever talked to, by the way, have ever said.

I think real estate's a terrible investment across the board. That's just you don't hear that. I like those people. I like those people. Yeah, that's that's the standard. But they don't all know the best.

To some people that means just buy a house and live in it forever and that's my real estate investment. To some people it's like I said, you know, buy a duplex or triplex. To some people it's put some money in a but this this option like working with and partnering with a private equity company, like what you guys are doing and getting that exposure directly I think I think is awesome, man. I love that. Yeah. And to that point, like we price our.

Our unit price on a monthly basis and speaking to there's public Reit's out there and I'm sure most listeners are familiar with public Reit's. They're priced daily. There's emotional market forces that go into that. So public Reit's in 2022 were down, the index was down 22%. Not because there's bad real estate, because there's emotional market forces. Equities are down, fixed income is down.

Everyone's panic selling similar to the run on the banks in the United States, you know? Silicon Valley bank Signature Bank goes down, the whole banking sector gets dragged down because everyone's a bad bank just because it's emotional market forces that get price mark to market. So we're in the private space, little bit more simplistic price it on a monthly basis and back to 2022 we returned just over 15% on the fund when public reads obviously. Weren't successful and what that led to was buying a lot of properties off book at what we perceive as discount to fair market value, right. No, that that's a fantastic point and I I wasn't even thinking about that.

That's a great point because a lot of people will say, yeah why not just invest in these REITs. I already have a stock market account somewhere I can easily just trade. I'm in real estate. It's like well you're you're not the company that you're investing in is. But like you said, they're subject to all these market factors that you can't control. You guys are not subject to that.

This is you're in the asset and you're getting a return based on the asset performance, not the emotion, not the news headline that day. That's not affecting your portfolio at all, right? Not on a mark to market basis and and we try and protect ourselves as much as possible. Like we see inflationary environments that tends to help rent, but like rising interest rates, like there's a lot of lot of noise in the marketplace and I think it's imperative that. You protect the portfolio as best as you can and we do that on our rate rate side as well, right. So let's, let's play a crystal ball for a second here.

You mentioned rates, I mean this, this could fare well for you guys. Obviously nobody knows where rates are going to go and we're not going to pretend that we know where they're going. I'm not going to say this is our solid prediction, but just talking about it, we're at a very high point. A lot of people right now are are are looking at it with a consensus thing, maybe it goes up a little bit more, maybe we reach the peak. This is a really good time in my opinion to get into real estate because now as those rates, if they do come down, I don't know if it's going to be this year, next year, but eventually they will come down. I don't know to where when that happens there's going to be more and more demand for real estate.

So I'm curious what you think right now but that that environment that we're in with these rates, how is that affecting the decision to invest in real estate? Are you guys investing through it? Are you waiting like what does that look like? So we are, we have capital to deploy, which is a nice position to be in. And how we protect our portfolio is we do 10 year fixed mortgages. So right now our average mortgage rate is about 3% with a little over 7 year term to maturity.

The majority of our mortgages are coming due in 20292030. You guys are great. We're in a good spot four or five years ago. We wished we were in variable probably, but we wanted to protect the portfolio for the long term, right. So we locked in tenure, fixed CMHC insured rates and that's protected the portfolio as rates have ticked up. But to your point, like there's going to be a massive opportunity, whether you're looking at private key apartments, single family housing, whatever, whatever you're looking to deploy in real estate.

Obviously talk to a professional like yourself on the single family housing side because you know the space a lot better than I do. I can't predict rates. No one here can. No I wish. But you know, if you do have capital to deploy, it could be a good opportunity. Yeah, I I I think so.

And I think a lot of people are making the argument about affordability. The problem with that argument is they're looking at it, especially in single family homes. Doesn't matter if it's apartments, whatever, they're looking at it from the perspective of what can one family afford and oh, we can only afford so much. Therefore, there must be a correction. The problem is, like a lot of place in the world, families start combining income and resources before those housing prices will come down. You'll see more families living together.

And that's just the reality of it. When you look in those very busy, expensive urban markets, you look in New York, you look in London, you look there's a lot of shared space, parents, family members living together, especially in the suburbs. You get to those detached homes, 4 bed, 5 bed. It's two families, one living downstairs, one living upstairs. Before we see that drop, like the market's going to dictate pricing, whether it's of apartments, whether it's of rent, whether it's of single family home purchases, the market's going to dictate based on demand and that demand isn't going anywhere. It just might shove more demand under one roof and that's what's going to happen.

But the price is not going to suddenly, dramatically drop, in my opinion, to meet not where we live, not where we live. Unless they close those borders up for five years, nobody comes in, nobody has work, everything just shuts. Unless that happens, which we have bigger problems at that point. But so long as we're flooding the border with new immigration, with students, we have a lot of students every year coming around 8:00. 100,000 huge. We don't build anywhere even near that.

A new inventory not even close like the Actually Justin Trudeau was right around the corner here like a few weeks ago announcing their their new investment. It was like 5959 million or something in dedicated apartment through Rio Can Living, I think it was. It's it's over 10 years. It only adds a few thousand apartments and the change is nothing. It's mine. Can't fix the.

That issue, like we're, to your point, 1.5 million new immigrants coming in the next three years doesn't even include the international students. Where are they going to go? And we have a land scarcity issue in Ontario. Protected greenbelts. Yes, definitely. Now it was unprotected.

Now it's protected. It's protected again. And then you look at British Columbia as well, like you have ocean on one side, mountains on the other, like there's no place to build. It's so difficult. It's obviously we have a, you know, a government system that makes it a little bit more difficult as well and that leads to that massive supply demand imbalance. 100%, So as long as you have that, like it's something like 1,000,005 between permanent residents and students coming in every year, as long as that's happening, we have to put them somewhere unless they're all going to be homeless, which is unlikely that they're going to want somewhere to live, right.

And so I think you guys are in a very strong asset class in that way. You actually, I I think the rental market is positioned for the most strength because that's the that's gonna be the thing for affordability. Now, when you can't afford that single family home anymore, when you can't afford that $1.5 million condo anymore, you're gonna make decision. I'm just gonna rent, I'm gonna rent. You're gonna get more people driven into rental markets, more people filling up these rental apartment buildings. You're going to see more of that before you see anything else.

So if there's any change in the market, it's going to start with more strength or apartments, I think. Yeah. And to that point, like you say, you take a $2,000,000 house in Toronto, for example, that was worth 2,000,000 bucks 2019-2020. Maybe it's now worth what, 1.71.8, but you're not getting a 2% mortgage rate. So affordability is based on payments and not price. We know that, right?

Not people. Most people aren't dropping 2 million just like that. They're taking you on a mortgage. Exactly. So now your monthly prices have gone up. So that house, even though it's come down ever so slightly, it's now more expensive.

Yeah. So that drives more and more individuals to the rental market. Yeah. And it's, you know, that's why we invest in in the areas. That we do 100%. I agree with it and it is so appealing like or even my personal story like we're in between two houses right now.

We had sold one and we have one that's being built. So we're renting in between. The rent in our house, the house that we're renting right now is almost identical to the one that we're buying. The rent is half the price of our mortgage. That mortgage is going to be after 40% down, we're putting 40% down and that mortgage is still double, double the rent I'm getting. So that's a deal, like financially, man, like I I have to buy the house for family reasons, for security reasons, for life reasons.

But other than that, from a strictly financial decision, the rent makes so much more sense. Because I could keep all the capital I'm going to use as a down payment and invested in something like what you guys are doing, then I can go rent for half the price for the same living space in the same area. But then all my money's working, right? So it's if I'm getting even like you guys, I know you have a bunch of options. Let's just say somewhere around a 10% return and I'm doing that on half $1,000,000 and that's whatever that is. What is that $50,000 a year in income plus my rent is halved.

That's a huge amount of savings versus owning the exact same house just to own it. So it's starting to make a lot of financial sense, not just for people that can't afford to buy the house, but for people that are looking at finances saying, you know what, I don't, I don't need ownership, I don't need that security. I'm just going to do the best thing financially and rent is starting to look like the best thing financially, Yeah. And a a lot of our clients are renters and buy the fund. That's the way to own. Property 100% and to your point like we're up 9.64% year to date.

So right on that 8 to 12% net a fee return target and just trying to keep it as simple as possible, but your points like you, you hit the nail on the. Head said it perfectly. It's it's that's the market, that's the market that we're in. I think more people are adjusting to that and they're seeing that and I think it's going to be like that for some time to come. I don't, I don't think that's a secret anymore. We're definitely moving towards a rental economy and more and more people it, it's either out of necessity or just at a financial decision and it's becoming the only reason to buy a home anymore is pure luxury.

It's like that's a luxury. You want to own it. You're going to pay more, you're going to put more down, you're going to pay more every month. You're doing it out of luxury. It's a it's a want now. It's not so much need and it's imperative to put your money to work.

These days where you know the rate cycle is everything's a little bit more expensive as we know, or a lot more expensive. I'm a family of four. Gross shopping is is devastating each week, but it's it's important to have capital working for you and also doing it doing it smartly. Yeah, no, I I totally agree. So that's why I think you guys provide a great option. And that was really my goal and bringing you on today was sharing this option.

So people that are thinking about, hey, I need ways to put money to work. GSE is not your only option. The bank is not your only option. There are options like this to get the physical real estate in a way that's that's easy, that's simple, that's very hands off. But it's still very much physical, it's tactical, it's something you can go feel and see and still feel like you're a part of that. You're you, you feel very much still I'd imagine like a real estate investor because I'm seeing the deals.

I can see what you guys are are getting into. I can go up to those buildings. I feel like an investor, but I get to go home and sleep nice and soundly at night. So I wanted people to know that this is an option. Yeah, and it's tax efficient too. Like distributions are 100% return of capital.

You don't pay tax until you actually sell out of the fund, which when you're looking at investors, high net worth clients that obviously want to be a different way to play taxation important tool. No, I love that. And because you mentioned people can invest out of TFSAS, out of RSPS, right? Yeah, TFSASRSPSRESPS for their kids, non Reg cash accounts. So that's big, yeah. And if you don't want to take a cash distribution, you can reinvest it for 2% discounts.

So my line's always open. As I said, you can go to equiton.com for single family housing, that's your expertise. Go to Darren for sure. But on private Canadian apartments, we're we're happy to help out the end investor. No, I love that, man. I love that.

No, it's a great option. I think it's something everyone has to consider. Do you guys do? I don't. I didn't check this before I answer. It might be a no.

Do you guys ever do any sort of education like seminars, webinars, ebooks and times, everything under the hood? Where can you find that? You can find an ecuaton.com. We have different events that we help sponsor all across the country, majority of in Ontario because our head offices, we have two, one in Burlington and one in downtown Toronto. So usually around those areas. But we do client seminars, presentations, we have videos on our website just to help answer frequently asked questions in the private real estate space.

So we want to help out the end investor as much as. Possible of that, I'll give you guys an idea if you're not. Are you doing property tours by any chance yet? From like a prospect standpoint, we can absolutely. That would be. I mean that that would be really cool if there's any way.

I'm going to trademark this now. I'm licensing this idea. If there's any way that you guys can do a tour where people that are interested can come out and even see like 2-3, four, the assets, go out, see the building, touch the building and then sit them down, I think that would be amazing. Oh yeah, and like we welcome anyone to our, you know, head office in Burlington. It's beautiful. And like as I said, we have properties all around the the GTA, London, Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph, Brampton, Brantford.

So it's it's easy to view the properties in a day. I love that, man. I love that. Well, awesome. So if people want to reach out to you directly, what's the best way to get in touch so they can reach out to me via e-mail at g.lang@equiton.com? They can also find me on the website equiton.com.

All my information is there and as well as our team members and if they have any further interest you know. How? How? How's your social? You got a LinkedIn. I do have a LinkedIn.

Jeff Lang. I'm a I'm AG off though, Geoff. FGEOFF, there you go. Perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

I appreciate it. Is there anything you want to kind of leave off that we missed? You know what I obviously I appreciate you having me on. I just think it's imperative when you're looking at your investment portfolio as a whole, real estate can be an important part of that and we've seen a a ton of volatility in the equity and fixed income markets. It's very, very difficult to deploy capital. Chat with your advisor and you know, look at private Canadian apartments, because we do not have that mark to market volatility on a daily basis and we just try and keep it as simple as possible.

I agree. Yeah. So if you're an investor listening to this, if you're just someone that wants to put some money to work, I think, yeah, you got to look at this opportunity. It's something to explore. Hopefully they can check you guys out at Equiton and someone will reach out because this is what I think Canadian especially now, combating that inflation, combating that thing that's eating your savings. You cannot keep money just sitting.

It's it's getting absolutely decimated. It needs to go to work and in my opinion is one of the best ways to put it to work. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for tuning into another episode of Inside Canadian Real Estate, guys. Don't forget if you liked the episode, if you found it enjoyable, if you learned something, if you liked our guest, if you liked our topics, don't forget to subscribe to Inside Canadian Real Estate on Instagram. That's where you'll find all of our clips posted.

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