Zorya & Patrick Belanger: Navigating the Transition to Full Time Real Estate Investors

Life by Design

Episode Title

40 - Zorya & Patrick Belanger: Navigating the Transition to Full Time Real Estate Investors

Episode Notes

In this episode of the Life by Design podcast, hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson interview Zorya and Patrick Belanger, a power couple who transitioned from engineering careers to successful real estate investors. They discuss their journey, the challenges they faced, and the mindset shifts that helped them grow their portfolio to 177 doors. The conversation emphasizes the importance of values, mentorship, and taking meaningful action in the pursuit of real estate success.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Real Estate Investing Journey

03:07 Transition from Engineering to Real Estate

05:59 Challenges and Growth in Real Estate

12:07 Navigating the Entrepreneurial Shift

17:58 Values and Decision Making in Business

24:10 Advice for Aspiring Real Estate Investors

Resources discussed in this episode:

• Zorya & Patrick’s website: https://brei.ca/
• WE Invest: https://www.meetup.com/we-invest-edmonton/
• Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoryabelanger/ & https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-belanger/
• Instagram: @zoryabelanger
• Books: Who Not How

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Contact Jessilyn and Brian Persson | Discover Life By Design:

• Website: weekendwealth.ca
• Instagram: weekend.wealth
• Facebook: Weekend Wealth Investments
• Linkedin: Weekend Wealth Investments

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Transcript

Jessilyn & Brian Persson (00:02)

Welcome to the life by design podcast with your host, Jessilyn and Brian Persson, where we help you build your wealth through real estate. Today. We're so excited to have a power couple on with us today. Zorya and Patrick, who are real estate investors also have two young boys, but have a background in engineering where they first met. I'm going to let them tell us a little bit more about themselves.

Welcome Zorya and Patrick!

Zorya & Patrick Belanger (00:34)

Thanks for having us. Thanks a lot for having us. Yeah, we can get talk about ourselves quite a bit. where would you like to start? Yeah, we'll start with.

Jessilyn & Brian Persson (00:40)

Tell us, we know you're a real estate investor, so tell us what do you invest in and how do you help others when it comes to real estate?

Zorya & Patrick Belanger (00:53)

So yeah, we've been investing since 2013. We've invested in single-family homes, half-duplexes, garage suites, small multi-family, and more recently, larger multi-family that Zorya has been participating in and working on in the US. And we help others through a coaching program called Multi-Family Makeover. It's a program where we help basically investors make the transition from essentially single-family into multi-family.

and all the steps that are necessary along the way.

Jessilyn & Brian Persson (01:25)

That's awesome. Now, we've known you for quite a few years now and you were both engineers, I think, when we first met you. And if I believe I'm correct, you've both stepped out of those careers and you're full-time into real estate. Can you share a little bit about what that journey looked like?

Zorya & Patrick Belanger (01:40)

Yeah, absolutely. So Patrick and I met in university, like fifth day of university. And yeah, we were friends. then we did engineering together for five years. And, you know, after university, that's when we started, we traveled together for five months around Europe and really got started in our engineering careers. And it was about three years into that that we, I guess, discovered real estate investing. I we were doing a lot of

reflection about what's next. were just, well I had personally got my PEng and was looking to the future now because that was always the goal but once that goal was attained we kind of thought what do we do now? Do we just work for the rest of our lives and our careers or what else could we do? And we started looking more into investments and self-development books. You know, we started reading other things other than engineering books.

And that's when we really came across Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad, specifically the Rich Retire Young book. And that's where we really learned about the concept of investing and being an employee versus being a business owner. Because we never really taught that too much. that really was the first mindset shift that really got us down this road. And initially,

we were thinking of maybe we could be business owners. Maybe we could start an engineering consulting firm or something like that. But we pretty quickly realized we didn't really have the experience for that yet. And so we started looking into real estate investing, which was mentioned in that book as well. And we were thinking, I remember thinking, I wonder if anyone in Edmonton invests in real estate. Because that's how little we knew about it. I wonder if this works here.

Jessilyn & Brian Persson (03:32)

Yeah.

Zorya & Patrick Belanger (03:36)

And so yeah, with a bit of research, we found other people that invested in real estate, found a real estate investing network that we could join and get educated. And that's kind of what it took to get started, once you go from there. Yeah, so I guess I was in the, like we bought our first property, not as an investment property, but we bought that in 2010 as our first condo. And we did everything wrong with that. We didn't use a realtor.

Jessilyn & Brian Persson (04:01)

Yeah.

Zorya & Patrick Belanger (04:02)

We didn't use a mortgage broker, so we spent wasted time evenings and weekends shopping for rates. We just kind of we didn't review the condo documents really well. Like it's like we did everything wrong, but it was, you know, a low price to entry and we were able to pay down that mortgage really quickly. And so it got to the point where we actually started wanting to invest in real estate. In the fall of 2013, we were able to like after getting educated, we realized, OK, well, let's refinance this condo. We had a bunch of equity there and that allowed us to

use that equity and go out and buy a couple of half duplexes. so we bought, know, so in October we started looking into investing in, or like we said, okay, we're going to invest in real estate and closed on our half duplexes by that December. And at that point it's like, okay, well we're out of our own capital, but let's make some systems and see if we can do this again. And so basically built the systems necessary on ...