The Wealthy Barber Podcast - #35 — Daniel Foch: The State of the Canadian Real Estate Market

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Our guest this episode is Daniel Foch, a Canadian real estate broker, co-host of “The Canadian Real Estate Investor” podcast and Chief Real Estate Officer at Valery.ca. Daniel creates widely-followed content at the intersection of data, news and insights for the Canadian housing market. In this conversation, Dave and Daniel tackle the big questions facing the real estate market today. They discuss the Ontario government’s move to take over RECO, whether realtors should be able to represent both sides of a deal, and the evolving role of municipalities, development charges and zoning in housing affordability. Daniel shares his perspective on where the market goes from here, why most Canadians still want a detached home and what it will take to make those homes more affordable. The conversation ranges far beyond prices, touching on the challenges of an aging population, mortgage stress tests and why older generations are staying “overhoused.” There’s also a fascinating discussion about the impact of AI, First Nations’ land claims and the rise in Powers of Sale. If you’re interested in the state of Canadian real estate — from policy to affordability to where things might be headed — this episode is full of insights you won’t want to miss.   Show Notes (00:00) Intro & Disclaimer (00:55) Intro to Daniel Foch (05:06) Ontario Government Taking Over RECO (07:57) Should Realtors Be Able to Represent Both Sides of a Deal? (10:36) Housing Affordability and the Role of Government (16:30) Should Municipalities Lower Their Development Charges? (18:00) Where Does the Real Estate Market Go From Here? (20:56) Most Canadians Still Want a Detached Home (23:15) Owning vs. Renting (26:25) How Do We Make Detached Homes More Affordable? (28:40) Older Generations Are Overhoused But Not Downsizing (34:07) Mortgage Stress Tests (38:42) Daniel Thinks Municipal Governments Could Go Away (40:13) The Potential Impact of AI on Societies (41:54) First Nations’ Land Claims in Canada   (44:31) Bill 60 (46:47) Valery AI (50:15) Increasing Powers of Sale (54:57) Conclusion

Hey, it's Dave Chilton, The Wealthy Barber and former Dragon on Dragonstant. Welcome to the Wealthy Barber podcast. Well, we'll be hosting some of the top minds in the world of personal finance. Yes, that's to balance me out. The podcast is about making this subject not just easy to understand, but dare I say, even fun, honest. Whether you're trying to fund your retirement, figure out how to build a down payment, save for your kids' education, manage debts, whatever. will be here to help you do it. Before we jump in, a quick but important note,

nothing we discuss here should be taken as investment advice. We don't know you and your personal financial situation, so we're not here to tell you we're specifically to put your investment dollars. We're here to educate, get you thinking, and we hope entertain. But please do your own research and or consult with your financial advisor before taking any action. Hey, it's Dave Chiltern, the Wealthy Barber with the Wealthy Barber podcast. I have no idea at all what episode this is.

I think it's somewhere in the 30s. Thank you again for your continued support. It just keeps picking up momentum. It's amazing how much feedback we're getting about the podcast now. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it, saying they're listening to it, recommending to others. It's very much appreciated. We really enjoy putting it together. Obviously, we've been incredibly fortunate to have literally the top minds in finance in the country on over and over and over again.

They've all provided such fantastic information. I've learned a lot, I'm sure you have too. So it's been great. And today we're keeping that tradition going because we've got one of my favorites, Daniel Foch, coming on to talk about real estate. Interesting fellow, he really is. He grew up in a real estate family to some extent, went to University of Guelph in the real estate stream.

Some of you may not know this, but U of G was quite far ahead of the curve. They adopted some of the American College and University approaches of taking their business program and breaking it up into streams in certain areas, real estate, marketing, etc. He chose the real estate stream, has done very well. He's a data guy, a geeky guy, no doubt, took an MIT course on data sciences as it relates to real estate. He loves all of this, but the most important thing is he is an outstanding communicator. And what I want to say about Daniel is he and I did not know each other a year, two, three years ago, and I was watching all of his stuff. And so he actually reached out to me about potentially coming on his podcast at some

points and I think was surprised to learn. I was a huge fan. I really enjoy listening to his perspectives on things. He puts it all together in a very interesting way. Yes, he's very data driven, but again, he wraps it in good anecdotes and good communication skills. So Daniel, there's a lot of pressure on you after an introduction like that. People are expecting excellence from you today. I was going to say, it's a lot of pressure when you, when you do the intro right in front of me. I'm like sitting here, you know, a little bit worried. But yeah, I was, I was going to say, I was going to say, I was, I was going to really happy to be on the show and appreciate you having me. And it means a lot to, to have that co-sign and that you, uh, that you've been, um, absorbing my content over the

years. It's, uh, when I found out, I was really, uh, shocked and, and, and, and a lot of pride, honestly. That's, you know, your, your, is it weird, before we get into the real estate, that you've kind of become the star. And so, you know, you're in real estate, you're in the Toronto area. And you start producing all of this content. It's different. Again, you're a good communicator. And over the years, you build this gigantic audience. And now everybody knows you and you know anybody in the real estate field knows who you are enjoys your opinions is that all kind of odd and when it happens i mean it is like i try not to think about it too much but when i do take a step back and then when i'm posed to the question like that yeah like it is pretty

weird it was especially because it wasn't my intention like i'm actually um sort of like a shy person i'm like probably introverted in in person and i'm not it wasn't like i had no intentions of being a you know personality or or anything but i just really started I started creating content to deal with the problem that I faced, I don't want to say an ageism, but that's like the easiest way to describe it. Like I was really young getting into the business and people didn't take me seriously. And so I said, okay, well, if they don't agree with what I have to say, as long as I can substantiate it with data, they can't really argue with that. Otherwise, it would, they would just be stupid, right? And so I started doing like really

complex market research and market reports, which is something that real estate professionals are often told to do by, you know, gurus or leaders or sales coaches in the space. And that really just kept progressing. I kept, it was always like I wanted to learn how to do that better. And then I built a data science platform that was later, uh, purchased and licensed by the Toronto real estate board and many real estate boards across Canada. So I sort of became a bit of a leader in that in that space, just kind of from being like a nerd like you mentioned, right? Like always wanting to get a better grasp for what was happening. No, well, you've done very well. And I mean, I'm always impressed by how much I see you in the media now and people are reaching out to you as

the expert on all these subject matters. And you do cover a wide variety of topics. So today we're going to kind of jump all around and try to give something for everybody. Let's go to a recent subject. Over the last couple of days, we've had some real changes in the real estate industry because of the, was it misappropriation of funds with the trust account that led to all of this? Yeah, basically, yeah, basically a brokerage misappropriation. funds from a trust account. And, you know, it's kind of like the made-off thing that happened, right?

It's like it probably went on for years without anybody noticing. But now that the market contracted and there were shortfalls, it came out. And people were, there was money missing from deals and whatever. So they were basically using their trust fund to cash flow the business, but also probably pay themselves. I mean, we don't know yet. I think there's criminal proceedings that will determine that. But the regulator came to this conclusion in May of this year, so 2025. And they didn't do anything about it until August, September of 2025. And they actually had already struck a deal with the people who did this. And so basically, as of today or yesterday, December 1st, 2025, the provincial government is taken over the regulator of the real estate

industry in Ontario. That's huge. Let me cut you off. I mean, that is something you do not hear about very often. And I think it's the right thing to do, by the way. I think they needed to regain trust and get the public back on site, for heaven's sakes, even get the real estate agents slash brokers back on side. I think the whole industry had turned on this setup a little bit, but it is a huge story. I would agree. I think Ford has finally realized that the lack of trust in the real estate industry is becoming a huge issue. And they are, I think they've realized that this is a huge part of our GDP in the province of Ontario and in Canada. And, you know, construction, we're seeing huge contraction in the construction space, in pre-construction sales, in

in real estate trades. And these are, whether we like it or not, there are necessary things that our economy relies on to keep moving. And I think they are pulling out all the stops to try and reduce friction in that space. They did Bill 60 recently and then they did this. And so I think that the Ford government really does have a lot of effort being put into restoring trust in the real estate industry. And they even did this earlier in the year, or last year with a rebranding of the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act was actually renamed the trust in real estate services act and they changed some of the structures of commission because there's an ongoing class action lawsuit against realtors as a copycat lawsuit like the one that

was recently settled in the US where basically they said that buyer brokers can't be paid by the listing agent and so you're seeing a lot of recalibration in the industry and they're kind of scrambling to figure out you know out of build trust because the profession has no trust right like realtors are embarrassed to say that they're realtors I think we're as poorly regarded as as used car salesman, if not worse. And so I think that now the industry, probably too little too late, is trying to solve for that problem. Hey, you know, we're going to go off topic for a second.

But one of the things that people I speak with are always amazed at is that a real estate agent, a realtor, can represent both sides of the deal. And so you just don't see that in any other field. So when I bring that up to my friends, and I have a million friends who are real estate agents, real estate brokers, they always don't know, it works and here's why. But you don't see it. No lawyer represents both sides. of a deal. No agent does. I mean, it's just such an unusual circumstance. Is the public right

to think this is a little bit odd and maybe not ideal? Well, I think that they've, they've sort of skirted around the nature of fiduciary duty in those instances where basically you relinquish your fiduciary duty to either party and your goal is supposed to be to reach a mutually agreeable deal between those two parties. But you, you had an original agreement with one of those two parties first, likely, right? Unless it was just a chance accident, like you're at a party and some guy wants to buy another guy's house and you say, hey, let me make a stupid amount of money doing that, yeah.

But, like, that's usually not the case. And so you can't, like, it's hard to relinquish a fiduciary duty or an obligation to a client when you have already had it. And I think that that's where somebody gets screwed in the deal. Like, it's impossible to create a win-win when you have to legally represent the best interests of a client. There are, I think there are ways you could kind of, like, argue that, you know, let's say there's a distress sale right now.

And really the best interest of the client is just to sell the property because otherwise they're going to go delinquent on the mortgage or whatever. And it doesn't really matter, but obviously you don't want to get them a horrible price. But, you know, we've established that that's maybe the best interest. There are, I think there are examples in which it's not as delicate, but in most instances, it's close to impossible. And this is why lawyers have conflict of interest searches. If you want to become a client of a law brokerage, they will search whether or not they've ever represented you or the counterparty in a case before because of it. they don't want to have a conflict of interest. So the industry and the commission structures, it's, like, even the fact that it's performance-based commission, right, if, like, in the equity raising space, if I wanted to raise equity for a fund or a company, and I do this a lot for investors in the space, larger developers and GPs, I can't make that tier based on the amount of money that I raise. But a realtor now gets paid based on the amount of money that you pay. So they're, like, incentivized in some way to make you pay more money for this. property because they get more money for every $100,000 that you pay, they get $2,500.

Yeah, no, all of that is really interesting to me. And again, you know, there's a line out there if you relinquish your producer responsibility, you've broken your produce your responsibility that there's a logical tie there. But I'll find all that fascinating. Now, we're going to start today giving me a broad overview of the industry right now. Very tough to do because unlike the stock market, real estate obviously changes from region to region across the country. Some are actually quite strong right now. But what are some thoughts on the overriding challenges that the industry is facing right now in Canada? I would say the biggest issue is affordability. And the easiest way to understand how the markets are working across Canada is

markets in which houses are affordable are doing totally fine. And markets in which houses are not affordable are in a big trouble. And so I would say that that remains the largest issue. It's been it was second to the largest issue in the April election. And now if an election, where to be held, it is now back at the first issue, which is people can't afford life in Canada right now. And housing is the largest portion of your household income. So it is very much at the forefront and the spotlight is on it as the biggest contributor to why life is so unaffordable for Canadians. If you look at that issue, I've always argued that I think the governments at all three levels need to coordinate, cooperate, and they need to view

residential real estate as infrastructure. Then it's got to be done in a way that's good for all us that encourages youth to be able to get in, gives people hope, a lot of people tie their optimism, their feelings about the future, their feelings about the country to real estate affordability. We have to look at it differently, not just as a profit center, not just as a percentage of GDP, but as the country's infrastructure, when you frame it that way, I think good things will flow. Yeah, I would completely agree. And I think we're starting to see things progress in that direction. But the further down, like the smaller the voter base that you get, So federal government, it was easy for them to say, yeah, we're going to remove HST on new build homes for first time homebuyers.

Now, I mean, I think that any first time home buyer in the province of Ontario is laughing to themselves saying, yeah, I would be lucky to buy a condo or an old townhouse, not like much less a brand new house. So it's not exceptionally impactful. And that appeared in the budget. Like they expect 20,000 deals a year to come from this. That's how much they budget in the loss of the HST. The province of Ontario followed suit by removing provincial sales tax on new homes. So if you're a young person, first time home buyer and you're buying a brand new house, you have a subsidy or an advantage against other purchasers to the tune of $130,000 on a million dollar purchase. So we're starting to see some support there and some, you know, concerted effort between the Fed and the province.

The issue is you get to the municipal governments and they represent a small voter base. And in most cases, they have two ends of their budget where you have OPEX and then you have CAPEX and then you have CAPEX. CapEx can only be funded through development charges and OPEX can only be funded through operating revenue, which is property taxes. And most, that's like the biggest way that they get it. And so any, any reduction in, um, the CAPX revenue will eventually have to be backfilled by OPEX, which means property taxes going up. And so municipalities basically have a very tough sell on their hands, which is, sure,

we can reduce development charges, but then we're never going to win another election because property taxes are going to go up 10, 20, 30 percent. I mean, there was estimates in the, in the, in the, in the, in Ontario when Ford proposed Bill 23, which is basically banning development charges as a revenue source for municipalities. And East Willembury, where I live, said that they would have to increase their property taxes by 100%, right? And so they, you know, how are you ever going to win an election as a municipal politician? And that's why they backed off on that. Is some of this because the municipalities in many instances had windfalls over the last five to 10 years. There was just so much

development. The development charges were so high. They had all this revenue flowing in. And then they spent to that level. And now they have to adjust spending downward. And is that even possible in a world like this? I think that's a huge part of it, to be honest with you. I think, look, governments aren't good at spending money. That, you know, they, and so, so when, you know, a lot of people say, oh, we know, the government say, oh, we have a revenue problem. We need to get more revenue. We need to raise more money from bonds, whatever. Um, why don't we, why don't we talk, talk about it as an expense problem first. Even before they got hooked up to this huge cap-ex injection of development charges,

municipalities were incredibly wasteful of the way that they spend money. And it's not just to pick on municipalities. All levels of government are incredibly wasteful. And I think that that is probably a problem that is going to be solved. I have my own kind of really crazy thoughts on the direction that I think that I'll go, which if we have time we can get into. But I think that that's probably one of the bigger problems that we'll see solved in our lifetime, and I think that...

Hey, my lifetime and your lifetime aren't matched up. Let's be clear there. I don't know. I mean, well, I would say probably within the next 20 years. I think technology is accelerating at such a pace. Like, we already have such a perfect, perfectly democratic system in the free market, right? The economy is very good at distributing value, like human values. People vote more with their dollars than they do with their actual votes.

And I think municipal budget is not super complicated. People could, if people can be trusted to vote their leaders, they can also be trusted to allocate. the capital that they're paying to the government, right? And so you can have like constant sources of democracy or referendum through property taxes or income tax, et cetera, I think with the set of technology that we have now. That's a more esoteric conversation. Very few of these issues are binary. There's so many subtle nuances around them. The referendums, you know, I don't necessarily think match up to voting on them. It will be interesting to your point to see where technology

takes all this. You made a point earlier that I think just does not get enough attention in society. It's a very basic point. Democracy matches up to excessive spending in all parts of the world over and over again. I don't care if the party is on the left or the party is on the right. Governments buy boats. Governments spend a lot of money. Who's going to come in and make the necessary cutbacks and therefore not get voted in again? Very few people have that approach.

And so we're almost always going to run deficits and be in fiscal challenges at all levels of government. Going back to what you said about the municipalities, do they look at it on an plasticity front now and say, look, nobody's developing, nobody's building. We've got to lower these percentage charges so at least get momentum on the building front again. We'll bring in more revenue with lower percentage charges. So I think they're starting to. And it's really interesting from my perspective to sort of watch it happen. So yes, and I talk to a lot of municipal governments about this. I talked to a lot of developers about this. I'm very involved in the Ontario Home Builders Association and do a lot of research for them and present it in a room full of stakeholders

in this decision-making process earlier in this year. And they said, oh, well, give me an example of a, you know, a municipality that cut development charges and then a developer went and launched a project. And I said, it's funny you ask that, you know, I have that slide right here. So it showed that basically Mississauga reduced their development charges by 50%, which is substantial. And then, you know, weeks later, Green Park launched a project at $875 a foot. Now, that's closer to the market clearing price. And they were able to sell, I think, like between 60 and 100 units.

which is significant in a market where, you know, we saw 50 condo units sell in the last month in the, in the greater... Like, that figure is truly stunning. Isn't it crazy? Like, I mean, yeah, it just doesn't even make any sense. If you had told me that could happen, I would have said zero chance that's going to happen going forward. Yeah, but, but, you know, the, why would somebody pay $1,400 a foot for a pre-construction condo when you can go buy resale at $8.75, 925, right? So what happens now? do we have that typical cycle where we don't build at all and we end up getting higher prices

again down the road because we have supply shortages? We could. So that would be like, I think that's the outcome that most people are sort of framing right now because they want the government to be fearful because I think the government has realized the consequences of a housing affordability crisis. I'm of the opinion that I think probably what will happen first is if we see housing afforded, like an issue with housing affordability form, it'll start with rents. And as rents get pushed up, you'll see a lot more developers enter the purpose built rental space.

My actual prediction, and you've seen this outside of Ontario, like the majority of housing stock, I think 88% of apartments under construction are financed by CMHC or insured by CNAHC right now. Yeah. And so, you know, it just doesn't work exceptionally well with the economics of development in Ontario. It does a little bit, but not a ton. And if that improves, which it is, like you're seeing land costs are going down, construction costs are going down. if development charges come down and rents start improving, then these developers will just pivot. Like they don't want to build an own rental housing indefinitely,

but they also don't want to have to lay off half their staff and maybe bankrupt their company. And so they're going to, they would, if they're faced with that, I think we've seen so far 21,000 condos in the pipeline get switched over to purpose built rental. I would say that we'll probably end up seeing a lot of rental product get launched that will begin to backfill that that um potential supply gap of condos do i think that it will be sufficient i think that really depends on the demand curve and whether or not um the

the government brings immigration back to the levels that it was because most of the issue was was the fact that population growth was running at triple what it usually would right you know if we're back at 500k a year we can build we can build 250 000 homes which is what you need for 500k population growth right average household sizes two to two and a half. That's all very interesting. But do you think that with all of this purpose built rental building taking place that we are going to see rents coming down in many areas because supply is going up. And to your point, immigration is slowed. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. We're already seeing it. Like rents are falling massively across the country. Even in markets that haven't seen, I mean, I guess Toronto has seen a huge drop of that, all that

condo coming on the market. So that's probably like rents in Toronto are down double digits. It's Alberta even where you saw population growth, like, you know, that huge exit of some Ontarians moving to Alberta. I think their population growth peaked at like 11%. It was at one point it was the fastest growing place. It's amazing. Crazy. So and, but even then, vacancies have jumped from two to seven percent because Alberta is

incredibly efficient at building to meet the market demand. You know, they'll just basically sprawl the city as much as they need to to accommodate. And so, you know, they've overbuilt or they've built more than the demand can keep up. And so rents are falling absolutely just purely based on supply and demand. Now, when you look at, I did a lot of pre-research before writing the update to the wealthy barber and I went out and talked to a lot of people in their 20s, early 30s. Interestingly, a lot of details have changed. It's more challenging now, but the priorities haven't.

That group of people still wants to send their kids to college and university and not having criminal burden with debt, take the odd vacation, have a comfortable retirement, but also they want to own a home. 85% of, I would say, of the people I talked to, wanted to own. own a home, maybe a little higher. And most cases, they wanted to own a detached home. And obviously, that's going to be a huge challenge. What do you see on that horizon? Is there any where we're going to see the supply go up there enough? How does the math make that work? Because to me, it seems almost impossible. Yeah. I think we need to accept that we're in a very late cycle

as a country. And, you know, if people want to, I would encourage them to travel. I would say go to a place like Switzerland or Germany or the UK and look at what their housing model looks like and ask yourself if you want to be a detached homeowner who is house poor in London or Frankfurt or if you're comfortable moving to one of the smaller cities. Canada has a long way to go from a perspective of like regional rail and accessibility and infrastructure to make that work. But you know, anywhere I've been in Europe, like people, they rent when they live in the in the core, right? Some of those like those top five cities. And then they later suburbanize and they pick a community where they're going to put down roots and raise their kids. And, and I think that,

we the problem is it like in in most of those places that happened over three generations because migration takes a lot longer historically what before we had airplanes and you know computers to do visa systems and whatever um here it happened in one generation right like I went to a private school and also all of my friends were from wealthier families or at least at a minimum upper middle class families and I and I just concluded this like a couple of days ago almost everyone that I know would have would have fallen from the upper middle class down to the lower middle class in their in their trajectory or at least or at a minimum they didn't have a positive upward mobility experience from when you know from their parents generation to to to to theirs and

that could change as we see the great wealth transfer and you know maybe some more time to accumulate wealth and whatever but I think geography is going to play a much bigger role in this than people want to admit well we're we're jumping all over but it's interesting Canadians are much less likely to move cities. You know, you look at the U.S. model, which, of course, is they're almost all moving. I think of my top 10, 15 U.S. friends, none of them, none of them live in the city they grew up in. They've all moved at one point, now they're all separated from the family.

I'm not saying that's the right way to go. I love having my family nearby, but that model is very different than what Canadians are accustomed to. And on that same front, in many countries in the world, including New York City, for heaven's sake, not a country, but a city, a lot of well-to-do families live in apartments and condos. they don't live in detached homes and they actually prefer it that way again in the heart of the city the canadian mindset's very different on that front we think if you're doing well a detached home is the thing you've got to have it so a lot of this is psychological do you agree totally agree

and i think that we're currently rewriting the rules and the problem is like you know you go back to i don't know there's a the psychologist and then like dr joe dispenza kind of like uh push this this idea further it's like neural plasticity right like we've been told for 30 years like literally our entire lives that it's a detached house and a yard in the suburbs and on the subway line or or within driving distance to downtown. It's not a decision you're going to instantly be able to be comfortable with when you make it because your brain has to be rewired to agree with the thing that you're, this new piece of information that you're telling it. And I think that that's why it's so difficult for people to get away from it. And then we'll actually, people will make horrible

financial decisions to go with that that idea that they've always told them. Hey, nobody sees that more than I do because I get sent to all these spending summaries and so many people that got into the marketplace, let's say 2015 to 22. And of course, if you bought late in that term, you're really in trouble. So many of those people got in, but they couldn't afford to save. They couldn't afford to have any fun. That was the decision they made. The tradeoff obviously is something they wanted to take on because people still think of renting as being a horrible thing. And I often hear you're throwing your money away. You're not at all. You're buying shelter. If you look at the data of the last 30, 40 years, despite real estate doing exceptionally well, residential real estate, had someone

rented and invested the full difference in costs, not just the mortgage, but all of the other costs associated with homeownership and put it into, let's say, index funds, as Ben Felix has said, they've come out about even. But you can make a compelling argument that now, that going forward, if you have the discipline to do that, the renter could finish up ahead because rents have kind of flattened out, gone down a little bit. If you look at the affordability gap in certain cities, you can make a compelling argument. You're wiser mathematically to rent. Absolutely, yeah.

I think that the truth is, though, that, like, we have to admit that as Canadians, like data would tell us, and maybe it's not even to say that, you know, not even default the individual, but statistically we are bad at saving and bad at investing. Or maybe the more polite way to say that is saving money is hard and investing money is hard. I agree. Yeah, I like to rephrase there and it is. I mean, that's what the wealthy barber is all about, is trying to say it doesn't have to be that hard, but saving's always hard.

I mean, look at all the temptation out there. I mean, for example, you spend almost 100,000 a year on hats, just on all the hats that you have. Usually, yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, they're vintages. There's a lot of money going into that. Okay, so we look back at the single detached tonne. Let's say the people still want to go that route. That's obviously an issue right now.

There's very little construction taking place in most parts of the country. There are exceptions to that, obviously. You've got high land costs, high taxes, high labor costs, high materials costs, et cetera. what changes that over time? For example, what continues to get the land costs coming down? Do we need more land released in? And then what do we do about the environmental arguments? Where do you strike the balances here?

Well, I think that if I look at like the political divide that's happened in Canada, I think that the right seems to like agree with one another on things a lot more than the left. And so I think that you're starting to see a lot of infighting happening in sort of like leftist political ideology where it's like, do we care more about homelessness or the, environment. Right. And those, these are real questions because there are consequences to policy, right? And, and I think that the, the answer to your question is, we need land to build, to build, to build single family detached houses. We're building, uh, as a, as a percentage of total, we're building the fewest single family detached houses we've ever built. Remarkable. Um, yeah. And so at a certain point, there needs to be political will and, uh, and societal

will to, for people to say, hey, maybe, um, all of the land in the green belt in the province of Ontario that is on a major arterial road that already has services available that you could build a subdivision on that tomorrow if we gave you permission. Maybe that's worth thinking about releasing, right? Maybe we should, maybe we should have a real conversation about whether or not there's a greater societal benefit to releasing that land versus leaving it undeveloped for whatever reason because it's probably a literally an old vacant soybean field that's growing cover crop. You know what I mean? I'm not talking about marshes and the walking path. course. All these beautiful habestats. I'm talking about a main road that you've driven by a farm and

you've always wondered like why there's houses on this side of the road. Why are there no houses on that side of the road, right? That's the piece of land that I'm talking about. So that to me is probably from a single family detached perspective. Like unfortunately, if you want it to take place, you have to allow sprawl. But it's funny because the same people who are complaining, I think, about not being able to afford a single family detached home are also the same people are saying, well, you can't tear down the green belt. So I think that that's a big part of it. I think the other piece is that there's a lot of friction.

There's a huge generational hostility that's formed as a result of this, but there's a lot of friction for older generations to sell and downsize. They're disincentivized to do it because switching costs are incredibly high. They also suffer from not being able to find affordable housing that would be suitable for their needs. And you have this whole generation who owns 60 plus percent of the residential property in the country that is overhoused and and it's not to say that that's their right and I would I would die for their right to be over housed right like I think property rights are fundamental but but there should like we need to understand why are our economic incentives such that that is the case

right that that you know why am why do we have a generation that's aging living in four bedroom mcmansions in the suburbs in walking distance to everything and they're not working they don't need to be close to work they don't need to be close to the majority of things except for maybe a hospital and in retail, et cetera. And this is a part of the conversation that I don't think we really thought about. And I think it's because it's touchy because politicians know that they can rely on that generation to win them elections. They are by and large the people who show up the most for any type of election,

municipal, federal, provincial. So that is a big piece of the puzzle. I think that if you play the tape to the end, if it doesn't get solved, you have this huge supply flood when, that generation starts to decease or downsize that nobody can afford to buy right now. And to me, actually, that's actually maybe a long-term bear case for these single-family detached valuations in fullness of time. I agree with you.

That's, you know, going to extend out over a number of years. I honestly started talking about this particular issue on stage 10 and 15 years ago, not because I'm smart, but because I noticed my parents' friends weren't downsizing. And we've seen that, obviously, through previous generations. And you're asking them, why aren't you downsizing? well, interesting first answer. I want to have enough room for my kids and more importantly grandkids to come and visit and stay. That's one of the reasons they didn't want to go smaller, but also until recently real estate was going up so dramatically. You know, sometimes 5, 10,

15% a year over extended stretches and they're going, this is tax-free capital gains. Where can I put the money? But you made an important point that I don't think it's made often enough because of the transition costs, the commission and selling, land transfer, the legal costs, et cetera. And because the undermarket has gone up so much in price as well, there's not that huge a gain often to be made by moving down. And most people, I said this way back in the wealthy barber returns, it's not a true move down. They move into a lovely place. It may be smaller, but it's often nicer than the one they were selling. And it doesn't result in freed up capital. And so they've looked at all of that and said, let's stay. And that has been a part of the supply

problem. It'll be interesting to see as you say, how does this all unwind when a lot of this demographic is going to have to sell at some point, including Dave Chilton, you know, I'm getting up there. I'm not going to stay in my house forever and deal with stairs, et cetera. Yeah. Well, you told me your house isn't a McMansion though, right? No, I only live in 1300 square feet. Yeah, I love small houses. Like, and I love them not because I'm cheap. I love them because I don't like cleaning a big house. I like them because they're cozy. I hate stuff and I don't need a room to store. I don't have a garage because I don't have anything to put in it, to be honest. I've got a car starter instead. So, but a lot of people, to your point, they're living in 2600.

3,600, 4,600, 4,600 square feet, not 4,600 too too often, but certainly 2,600 to 3,200. And you're talking about two people, you know, two people late in life. It really doesn't make a lot of sense. They are overhoused, but I agree with you. That's their right. How does this all play out? Yeah, well, I think that, you know, the piece like that you mentioned about how if you're going to, if you're going to benefit from that tax-free capital gains, the best way to do it

is like the bigger the asset that you hold, the more capital gains. And so you might as well stay in the biggest one that you possibly end. And so I think that's a big piece of it. But I also think like if you, if you sell your house, you pay 5% commission, let's say, you know, on average across Canada, plus HST, you've got to pay a lawyer to do the deal. You got to pay moving costs. You got to go buy a house. So now you're paying 5% commission on the way back in because you're, you know, you're, it's a built into the cost. Plus your land transfer tax on the way back in.

I mean, to make that lateral move or even if it was a downsize and you free up a million dollars worth of cash, like let's say you sell a $2 million house, you buy a $1 million house, you have a million dollars with the cash. Now you're going to take that money and you're going to go put it into something that is a taxable, you know, right? You're going to put it in a taxable non-registered account, maybe some of it in your, you know, whatever your registered accounts. You're going to buy a house that you now are down by 10, 20% in order to restart that

capital gains trajectory. So the economics simply do not work. And this is like this is a problem that at a real estate brokerage, we're super focused on trying to solve for both upsizers and downsizers because it, well, the, we're economically incentivized because we get two deals out of it. Let's start with that. Okay. So we'll put that on the table. But the, but the, the, the part that to me is like there's so much friction in the market, nobody's moving and it's because they cannot afford to or the economics make no sense. And we need to fix that problem

really badly, I think, in this country. You know, I've, I've said this for years that when you have a roaring market like we've had for so long, people will plug their nose on the costs of moving. But now that the market is stabilized, even headed down in many areas, people are looking at this and going, wow, this is sticky. And, you know, but let's go to another matter. You talked about how the market is frozen a little bit. I was saying a while ago that if you look at those buyers that came in and let's say, 2019, 20, 21, early 22, a lot of them came in with 5, 10, 15% down payments.

They have negative equity in their home right now. And that's fine. They're still making their payments. They may stay there 20 years, et cetera. But for those who wanted to move up, the traditional going up the ladder, they can't. They don't have any equity to provide the down. payment for that next move. I think that's really sticking the market. And if you look just above entry homes to the next level, it's a lot of that inventory that's not moving. That makes perfect

sense to me. Yeah, I think it's that. So there's the equity piece. And then there's also the mortgage piece. So there's, um, yeah. So there's two, two factors on the qualifying year. So let's say somebody's been in their house for like 10 years, two mortgage terms. When they bought, they bought maybe with a 3% or 4% mortgage. And they, they, were not stress tested. Right. And now if they want to upsize, it's a new mortgage, which means that they're stress tested, which mean, and if their wages haven't grown as much as what they're now being

stressed tested at, which it would be remarkable if it had, because the, you know, the mortgage rate would jump from like three to minimum of 5.25%. That's right. Typically 6%. So that's one huge piece that I think that a lot of people don't think enough about, to be honest. So there's that. And then even just organically, without the stress test, if you bought in 21,

one at a 1% and you wanted to upsize, even if like all of the other stars aligned and you had equity and whatever, you probably wouldn't qualify for the same mortgage or, or certainly not a larger mortgage in today's economy with, uh, with a three, four percent rate that you did when you got a 1.99. So those people are going to have to probably delay until they have built some equity or increase their wages enough to qualify at a higher rate. Um, I will say that the, the stress test is one thing that fascinates me the most because I, I honestly believe that is going to get rid of the stress test in Q1 of next year. They're currently doing, they've been running a year-long study.

It's concluded now in November of this year. And basically they're running two simultaneous tests. They're testing the banks at 4.5x income across the whole portfolio and the stress test. And we've seen the loan to income drop, like the only like 10% of mortgages are over 4.5x income now. So I would expect that it will likely yield comparable results. and they would maybe maybe they reduce the stress test by 100 bips even that would be meaningful right but if they reduce it or they get rid of it I could see that that probably is the biggest potential catalyst and actually helping people attain houses because even if they can afford them

right now they can't buy them because they're tested at 200 basis points above their rate yeah and as you say that's 6% usually right now you know 5.25 is the minimum you know it's funny though as the wealthy barber I kind of like the stress test in one way it's stop people from overreaching and putting themselves in a position where, yes, we bought the house, but we can't save any money and we can't go out and have a drink. So it did, but it also didn't in one case. So, and this is my beef with it a little bit is, and I don't know if Routledge thought this through when they had it.

So what happened was, and this is where it gets a little bit too in the weeds with economics, but the bond market is, I would say, more trustworthy with what's going to happen with the economy than maybe the central banks. The central banks tend to be reactionary. Right. And so what happened in 2021, late 2021, when inflation stayed hot, right, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8%, the bond market said, these guys are going to have to hike rates. And so your five-year bond yield started rising towards the end of 2021.

And now your five-year fixed mortgage rates typically trade in tandem with that or they up 1 to 2% above that. Your fixed mortgage rates were high by the time the market crash. And by the time they started hiking rates. So what happened was all of the people who were stress tested on a 4% fixed rate now qualifying at 6%. What did they do instead? They went for the lower rate, which was the variable at the time because the Bank of Canada

hadn't started hiking yet. And it pushed all of these people that probably would have been fine had they got fixed mortgages. It pushed them into the variable because the variable they could still qualify at 5.25. When the comparable fixed, you couldn't qualify at what you were going to, you're qualifying at 6, 7% at that time. Yeah, seven in a lot of cases. And you're right. So unintended consequences. No, that's a fair point. But I still think in general there's some sense to having that stress

test. It forces a little more discipline on buyers. But to your point, there's downside to it too. I mean, all of this is quite tricky. Speaking of tricky things, do you realistically ever see us getting the needed cooperation between the three levels of government? We can't solve all of these challenges without them coming together to some extent. That seems like a pretty big stretch. It wouldn't surprise me. I think it's probably more likely that we see municipal governments actually just disappear, to be honest with you. Like that to me is a better, like they're not super complex machines to run. The city of Toronto is probably the most, what it would be the most complex is got transit and all of these other things. But they're not like very complex businesses,

right? They're pretty simple. It's like, it's like, you know, it's running a real estate business, really. Right. I think that given the technology that we have and, and, and the political will, like at that is probably a more likely outcome than getting these that getting them to concert the efforts like you saw we saw what happened when when doug ford threatened to take the keys away from municipalities in in the province of ontario with bill 23 with the development charges they had a fit and we still have development charges and had that happened back then i honestly do not think we would have the problem that we have right now with the condo market collapsing construction uh unemployment hitting 10% and from my my best guess

probably you're going to see it over 13% to be honest with you unless the unless you mean You mean in Ontario. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I don't think you'll see municipal governments go away in my lifetime, but again, you've got a long time to go relative to me. So, yeah, it's fascinating to watch again. We can't figure out the impact of technology and AI are going to have on so many of

these types of things going forward. I find it all quite intimidated, by the way. I'm very excited by it. I study AI hours a day because I don't tend to socialize, but I'm also intimidated by it and what it could do to society on the job loss front. And, you know, if you're raising kids, you are, if we have grandkids coming along, it's hard not to be a little bit worried about all of this. So much change and so quickly that our policymakers, our institutions can't keep up to it. I think that's like the big, the big scary part about it is like if, you know, for the wrong uses, it could be catastrophically bad.

But otherwise, I think it's like it should, it should net more benefit, like, you know, eliminate. I think, I think human beings need to start thinking about like, what are we going to do with all the free time that we have? um because the you know probably in the next decade a lot of work is going to be useless so people who have those jobs should you know there's this there's this documentary i watched when i was a kid in like university about this like sort of idyllic society like utopian society where nobody had to work and they all became artisans or whatever it's like people are are so busy just trying to get by they never cultivated like passions and stuff so i mean think about like what a nice life looks like for you because that might end up being like achievable in your

lifetime with with maybe i think this transition to abundance though where we don't have to work because we can just do whatever we need to through robots and ai etc the transition seems to me to be exceptionally challenging and to go back to your previous point this is why a lot of the experts are worried they say it could be 95% positive but the 5% negative could overwhelm us it falls into the wrong people's hands it's going to be fascinating to watch it all play out i hope i can stay around long enough to see where this all ends up, but it's intimidate. Okay, we've got to get moving. So I want to throw a few quick ones at you.

The land claim situation in Canada obviously has really become even more fascinating over the last several months with what's happened out in B.C. I find a lot of my friends and colleagues in Ontario aren't aware that there's similar situations brewing here. What are your thoughts on that? One was already successful in Ontario before Couch in M.C., which was the Salvo Beach. And there's one in the Haldon, track is up for like most of these are financial settlements by the way like they basically just

wanted to be able to say hey look you've been collecting property taxes on our land for the last x amount of years we just want all that 250 yeah yeah it ends up being a you know multi-billion dollar settlement that governments give to the first nations I think the interesting thought experiment that I'm trying to wrap around it is what if they're better stewards of land than these municipal governments like what if like look what happened in bc where they had this the second now development. They gave some land back and they developed like the most amazing beautiful purpose built rental building, all affordable, you know, whatever, you know, they can, because they don't have rules. So it's like, you know, we talked about the green belt. It's like, well, what if we

gave them the whole demand tract? And they said, hey, come here, build whatever you want. No development charges, no property tax, no whatever, you know, first time homebuyers, let's go, right? Like, it could happen. That could happen. Now, but with those of us who live in that tract, I happen to live in that tract. Yeah. A, should we be concerned? You say it's more likely a financial settlement, but is the risk that it could be something beyond that? And B, what about disclaimers? You've spoken in a video recently about because there is some risk based on other rulings, do we have to start telling people as they go to buy property here that this may be

something that jumps up and bites them X years down the road? I think until there's a settlement, it probably would be worth like people being aware. I think buyers in those areas should be aware anyway, but, you know, the real estate profession isn't exceptionally good at informing people of what's going on or knowing themselves. So I think, yeah, probably for the period of time, you'll start to see in some agreements that there's ongoing, you know, disputes and whatever and that, you know, there's no representations and warranties and there's really nothing that a real estate professional can do or know possibly about that. Do you, I think you have to be worried, probably not. I think they've made it relatively clear that they have no intention of taking private property from people. Yeah, I agree. But, and I think a lot of this stuff gets sensationalized, unfortunately, which is why I've really tried to get, you know, to the bottom of it a little bit. Well, I mean, honestly, something you do exceptionally well, as you avoid sensationalizing issues. A lot of people who produce real estate videos, including, by the way, some of the better ones out there love, you know,

to go to the extreme and the fear mongering. But I guess, you know, it's all part of the business of getting clicks, et cetera. But you've tended to walk a little bit better line there. And I like that. In fact, a lot better line. So it'll be interesting to see that one play out to, again, walk our listeners through Bill 60 and the repercussions. So Bill 60 basically, they reduced the period of time in which landlords need.

to give tenants if they're behind on rent, so from 15 days to seven days. Tenants now, I guess the other one is that they split the burden. So if you're a tenant who's behind on rent by like six months, let's say maybe you owe $20,000. If you want to file an appeal against a nonpayment of rent eviction, you actually have to provide 50% of the unpaid rent to the landlord before you can show up in court. So they're basically trying to make the burden split evenly, which seems actually reasonable. The impacts, I think, will be, it's still going to take them probably a year or two to clear the backlog that they have right now, but this will start expediting it.

The other one is that they're going to hire more sheriffs in hopes that right now you have to wait, like, if you have an eviction, you get a ruling, you still have to wait like three months to get sheriffs. So I think those are the major ones, you know, just starts shifting things back in favor of landlords. I think, again, to Ford did this and the Real Estate Council of Ontario in an attempt to restore a little bit of faith in the real estate asset. class because nobody wants to touch it right now in the province of Ontario. No, it's true. And even in BC to a lesser extent, there's a lot of concern about the tenant situations. There's a lot of bad landlords and we certainly don't mean to come across as though we're unsympathetic to the challenges that many tenants face. You've mentioned earlier the huge cost of living. But let's be honest, over the last five to 10 years, a lot of people have started gaming the system. And they've

realized that the tenant review board is a long, long process and that gives them tremendous leverage. And a lot of landlords are going, holy smokes, what balances can we strike here? to bring this back in to a spot that it makes sense to invest in real estate. Yeah, I think the easiest way to think about that is, like, Milton Friedman said it best that, like, you know, one of the primary functions of the government is to enforce the contracts. And so when you lease a property, you're entering into a contract. And a country is really only as good as the strength of its contract. So everybody should want a more efficient system to enforce and settle contract disputes. Like a lease is a contract. And we need that

to be an efficient program, regardless of who it is. Like, the court will, The courts are fair. They will find a resolution. They need to be able to do that expediently so that whoever is being harmed in the process can stop having that happen to them. Now, to wrap up, tell us a little bit about what you're doing now. I mean, everybody knows you for your educational videos, your looks at the industry, but you also are in the industry. You run a company called Valerie.ca. First off, where did the name come from? And secondly, what are you doing? Yeah. So I joined the founding team. I was like I said the third like sort of founder partner there and they had already had the name. But it came from chat bow, which was valuation. Originally they built a thing called chat bow, which they actually got they call it the hug of death. I don't know if you've heard of that. But basically like the they were on like CTV and a bunch of stuff like that. They were they were in automated valuation before house sigma and all of that. And then they got too much traffic, didn't know how to monetize it and basically the site kind of just like broke. And then they sort of reconfigured it as as valid. which is an AI powered real estate website. So basically like your Realtor.ca, Zolo, House Sigma, et cetera, with an AI layered on top of it that does a lot of the searching for you. And I joined the business originally sort of as like market intelligence to kind of like

be the person to train that chat bot. So it was sort of like tapping into my brain. But I honestly was just, I just got so much faith in their ability to execute and the things that they were doing that I wanted to be part of that team. And so I joined, I joined their business after that. And what we're trying to do right now is a couple of things that I think are really on our list. But number one, we're very focused on leasing. I think that for us, like as a tech company, we grow through iteration.

And the easiest way for us to iterate is to do as many transactions as possible. And so we wanted to get the shortest transactions. Yeah. And realtors are now actually doing more leases on the Toronto Real Estate Board than sales. So the market's shifting in that direction as well and something that I've been documenting for a long time and something that I've been bullish on. And I think a good opportunity. and I think that that will spread across the country as we progress towards a renter's economy. I don't think any of the problems that we've discussed here are going to be solved, to be

honest. So that's piece number one. And then I think piece number two is taking those renters over time from a housing affordability and attainability perspective and turning them into homeowners. How do we create a path for renters to become homeowners over time? And then the other piece that we want to really focus on is the idea of right sizing. So people upsizing, and this is a lot a really a financial education exercise, which is kind of why I wanted to chat with you on it a little bit. You know, it's how do we help people get into the home that's going to help them do the best financially for themselves from going up or going down and solving the problem that we, that we discussed, which is like really eliminating those switching costs, reducing that burden. Because

real estate, the fees, the real estate fees are the biggest portion of that switching cost. And if an agent's doing two deals on like two ends, they should be willing to. to make some concessions to reduce that fee structure to accommodate the client. And most, yeah, many are. For sure. Yeah, absolutely. But you know what? You know, it's interesting is we always talk about the commission you were saying,

let's say it averages five percentish across the country. It's fascinating because that's 5 percent of the sales price, of course, not 5 percent of your equity. And if you have, you know, say 30 or 40 percent equity, then you start going, holy smokes, that's one six or one eight. That's 16.6 percent. And then when people think of it that way, they go, the switching costs are huge. And you and I both know people who haven't changed cities, but they've still

move five, six, seven times throughout their lifetime. If they ever sat back and looked at the total cost and had they kept that money just sitting there in that house, whatever, and then been able to invest the difference. Oh, my gosh, it's fairly stunning what it ends up being with the power of compounding. So all of that's quite fascinating. Now, I've really enjoyed this. I mean, you're obviously a very bright guy. Take us home by talking a little bit about the jump we're seeing in many parts of the country. Again, we've been a little Ontario specific, but seeing it more here with the powers of sale and how lately they've finally started ramping up to a point that it's a bit concerning. Sure. Yeah, so I've been tracking power of sales for four years now, like basically

since I thought it was going to spike during the pandemic, but then we had all those mortgage concessions started happening. We basically have reached the point where power of sales are almost parabolic. Eventually that's going to stop. They'll stop growing at this rate. And I think once you start to see delinquencies roll over, that's when, you know, the light's visible at the end of the tunnel. We're not close to that point yet. And I think power of sales typically, lead the delinquency figures because usually if a lender actually, if you stop paying your mortgage, they're going to list your property power of sale before 90 days. And 90 days is when lenders actually legally have to start reporting delinquencies. So to me, I think that we're seeing

this huge wave of properties come up for sale where the sellers are distressed. They're unable to pay their mortgages. It started off with failed flips, failed investment properties. A lot of those properties bought at really high prices. But it's starting to trickle more into, unfortunately, like a lot of your a lender, homeowner stock, people who just, you know, they've, they've been trying their best. We're seeing Canadian household indebtedness rise. They're probably paying credit cards, HELOCs to try and service their mortgage. And they've just run out of room. And they, you know, that's all they can do. And so they're going delinquent. And I, this is a trend I would say, we'll probably peak next year as we have a bunch of new mortgages, or a bunch of mortgages

Renewed. Resetting at higher rates, right? Yeah. I'm very worried about that. You know, I think Yeah, that could really make it spike. I mean, you sit down with pen and paper and look at how much a lot of those costs are going to go up. People are already stretched and strained. I would argue the CPI is not properly catching inflation in most people's lives over the last five to seven years that their actual costs have gone up even more. But you get these mortgage costs jumping to the level they can on renewal.

If they're already tight, can you imagine? And we could have even more of these types of things. It'll be interesting if you end up seeing the government get involved to some extent. And of course, you mentioned earlier the threat of Ontario in particular or dealing with a high unemployment rate. That makes it very tough indeed. You know, a lot of the student markets, of course, have really been hit because we've seen a dramatic cutback on the foreign students and a lot of those homes were being rented

to many kids. You know, we certainly saw it in Kitchen of Waterloo by Conestoga College in East London by Fanshaw. And now that supply or that demand part of me has dried up. Some of those houses must be the ones we're talking about in the powers of sale. Absolutely. I think that that's a huge portion of the supply, the international student piece. has done a lot to a lot of markets.

I think some markets, like Conestog would be one of the big ones, but larger urban market that's maybe a little bit more resilient. You go look at like Sioux College and North Bay, et cetera. Like, yeah, I mean, it's a good thing because locals are certainly able to afford housing again, rental or ownership, but it's certainly becoming a big risk or issue for a lot of those student rental landlords, which to be honest, that was the only way that people could cash flow investment properties during the pandemic, right? Like Airbnb got banned and then it was basically student rentals.

And so now if that's gone, like this is where I think people really need to pay attention to regulatory risk or legislative risk in real estate investing, which they completely ignore. Like, you know, if you got a bought a property, Airbnb, okay, that's gone, student rental. Okay, that's gone. Now what, right? Well, you know, I'll give you one Airbnb example. It's a friend of mine owned a property and in the area that it was.

She was the only one that could fit eight people. and it was near a good golf course, so you had two groups of four coming in. They then changed the regulations where the max you could advertise could stay in any one of the Airbnbs was six. Well, there was a ton of them that had six. She went from no competition to significant competition and therefore obviously pricing problems. The math didn't work anymore. And to your point, these regulation changes, not just the big ones, but even some of the subtle

ones change the dynamics of all this so dramatically, people better be thinking that risk through beforehand and trying to do as much research as. as they can on it. Yeah. Yeah. I think like most people do, they just assume that there's like a way out and that or that and it's like just all you have to do is model this stuff. Like just run the numbers and say, okay, would this work if it if I had to run it as a long term rental? And if the answer is no, then you're probably taking on too much risk with the investment unless you're willing to do like bail it out, take a loss on the property, put more equity into the deal to make it cash flow or completely lose. And I think a lot of people just nobody had spread.

cheats out for the last 20 years in Canadian real estate. I completely agree. Yeah. And so hopefully we're done with that, that period of time. No, you said that very well. Look, I've really enjoyed this. As you know, I'm a big fan. I really am.

I love your stuff. I've learned a lot from it over the years. You know, one of the big compliments I would give you is anybody who watches Daniel, it'll get them thinking. You may not agree with everything he says. You don't agree with everything I say, but it does get you thinking. He looks at all of these real estate angles from a number of perspectives. It's just a really enjoyable watch.

So give him a tune in on YouTube. What can they find you on YouTube? Just my name, just search Daniel Foch on YouTube and you'll find me. And I try to be on like every platform. So like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, we have a podcast, the Canadian Real Estate Investor podcast, which you were on. Yeah, I enjoyed that. Yeah, so try and be everywhere.

You were pretty quiet that day when I was on the podcast. I think Nick's a better, he's a really good interviewer. I'm not an exceptionally good interviewer. Like if you listen back to some of our interviews, I get too excited and I ask like five questions at once. And the people are just like, what is he? So, yeah. I'm not, I'm honestly not exceptionally good at it.

I'm working on it. Well, the problem with you is that when you have real estate people on, you know more than most of the guests, that's a challenge. Maybe, yeah, I don't know. It depends. I do try and know a lot about it, but I think, I don't have the experience, right, of people like yourself or like Chip Wilson, who we've had on or whatever. So, yeah.

Now, how many hats do you have kidding aside? You seem to have a different hat on every time I see you. Yeah, I, uh, oh, I don't know. I don't say, I've never counted them. But, yeah, I have a hat from pretty much any company that's, like, been bankrupt in the last, 50 years. Well, we're not going to send you a wealthy barber hat. That's for sure.

We don't want the bad luck. Well, I wear one for my brokerage now, so hopefully that's not a... I'm hoping it's a good omen, not a bad one. All right, well, listen, good luck with everything. A real pleasure having you on. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.