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SEAS5 EP233 - Michele Chats With Thomas From Reitium
August 11, 2023 | Posted by: Michele Cummins
SEAS5 EP233 - Michele Chats With Thomas From ReitiumWatch segment one here:
Watch segment two here:
For more information on Thomas Park CLICK HERE
Your Real Estate Investor Specialist
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673 Abbott Street Vancouver, BC V6B 6B8
Phone: (604) 720-6999
Email: thomas@reitium.com
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Michele Cummins Cell: 778-885-4659
Email: mcummins@remax.net
Curtis Pope 0:21
time It's time for the company's real estate show with Michelle Cummings and myself Curtis Pope and good morning Michelle. Good morning Curtis smell I have to ask you a quick question here before we get going because you really weirded me out on Facebook this week what happened? Well I see this picture of you and I'm looking at and I go there's this person under like five ladies there and I'm looking this I know this person. I'm like, How do I know it? And then I clue in. And it's it's Kim Kim who I've known since I was five I went to kindergarten school all the way with I've known her forever. And I'm like how in the heck are Michelle and Kim at the same event? How do they know each other what
Michele Cummins - PREC 0:56
social media does? It brings us all together? It weirded me the heck out? Kim is an amazing person. I just met her at that realtor event. It was fun. It was the Barbie movie. And yeah, so I had to reach out to her and go oh my gosh, you know Curtis
Curtis Pope 1:11
Pope? And she probably went Oh, no,
Michele Cummins - PREC 1:13
don't know. You don't want to know what she said.
Curtis Pope 1:15
I probably don't know. Actually, I was bugging her online after seeing that too. Because I'm like, This is so weird. What is going on? Worlds are colliding here. This is just bizarre. But that again, it shows you the power of social media and everything else. Because 20 years ago, I would have no idea you guys are an event and we would have had no idea that we knew each other. We're all like
Michele Cummins - PREC 1:33
one away from each other.
Curtis Pope 1:35
It's frightening. Yeah. Well, we have a special guest today and I know that you've got one of your world famous Michelle Cummings intros ready to go well, I
Michele Cummins - PREC 1:43
don't know about world famous but I definitely do have an intro for this amazing person, Thomas Park. So welcome, Thomas. Thank you very much Michelle Thomas Park. So all our listeners know he's been a very successful realtor for the past 19 years, and he owns his own real estate office in downtown Vancouver. Prior to his journey in real estate, though Thomas was in the tech industry in the early 90s, selling computers, and then started a web development company in the later 90s and went through the.com boom and bust. Fast forward to today, Thomas has created an innovative FinTech prop tech company called Real ATM, mixing two industries, he loves real estate and tech. And when I met Thomas A while ago, I instantly connected with his brand and his name. We followed each other on social media first, or I followed him and and then I got to meet him. And Thomas, I'm so happy that you came to Abbotsford today from Vancouver, and you fought the traffic and you're here with us to give the listeners knowledge about this amazing company you built.
Speaker 3 2:50
Thank you very much. I'm super excited to be here. And thank you very much for allowing me to actually be on your show.
Michele Cummins - PREC 2:55
Oh, absolutely. It's our pleasure. And I know, we all need to know what is your company?
Speaker 3 3:01
Yeah, great. So read TM, we built a real estate investment platform that allows anybody to invest into income producing properties. They get to share their rental income and appreciation through fractional ownership, starting with $100. So we wanted to do democratize real estate investing, and make it accessible to everyone.
Curtis Pope 3:22
This is my running joke with Michelle every time she comes up with an investment I go, I mean, 400 bucks. Yeah, absolutely.
Michele Cummins - PREC 3:28
Literally is a running joke. And did you know Curtis that that's that was the basis? No, I
Curtis Pope 3:34
didn't know. That is amazing that you can get in for as little as 100 bucks.
Speaker 3 3:39
Absolutely. And so that was the premise of the whole idea is majority of the world's population will never ever be able to afford to buy real estate, obviously living in, you know, Vancouver or even British Columbia, any major city center, all real estate prices have gone up. And it's really priced out a lot of the people out of the market. So it was quite interesting. You know, fractionalized and real estate asset was the only way that we could do this, five years ago, or 10 years ago, we didn't have the option because technology is not as advanced as at once as it is now. And so with new technologies coming out, we're able to do this and perform this and enable people to be able to invest into real estate.
Michele Cummins - PREC 4:17
So I'm sure people are thinking, no, there must be this isn't real $100 to invest in real estate. Can you explain how it works?
Speaker 3 4:25
Absolutely. So what we do is actually we digitize the share structure of a corporation. That Corporation owns the asset. And what it means is owns the real estate property, that real estate property isn't going to be an income producing property. So you're going to generate rental income. And then what we do is that we digitize the share structure, and we attach the ID of the individual investor into that property, as well as their investment when they paid how they paid, and so that we're actually compliant with all security regulations in Canada in the United States. What we've done is we have to follow that rule set because we're selling shares within the corporation that owns the asset. So enabling and doing that with technology and automating it allows us to take the micro investors to be able to invest, because it's actually a paperwork nightmare. And because of technology and automation that we've created within our platform, that enables us to take the smaller investors to be able to participate and then share the rental income and appreciation.
Michele Cummins - PREC 5:28
Is there dividends paid out? Or how does that work?
Speaker 3 5:31
Yes, absolutely. So the dividends are paid out based upon the rental income that comes in from the property and the types of properties that we can have on the platform or a short term rental fund, senior housing, student housing, self storage, multifamily properties, new construction, hotels, motels, mobile home parks, so anybody that's investing to these properties, after expenses, whatever is leftover is actually paid out in distributions or dividends out to the individual investors based upon how much they invested into the property.
Michele Cummins - PREC 5:59
And are these as a Canadian when you invest, or you only invested in Canadian properties and US US properties? Or if I or Curtis, let's say, invest? Is it? Is it a mix?
Speaker 3 6:13
So absolutely. So Canadians actually will invest into Canadian properties. However, there are structures that you can invest into us properties, but you have to make sure that that structure is available, it's usually called an MFT, which is a mutual fund trust, because what you do not want to do is get taxed twice from the Canadian side and the American side, on the American platform, only Americans can invest into the their deals.
Michele Cummins - PREC 6:35
Ah, okay. Uh, how did you come up with the name tritium? Oh, it's a good one. Yeah,
Speaker 3 6:40
great question. So I was a, you know, domain names are very hard to come by. I come from the tech industry in the 90s. And so, everybody knows, well, a lot of people know what a REIT is, which is a real estate investment trust. And so I wanted to have that in the name. We're not essentially just a REIT. But I liked the fact that it had real estate investment in trust. And I was at a conference and at this conference, I saw this company called Guardium and I really liked the iulm at the end, because it has a prestige to it like titanium Etherium, you know, platinum. And so I was sitting there and I just thought of the name tritium. And I was it was amazing because I got to register all the socials. So I got reteamed.com dotnet.ai dot everything. And then also the the TIC tock Instagram, Facebook, I got reach him because it was a made up name. And then I go to a lot of conferences and we booth a lot of these conferences. And what had happened was a lady came to me and said, I love your name. And I said, Well, why do you love her name? And she goes, Well, I know what a REIT is. But she goes iu m. And people at conferences, do never ever blow my mind. But she was like investors under management. And that's when it was the the explosion. I was like, wow, I never even thought about that. But it was an Americans love acronyms. So what my whole name for reteam is one acronyms. So I'm super excited. And that's how we came up.
Michele Cummins - PREC 8:08
Your Branding is really good. Your logo is great. Thank you. Yeah. Explain us a little bit behind the scenes, like your real estate experience of almost 20 years. And your tech, like, how did that come about?
Speaker 3 8:21
Yeah. So in my since an early age, I was selling computers in the early 90s, I was selling 10 computers a day my colleagues were selling one is because I made something very challenging, easy for people to understand. And so I brought that in. And then I started to internet companies where we did web development, e commerce online marketing. And this was in during the boom of the internet, so 1997 and then went to the.com, boom, and then bust. So at 28, I thought I made it on paper, I had two companies I was had a lot of sweat equity, we're going to go public and on paper at 20. I was like, Oh, I'm a millionaire. And then later part of 28. Actually, that's when everything went south. And I literally lost everything. And at that point, actually, it was all about ego. I lost my car, I lost my house, I lost the girlfriend that I thought I was gonna be with for the rest of my life. And it was actually a very, very difficult time. But looking back at it, I'm glad everything happened the way it did is because I would I think I'd be a different person if everything went the way I thought it was supposed to. So I'm glad that it happened. And also, because of the been a lot of real estate dips. I was prepared for it because going through that.com bust was actually enlightening in that sense.
Curtis Pope 9:32
So you were this close to being like Mark Cuban and getting out just at the right time and becoming a billionaire and owning the Mavericks.
Speaker 3 9:37
Absolutely, that would have been great. I think it could have well, not a billionaire, but you know, a multimillionaire would have been great. But at the end of the day I'm I'm glad that it happened because I wasn't spending time with family. I was actually just everything was centered around myself. And what I realized is that it's kind of interesting, this is the one of the learnings is that I thought But I wanted to spend my time trying to make everybody liked me. And if there are people that didn't like me, I wasted my time trying to convert them to actually like me. And what I was doing is that I was actually taking away my own personal time from the people that did like me. And so family was the biggest thing is that my mom, my sister has told me, they're like, We never saw you, during this time. And it actually brought me back to realize is that time is, you know, the most precious time that thing that we have, and then spend it with the quality people, the people that actually add value, you can add value to them. And that's who I want to spend my time, there are always going to be people that aren't gonna like you. At the end of the day, that's fine. I'll spend my time and my quality time with all the people that do like me. And I can actually add value to them, and they can add value to me. So good words of wisdom. Well, that was my world learnings. And if I probably hadn't gone to that.com bust, I probably wouldn't have saw that for quite some time.
Michele Cummins - PREC 10:56
Learn through the hard troubles in our lives. If we had it good all the time. Yeah, we wouldn't learn. Yeah, yeah, it's it's real estate, the ups and the downs, and the turnarounds and the volatile. It's so volatile. And it's amazing what you've taken your personal life, and you've used it really, as a benefit to others, as well as yourself. So this amazing that you've offered this, I love when there's creations, you've invented this. And when we get back from the break, we're going to talk more about it because there's so much more I have some more questions I have for you, and you've got a lot of wisdom to give us. We need to share how people can get into real estate by $100 or 100 bucks 100.
Curtis Pope 11:37
Who knew I was onto something all this time? All right, well, we'll take a quick break here. Michelle, if people want more information about your listings and things like that, where can they go, Michelle cummins.ca. We're back with more right after this.
And we are back with segment number two of the Cummins real estate show with Michelle Cummins and myself Curtis Pope. And of course, we have Thomas, our special guests here now. Now tell me about where the just the idea came from to start this business because it's it's blowing my mind that you would come up with something like this, and then I never thought of it.
Speaker 3 12:53
Thanks. Yeah. So Chris, what had happened was about seven years ago, my affluent clients contacted me. They basically said, Hey, we have capital pick and choose some properties downtown that we can fix and flip. And so I identified a couple of properties in Yaletown, they fix and flip them, and I made them a million dollars fixing flipping those two properties in a calendar year. And so I have family dinner with my mom and three older sisters every week, we always talk about real estate, just like every other family. Tom usually talks about how expensive real estate is. And so my mom's like, Oh, you made your cleanse million dollars, huh? She goes, I have $30,000 Go make me the same returns. I'm like, sorry, Mom, I can't do anything with $30,000. But same problem, how many people you know have some money and they want to invest in real estate but can't. So my mom was like me, she's like a born Natural Born salesperson. So she goes to church comes back a week later the next family dinner and says, Okay, I got six girlfriends, we all have 3000s. Now go make us a million dollars. And that was the lightbulb moment? How many people have a little bit of money, one invest in real estate or buy real estate but can't? And how can I solve that problem? And so it was quite interesting is that my my co founder was entered a hackathon to put title registry on the blockchain. And they won that, that, that hackathon. And they came to me and they presented the idea. And I just said, Well, you know, it's gonna take a long time for governments to adopt blockchain to for Title registry. But I said, here's the bigger problem. You know, we look at it as a problem statement as an investor investing to your company, they always talk about what problem are you solving? And is there a big enough market to solve that problem. And, again, majority the world's population can't buy. So those six ladies that were going to invest into a property actually invested into my company, and we raised about 500,000 through friends and family, and we started developing and building out our product.
Michele Cummins - PREC 14:39
That is such a great story. Oh my gosh, and it's so true that there's been movies made of how friends buy together because they can't each individually purchase something. And this idea like what if have Okay, I have a couple of questions. Well first is what type of properties are you buying or what kind of properties What are your investors getting out of this?
Speaker 3 15:02
Absolutely. So our platform is actually a marketplace. So we have asset owners that come to us and say, Hey, we have a multifamily property that we want to raise capital, they can raise capital, the traditional way, going through accredited investors, and then basically paying their fees to those accredited investors to actually loan them the money or to the banks. So who's making the money on that? The rich and the banks, banks are making record profits. But how about the little guy, so I go back to my mom again. So my mom immigrated Canada with my two older sisters in 1970. And my father wasn't the best person. And so my mom in the middle of the night might, I have another sister and myself were both born in Canada in Toronto. But my mom packed us up in the middle of the night, and moved us from Vancouver to Calgary to get away from my father. My father founded something in Calgary, so we moved to Vancouver. So I've been here in Vancouver since I was five. But my mom's whole idea of saving money and leaving money in the bank is how the she thought she was going to grow her wealth, just because she was an immigrant coming into another country, not understanding the language, and not knowing the opportunities, actually, that there are that there were for her, but she just didn't know what that looks like. And a lot of kids and a lot of people don't understand this, which is financial literacy. And so a big component to our platform is to teach financial literacy. So when I see a person that has a little bit of money, and basically just leaves it in the bank, and it gets eaten by inflation, I see my mom. So if my mom had the platform that we have, right now that she couldn't have started investing in real estate, she could have built her wealth sustainably, she could have built it up faster, and maybe going into the real estate market a little bit sooner than having to actually buy real estate later in life.
Michele Cummins - PREC 16:41
And by investing in your company. And we the investors don't have to deal with the property management and the maintenance and the finding it and the dealing with it. And the lawyers and the there's so much to do with that. But yet it's real estate, we know it's tangible, it you won't lose it, like putting it in the stock market and it could be gone tomorrow. Real estate is tangible and will always be there will always be worth something absolutely explain a little bit about that difference.
Speaker 3 17:13
So real estate has outperformed the s&p 500 Over the past 25 years. So investing into a property onto our platform, what's very important is that you're not only investing into the property itself, you're investing into the the GP, the general partner that's managing the asset. So every deal that comes onto the platform are vetted. So what that means is that we look to see who actually is the developer or the person that's managing the asset. And managing the fund is just going to be as important as the property that you're investing into. Because you're investing into their experience, what they've done in the past what their past performances are, you'll get to see all the legal documents, you get to see the the performer, you'll get to see you know their history and educate yourself and be able to pick and choose the assets, you get to see the expected returns. Now, nothing is guaranteed. So as per the security regulators, we have to put risk acknowledgement that you could lose some or all of your money that you invest into this deal. But at the end of the day, if you invest into the stock market, if you're unsophisticated, you can throw $100 And you can lose $100. With real estate, you can invest in $100. If the market drops by 10%, technically, you're only losing 10% of your investment. However, again, real estate has outperformed the s&p 500 Real estate is not something you buy today and literally sell tomorrow. It's something that you buy, you hold it and you actually collect the dividends. And the other component to that is that if you do get dividends from the property, my recommendation would actually be reinvested into another property. So you get compounding interest,
Michele Cummins - PREC 18:44
that compounding interest is amazing. Yes. Amazing. So how many properties does reach him? Own right now?
Speaker 3 18:53
Yep. So read him. It takes no equity in any of the assets on our platform. So again, we are the marketplace where like, let's say for example, we're like Airbnb, Airbnb has a host, and they bring in the guests that want to stay in the properties. So what reteam is, is that we have developers or anybody in the real estate industry, that have a rental property, that and it could be commercial residential. So they come to us and say, we want to raise capital for our project. And then we bring the individual investors into the deal. And then basically, we merge them together. And we want to make sure that we bring great assets onto the platform.
Michele Cummins - PREC 19:28
Okay, and so you are vetting these companies. Yeah,
Speaker 3 19:33
so we actually have a third party vending, vetting company, so we don't personally vet them ourselves. We have an outside agency that vets these deals so that we remain impartial. So that we're there's no like special treatment because there's a friend of family or what have you. We want to make sure that we bring great deals, because we want to mitigate risk. We can't say that we can do it 100% But we want to try to do as much as possible.
Michele Cummins - PREC 19:54
So does it do US investors like when we give you do we do we know it exactly which properties are okay? We do? Yeah,
Speaker 3 20:03
absolutely. So you can go in there you can search based upon asset type. So short term rentals, senior housing, student housing Self Storage bunch, you can see what the expected returns are. So you can pick and choose, Okay, this one has a 16% return, this was an 8% return, or this one has a time horizon. And what that means is that when they sell the asset, it could be five years, four years, three years, two years a year. So you can pick and choose the assets. Now, we are a new startup. So we're just onboarding assets onto our platform, you can invest into, you know, certain types of properties, but we will be adding more over the next little bit. And so want to go and check out to see what we have just go on there, and then just learn,
Michele Cummins - PREC 20:40
what's the best place for us to go on and get more information? Is it your website, or
Speaker 3 20:46
so you just go to retune.com. And you'll be able to find everything about the principles of the company, you'll get to find out all the different asset types. There's a little bit of learning, and they're worth adding to that because again, the whole component to us is financial literacy. And so we're started off in Canada, we will be moving into the United States, most likely by the end of the year.
Michele Cummins - PREC 21:03
Wow. Sony, so Curtis,
Curtis Pope 21:06
yeah, 100 bucks? Well, that's a question I guess I would follow up with is like, so you know, you say that there's an 8% Return on something. So at the end of the year, you get an 8% return? Does it just get reinvested? Or do you get a dividend for that? How does that kind of work? Yep,
Speaker 3 21:17
you'll get a dividend. Usually, they're paid out quarterly, and they're paid out by the issuer. So the asset owner, retain them, again, doesn't take any participation in that, right. And you can reinvest that into another property, or you can take out that dividend. We're how you set up your account on our platform, and you actually took the money out of your bank account into the platform, what can happen is that that's where they'll pay the distributions, the dividend, or you can just say, Hey, I would like to reinvest this into another property. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah.
Michele Cummins - PREC 21:46
Well, we have to end the show, unfortunately. But we always leave our show with a quote. And Thomas, I would love it, if you can give our listeners your quote of the day.
Speaker 3 21:58
Yeah, great. So I've been an entrepreneur pretty much my whole life. I've been working since I was 13. And a lot of people, an entrepreneur, my, my, my co founder says this all the time, she said, You have to be crazy to start up a company. Because you have to know everything. There's so many things, you're the janitor, you're the CEO, you're you know, you do everything. And so for us is that, you know, there are big risks and what rain Wayne Gretzky says, You,
Curtis Pope 22:24
what was the quote, it's 100 shots you don't take.
Speaker 3 22:27
And so for me, it's like, I don't want to sit back, I want to try, try, try and keep on doing the things that I love. And I'm not the typical guy that to work in an office nine to five work for somebody else, I want to try different things. And for me, that is my excitement. And there's like real estate, you'll get to a point where you're plateau, you'll know pretty much everything you need to know, at a certain point in your career. So then it becomes very robotic, very mundane for me. And that's how I saw it. But starting a new company, a startup in a field like FinTech, or prop tech is very excited, because there are a lot of elements that I didn't know. And I didn't know what I didn't know. So there's, it's very exciting to be part of that. But there's so many naysayers in like, Oh, why are you starting this, you're doing very well, in real estate, you just keep on continuing and keep on doing it. But at the end of the day, for me, it was just like, and I mentioned this to you earlier, as I'm, you know, as I getting a little bit up there in age, and I was thinking about if I was to sell my book of real estate business, I would hope that I could get a 1x return on my book of business, because at the end of the day, if I retire, what's gonna happen is that all my clients are gonna go elsewhere. But in a tech company, you can get a 20 30x return. And because I love technology, and real estate, and I'm merging the two industries together, I'm doing something that I'm passionate about. And so I did really well in real estate. But at the end of the day, I can see that in the future, I could potentially get a 20x return for not only myself, but those six ladies of my mom, that invest into my company, and
Michele Cummins - PREC 24:03
to be a realtor, you are solving problems that is your problem solver. And that is what you did with this new company. And we humans have to create we have to make we were born to always, you know, do something. So this is really exciting because yeah, you're not you're not satisfied to just sit back and let life just pass you by. You're gonna take that shot, every shot you can take what was that quote again?
Curtis Pope 24:27
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take? Yes, so true. Yeah, I'm a hockey coach. Yes, I use that one a lot. Yes. Amazing. All right, Michelle. Well, I guess that wraps things up if people want more information about your listings and what you do as a realtor and all that where can they go Michelle commons.ca. And join us again next week and we will talk real estate in order to unlock your real estate potential on the show real estate is maximized. Thanks for listening