No Money? No Problem

Just clear vision with faith and purpose

With the business back on track, there were a few dreams I saw in my heart. After all, the business was created to allow me to live my dreams. Could I?

1. Build my dream home

2. Buy a church property

3. Buy a commercial office building for work

Each of these would require at least a $10 million investment, over $36 million total.

The problem? I only had $200,000 in the bank.

It seemed impossible. But I’m a dreamer with lots of dreams.

My Dream Home

I thought about what I wanted in a dream home. I imagined in my mind’s eye:

• a view of the mountains

• the Pacific Ocean

• close to the city, yet a secluded, tranquil neighbourhood

• clean air next to parks and beaches, and

• a large lot 

So I looked on Google Earth and looked for areas that would match this. I found a few locations. I looked at houses for sale in these neighbourhoods. One house, when I stepped into it, I just had a vision and an intuition that this would be my home. It was already ‘done’.

The realtor said the basement was a mess and flooded, and likely had mold. I didn’t even go look at the rest of the house. I told my realtor, my brother-in-law, Gord, to put in a firm offer for $3.6 million just for the lot, I knew it was a bargain compared to the other neighbourhoods. I would then spend the next five years building my dream house on this big lot. I would struggle to pay for the building of my dream home, as it took much longer to build (5 years) at double my budget.

Our church

Our church congregation is only about 150 people. Small. So we rented churches and we often had to move from one location to another. One day, the youth group gathered together and had a dream of buying a church property. Something we would own. Our elders told us we needed to think big, buy a place that was by the ocean, surrounded by trees with a creek flowing through the property into the ocean.

That sounded very expensive, much larger than our $300,000 budget back in early 2000. Over the next few years, we went to view many potential lots. They were very expensive. We had our eye on this one 78 acre property, owned by the YMCA. We had had a spring Bible conference there and we loved it. The problem was that it wasn't for sale.

A couple of years later in 2004, I was reading the neighbourhood newspaper and it mentioned that the YMCA might be selling this particular property in order to build a larger facility downtown. I quickly told an elder and he told me bluntly, “We can’t afford it.” I asked one of my mentors, Bryant, if we could pursue this.

We went on to raise $10 million and negotiated with the YMCA to pay it over the next three years. An impossible dream made possible by faith. We had very little money, but we raised the money with a dream that this property would help people with their health physically, mentally, and spiritually.

My dream office

I noticed that downtown Vancouver felt a lot like Manhattan downtown. It needed to be accessed by bridges. The secret in real estate:  location, location, location!

I knew that downtown could only go up in density as I was looking around different neighbourhoods. I really liked this heritage area called Yaletown. I saw a building on sale and asked my realtor to view the property. As soon as I stepped into the building, I once again had a vision of exactly what would happen: a bank in one corner, a restaurant taking half the building, and my company occupying a quarter of the building.

I asked my realtor, Gord, to make an offer. I didn’t tell him I didn’t have the money. I asked him if we could have a small down payment of $100,000 and close in 12 months. I know that these were crazy requests, but we got the purchase price down from $12.2 million to $11.2 million, closing in 10 months. 

I thought that I could get a mortgage for 95% of the building, but did not know that commercial mortgages typically required 50% down payment. 

Where was I gonna come up with $5.4 million in 10 months?

Read the rest of the story at Ham.com (5 min read)