BRRRR Stopped Working—So He Built Brand-New Rentals Instead | Aditya Soma

Aditya Soma (00:00)
So the successful way to build relations What worked for me, what I see missing in… Some people, I train a lot of agents, right? So what I see missing is like, they don’t have this curiosity. So for me, I built very, very meaningful relations over the years, but it all started with… Really genuinely curious. I don’t go to networking events just to go there and distribute my business card. I never did that.

Issa Hanna (02:07)
Welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pros Show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna and today I have Aditya Soma with us to share his knowledge. Aditya, welcome to the show.

Aditya Soma (02:16)
Thank you brother, how are you?

Issa Hanna (02:18)
I am super good, super excited. I did my research. You have a huge social media following, so it wasn’t that hard to find you online. You’re somebody who’s built it from the ground up. You’ve owned your own brokerage, you own a rental portfolio, you’re a full-time realtor. So super excited to have you on the Investor Fuel Show. But with that, could you kind of run down like your main focuses nowadays and then what you’re kind of doing? What is it that you do from day to day?

Aditya Soma (02:47)
Yeah, sure. Mean, you know, right now, my main focus is like just building purpose-built rentals for me and for some of my clients. And I have a real estate team. Used to have a brokerage. I shut down the brokerage and just focused on building a small team. Are like agents of five, seven agents and just focus on helping clients here locally in Windsor, Ontario, buying, selling, investing, mostly investor-focused team.

Issa Hanna (03:20)
I love that man. So you’re not just building wealth for yourself. You’re not just keeping the secrets to yourself. You’re building it for your clients. Seven hundred, I think I read somewhere online, over seven hundred families you’ve helped get into purpose-built rentals. And you’re calling this new strategy that you have the Brand New BRRRR. So can you fill us in on the Brand New BRRRR, please?

Aditya Soma (03:44)
Yeah. So before that, just a small correction. We passed 800 plus families. It’s been a blessing. Honestly. I think that’s how social media works, right? Like, you attract the right people. So I’ve been doing social media from my day one in the business. So the Brand New BRRRR, like, I had to reassess my whole, portfolio in recent times, because, know, in Canada, we have seen. I don’t know about US, you know, in Canada, especially in Windsor, we have seen a lot of readjustments in the market, right? Like, you know, the market was going up and up and then tanked by 30% plus, but more than that, immigration has tightened up quite a lot. Like, you know, if you follow Canadian, the new people coming to Canada for the first time in decades, Canada lost a hundred thousand plus people. Means people moved out. So obviously, which brings a new challenge, is units getting vacant. So I had more than 70 plus rental units. Now I’m like, you know, but some of the strategies that I played, 90% of the strategies did not work because I see now when the market readjusted, now I started to see the reds. In my Excel sheet. That is not good because you cannot go too long being in the red. So I had to readjust and find the right strategy which works in this market because I cannot go with the older strategy. So my old strategy was always like, buy an old property, make it pretty, renovate it, rent it out for the best possible rents and then refinance and pull out my capital. And continue. So it’s like, if I have a hundred thousand, I’m recycling that same hundred thousand again and again. And that said, is fabulous. But now in Canada, have some, you know, because of this immigration and there is a lot of other things are going on. So I noticed building rentals is way more profitable and also way more advantages in this market because you know, when there is lot of units on the market when the vacancy rate is slowly climbing up, I want my product to be the most attractive one at an affordable price. So for that, I could not do with the existing rental portfolio because they are old buildings. I can only do so much. And there is a lot of Ontario-wide grants in Canada right now. Like there is like, know, HST rebates. If you’re building purpose-built rentals, the government is like, you know, CRA. You can get like whatever the HST you paid for the construction process, you get all that back. And there is areas where development, no development fees and the land prices has came down competitive to, you know, two years ago, three years ago. So a lot of things made me go into old BRRRR to a Brand New BRRRR

Issa Hanna (07:48)
I love that man. You you’re you know I come from Cleveland, Ohio. I own rentals in Cleveland, Ohio. Properties are a hundred years old. Like Aditya said, there’s only so much you can do to make these things attractive, but now you’re building brand new housing exact just for the purpose of renting. You’re not selling these buildings, you’re bringing them up from the ground up. They’re brand new, they’re the talk of the town. So you’re definitely gonna have a competitive edge. On even somebody like me who owns a hundred-year-old rentals, and you know, I maybe I can paint it, I can redo the kitchen, but I don’t have a brand new building. So man, I love that and I’m definitely for it, man. The Brand New BRRRR. Trademark that because first time I’ve heard it, all right, I’m sure you have. That is hilarious. So I kind of want to shift focus just a little bit. We all have I got into real estate this way. I did read your bio, so I did read kinda how you got into it, but I’d like you to share your story with our viewers. So how did Aditya get into real estate?

Aditya Soma (08:55)
Yeah, so for that, I got to go back into 2012. So I came to Canada as a student. I come from a small farmer’s family, from a small village in India. My parents, for their whole life, they were financially struggling. And my whole family was apart. This was from my childhood. My dad was in Dubai for seven years. If you heard those stories, 20 people in one room. The, you know, labors who work in construction. You don’t know whether they’re going to come back home or not, because it’s very unsafe environments in Dubai. Like, and my dad survived that. He was there for seven years. Didn’t see him. And I, he always like worked his ass off to give education for me and my sister. The cost was he has to put us in the boarding school because in our village, we don’t have a better school at that time. Fast forward. He borrowed a lot of money to send me to Canada and I land here and pretty much for the first three, four years, I was like working my ass off, doing two jobs, a lot of hard jobs, like many immigrants, know, a typical immigrant story where, you know, working in convenience store, working in factory, cleaning the toilets, you know, cleaning the washrooms, all sort of like, you can name it, like I’ve done all those things in the first three years. But I was still not paying my debts because the interest is keeping up. Finally, in 2015, I got a professional IT job in Windsor, Ontario, which was a blessing. Sometimes the universe has its own plans. I landed here in Windsor with a professional job, an IT job with over 80,000 salary, but still I could not see myself because now once I got my job, I got my wife here. Now we have to rent an apartment, we have to have a car. So still that debt is not clearing up faster, the faster way that I wanted to. On top of it, I have a bigger expenditure coming up. My sister’s wedding was planned one, one and a half year down the road at this time in 2015. So more expenses coming up. So, and it’s like my parents… They borrowed every penny for our education. So they don’t have any money. So their only asset is me. And I knew that. That’s why I was always hustling. Always, even though I had a full-time IT job, I was doing in the evenings Uber Eats or e-commerce. I was trying different things. In that process, again, God probably recognize you when you’re trying. Sometimes he sends some signals, I believe. I found this book named *Rich Dad Poor Dad*. So probably you would have heard. I have seen that book years ago when I was in college in India. Many people used to talk because I was in network marketing. At that time also I was always hustling. I used to hear but I never read. And this time I saw in a networking event a young guy, probably 21, 22, American guy in Michigan. So. He stands up at the stage and he says, okay, this book made me millionaire. And I’m like, this guy looks like young. What is he talking? Is he real? And I asked some people around me, I’m like, is he like, he telling the true story? Is it real? And I understood it’s real. He’s, he’s one of the top producer in this network marketing company. So long story short, I picked up that book and I read it that in that weekend, my mind like completely started to like think. Differently. Okay, all these years, I see why my dad was because my dad was one of the most educated guy in our village, but he did not have financial background. Like he didn’t, he didn’t have much financial education, I would say. Always lived in debts. As far as I know, like until 2020, we were always in debts, whole family debts, plus my debts and you know, the education debts, lot of the lack of financial education. And when I’m reading this book, I could see those things. So my mind started to imagine, I have a good friend in my village who is my cousin and his dad was not so educated, but his dad was smart with this. He was like that rich dad and my dad was that poor dad. So my mind was running off of all those things. And the summary was like the whole book, Robert Kiyosaki keep on pointing towards rentals. Cash flow, assets versus liability. So that’s the day I made my mind, okay, you know what? I think if I want my whole next generation to not to think about, not because my dad, I could not see him for years because of financial issues. Now I’m also aware because of financial issues. So if I want my family to be together, if I want to have some kind of, know, family tree to grow, not just divided apart, I have to build assets. That’s the message I got from that book. So from that day onwards, I was like reading and learning about how to buy rental properties. So long story short landed in buying my first rental property in 2017, March 1. So that’s where it started.

Issa Hanna (15:16)
Man, what an inspirational story and kudos because a lot of people sit home and they say, how do these immigrants come from different countries? And next thing you know, they have 70 rentals. Because they work, you guys. Because they come, they know what poverty is. Like Aditya was saying, you know, his father went to Dubai. If you don’t know about those kind of labor conditions over there, you can definitely YouTube it and see it for yourself. Not an easy, not an easy life to have. He did it for his children. He did it to send him to get a better life. And then the pressure on you as the child of an immigrant to succeed once you’re there, and like you said, you’re their only asset, is definitely a lot. And that is why pressure builds diamonds, and here you are shining with a huge social media following, your family’s debt free. You’re building legacy wealth, right? You’re building generational wealth. And real estate. I say it on every show. One of the only businesses you can get in from zero and build that legacy wealth. So man, what an inspirational story. And that’s why I wanted you to share it with our viewers. I also want to ask you something I ask all my big time investors, because we all have it, the real estate nightmare. So give me one time where You bought a property, things weren’t going as planned, and you had to get through it somehow and how you got through it.

Aditya Soma (16:46)
A lot of them, not just one, but I’ll tell you the first one. This is like, started, I got my first rental in 2017, right? So in 2018, by then I had three rentals. The fourth one, I already like started to feel like I know everything. All I had is like three duplexes and cheapest one in the whole Windsor market. Still probably, you know, the confidence went, I guess, too high. I wanted to do something crazy. And I always used to live around university. And I got this idea of building a purpose-built rentals at that time. So I always wanted to build rentals. I wanted to build 32 bedrooms, a kind of, you rooming house. So that idea escalated to meeting a of people and I just blindly went into the deal. I borrowed pretty much all the money I invested into it, almost 80,000 at that point. I lost. I had a litigation lawsuit on me and my partner. Long story short, huge stress. For a few months.

Issa Hanna (18:17)
I bet, man. That sounds like a nightmare, especially when there’s litigation involved. It’s like a weight on your chest, you know. So you know, you lost it, you had to get through it, but you know, here you are on the other side. And I bet you wouldn’t trade that lesson for anything. So you know, one thing I always tell my viewers, we don’t lose, we only learn. So if you’re gonna make it past that loss, it might seem like the end of the world, you’re gonna go past it. The ones that stick in the game, the ones that continue to push through, the ones that learn from their mistakes, those are the ones that are sitting across from me on the Real Estate Pros Show, telling you how they’re successful now and they’re a rich dad and not a poor dad. So I love everything, man. You’re giving us such golden knowledge and great inspiration. I mean, great inspiration for our viewers at home. I want to talk a little bit about the future now. I you know, I looked you up this morning before our interview. I’m five years from now, I’m gonna type your name in. I’m gonna run across your insta. Where am I gonna see you at?

Aditya Soma (19:23)
Maybe you don’t see me anywhere at all on that social media.

Issa Hanna (19:26)
Yeah.

Aditya Soma (19:28)
Maybe five years down the road, I’m just relaxed and trying to take my daughter to games and just traveling different countries and have a small portfolio that I’m managing, five buildings, offload everything and just that five buildings, probably 50 units. In those five buildings and only managing them. Other than that, no other work to do. Maybe if I still have the same passion to continue to share my life lessons or life journey on my YouTube, that’s what I do. If I feel like I would continue on that, but you would not see me in many places.

Issa Hanna (20:16)
I love that. I love that. You bought yourself time. The one thing you can’t buy, you’re buying it with your family, with everything. In five years, if I don’t see you, I’ll smile because I’ll know. I say, man, he’s you know, globe trotting around the world in his private jet probably too.

Aditya Soma (20:33)
No, probably just in economy class on a flight.

Issa Hanna (20:38)
Definitely very smart, very smart man. I can definitely relate. Why pay extra for something is gonna get you A to B. Just go there. Don’t pay crazy amounts. Also now I wanna get your I want to pick your brain for my young viewers, right? A lot of people that watch my show are just starting off, or they’re on Apple Podcasts, they listen to this on the way to work. They you know, they love hearing from our big time operators. So if you had to give them a little bit of advice on building these business relationships, growing their networks, before when we talked before, you said that one of your strengths is building connections. So what tips would you have for them on getting that ball rolling?

Aditya Soma (21:24)
So the successful way to build relations in my… What worked for me, what I see missing in… Some people, I train a lot of agents, right? So what I see missing is like, they don’t have this curiosity. So for me, I built very, very meaningful relations over the years, but it all started with… Really genuinely curious. I don’t go to networking events just to go there and distribute my business card. I never did that. I don’t even have a business card from my day one. When I go to networking events, I’m genuinely curious, okay, what is this person doing? What are they executing? And I’m invested in knowing them or knowing the speaker, knowing the other people, and just maybe just make friends on social media. Just say, hey, let’s follow each other. Let’s see how everyone’s journey going through. If I get a contact, that’s fantastic. If I don’t, but I’m going with a genuine curiosity of knowing stories, of knowing. Because think about it. As a, can you tell me more about what you’re doing? If I start to focus on you and get more interested, would you like me or not?

Issa Hanna (22:49)
Course, of course, definitely.

Aditya Soma (22:51)
So I didn’t know that that was the reason why I always had a built good connections. But later on someone told me, I’m like, you’re always like curious in us. And that makes me to talk to you. That makes me to come back to you for business or any discussions. Cause you’re not talking about you. You’re not talking about, know, what you want to, yeah, here and there sprinkle, but not like the whole event about you. So that’s one tip I think I can give. For, if you’re genuinely curious of building that business, then bring it on, like, you know, bring that curiosity on.

Issa Hanna (23:28)
Definitely, guys. All my successful people, when I interview them, I ask them that same question. And the really, really good ones, they answer it exactly the same way in their own words. It’s not what they can do for you when you meet people, it’s what you can do for them. You bring a genuine career out curiosity. You build that connection. They’re going to want to deal with you because they like you, right? If you’re over there, here’s my business card, I’ve done this, I’ve done that. I could do this, I could do that. You’re gonna rub people the wrong way, right? Let your actions speak louder than your words. And that’s how you build those connections. Amazing, amazing advice we’re getting from you today, Aditya. Amazing. And now we’ll lean into your social media following because you have a hundred plus on on Insta, you have over 30K on YouTube itself. So if people wanted to get a hold of you, even if they you know, they wanted to use the best agent services and agent team in Ontario, where could they reach you at?

Aditya Soma (24:32)
If you search for Aditya Soma, you’ll find my YouTube channel where I shared a lot of my journey. Instagram, that’s the best way you can DM. Hey, I saw your podcast. Thank you. Here’s where I am. Or just connecting over there. Social media is the best way.

Issa Hanna (24:51)
Definitely. So make sure you guys reach out. It’s S-O-M-A, Aditya Soma, huge social media following, over 800 families help, build wealth for. So he can definitely help you if you’re in the Ontario, Canada region. Even if you want to shoot him a DM, bounce some get some advice, bounce something off of him, I’m sure. Very personable, nice guy. I’m sure he’ll answer your you know, your messages. So with that, Aditya man, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a true honor to host you. And I’d love to invite you back on the show for a different time.

Aditya Soma (25:26)
Sure. No, thank you so much for having me.

Issa Hanna (25:30)
I really enjoyed our conversation and to my viewers at home, if you enjoyed the conversation with Aditya and want to see more like it, make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that could bring us different knowledge on every aspect of the real estate industry. Until next time, the Real Estate Pros are out.