
Show Summary
In this conversation, Babar Moghal shares his journey from a corporate engineer to a full-time real estate investor. He discusses his two-pronged business strategy that includes both short-term active projects and long-term multifamily developments. Babar emphasizes the importance of adapting to market changes, leveraging personal skills, and building strong partnerships. He also highlights the significance of continuous learning and giving back to the community.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Babar Moghal (00:00)
You know, as I was learning more about real estate, you know, as a mentee, as a student, just absorbing the fundamentals of real estate, and I started going out in the field, in the market to really now rub shoulders with those that are executing real estate. And I quickly realized that, you know, real estate has no barriers to entry, right? Anybody from any walk of life can come into real estate. SoRight there, I noticed that it is not a level playing field. Not everybody shares the same background. Not everybody shares the same level of education. And therefore, the level of sophistication is different. That was my aha moment, my light bulb moment that I’ve got skill sets that I’ve developed in the past, which are now transferable.
Quentin Edmonds (02:23)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. And you know what I’m gonna say. I’m excited to be here today. I can’t imagine a day when I’m not excited to be here. Especially when I get to talk to just fantastic guests. Get to see things through their lens. And today is no different. I have another fantastic guest who’s gonna tell you everything that he does. And I’m excited to have this conversation. So I wanna introduce you all to Mr. Babar Moghal.Mr. Babar, how you doing today,
Babar Moghal (02:54)
I’m doing great and thanks for having me. It’s great to be here on this platform.Quentin Edmonds (02:59)
Absolutely, man. Thank you for coming through. Thank you for your time. And so listen, let’s do this. I want to dive in. I want you to tell the people what your main focus is these days. If you want to give us a little bit of an origin story, we love the hero’s journey. So please, you know, tell us how you got into real estate. We love that and got into business. Even that if you want to tell that. And then if you don’t mind, because I think it’s just special, tell them a part of the world you’re in, man. So sir, you got the floor, man.Babar Moghal (03:25)
Absolutely. You know, my story in real estate is probably very similar to many other journeys. You know, by profession, by trade, I’m an engineer. And, you know, I drank the corporate Kool-Aid. I was a big believer that, you know, it’s the ticket to your lifestyle is climbing the corporate ladder. And, you know, forthe last 20 years or so that’s been my exclusive focus is that, you know, how do I grow in that space? And while I was growing and climbing the ladder, I just realized that what was happening is I was creating my time for dollars. And I just felt like, you know, I had the title, I had the position, the paycheck was great, but I just didn’t have time for myself, time for my
loved ones and time to do what I really would like to do, right? And that’s when I started researching other vehicles, other avenues, like, you know, there’s gotta be another way where I could do both, right? I didn’t wanna just quit my job and say that, hey, I’m a real estate investor. I was really looking at the trajectory of others that have gone down this path and how successfully they have.
diversified their skill sets ⁓ into real estate and they built that momentum to the point where they have achieved, you know, call it financial freedom, time freedom, location freedom. And that is what really attracted me is that how can I leverage my skill sets to propel me in that direction and buy back my time? So I’m a you know full-time real estate investor. I still have my corporate nine to five.
but my job is very much complimentary towards what I do in real estate. So essentially I’m in a sales and business development role. What that means is my role is to develop relationships with customers. My role is to network and know who’s who in the zoo. My role is to uncover pain points. My role is to develop solutions and be creative.
My role is to develop trust and add value. So all of this is so synergistic and complementary to real estate when it comes to finding opportunities, when it comes to finding partners, when it comes to raising capital, when it comes to developing your brand and marketing your services. So that’s my pivot from my origin story to real estate.
Quentin Edmonds (06:54)
Loving man. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing the story. Thank you for walking this up until you had until where you are now And man, I love how you started talking and the things you were saying and I wrote some stuff down I wrote down for you being an engineer But then you started talking about skill sets you started talking about being synergistic Right. And so I have the same way I say destiny has no wasted moments, right? Meaning like through our life. There are things that we just put pick up as we going game momentumon different destinations of our life. So when was there this synergistic moment that you knew, like your mind was wired to be an engineer and you was wired to take that skill set into being, you know, an entrepreneur into real estate? Like when did it click for you that you had the skill set to put all this stuff together?
Babar Moghal (07:45)
You know, as I was learning more about real estate, you know, as a mentee, as a student, just absorbing the fundamentals of real estate, and I started going out in the field, in the market to really now rub shoulders with those that are executing real estate. And I quickly realized that, you know, real estate has no barriers to entry, right? Anybody from any walk of life can come into real estate. SoRight there, I noticed that it is not a level playing field. Not everybody shares the same background. Not everybody shares the same level of education. And therefore, the level of sophistication is different. That was my aha moment, my light bulb moment that I’ve got skill sets that I’ve developed in the past, which are now transferable.
So I can leverage all those same skill sets and become
a bit more dangerous in real estate. And that’s when I realized that I need to double down on my strengths, right? There comes a point in your career where you want to amass new skill sets and that’s always the case, that’s great. But then there comes a time where you got to stop experimenting and you got to double down on your strengths. And that is what I did with real estate is like,
I knew what I was good at and you know what are those skills that I can develop my muscle around. I focused primarily on that and then everything else, which was maybe call it not my strength or my weakness, I partnered on that. So what that also helped was to find the right partners, right? You don’t want to just find somebody because you get along with them and there’s an overlap, right? You want to find somebody that compliments.
your weaknesses and then you can yin and yang accordingly.
Quentin Edmonds (09:38)
Yes, sir. Oh man. I love that, man. I love how you talked about partnership. And I’m going to get to relationships probably a little bit later. But I got to hit on it while you said it, because you talked about you want somebody to compliment. There’s an old proverb that I say quite often is that I’m blanking. give me one second. You sometimes you’ve been thinking all day in your mind just like want to go. But it says, sharpens orange, right?And in order for it to sharpen, you’ve to rub up against each other. Meaning like it’s not always about, you know, being the yes person or always about, you know, just, just getting along, just to get along. No, you really have to compliment each other. So sometimes that takes tough conversations. Sometimes that take, you know, making sure that we are aligned and talking about the places where we’re not allowed. If you’re really going to sharpen each other, sometimes it has to be a little bit of friction so that you too can be sharp.
Or however people you’re involved with, can be sharp as y’all move forward in business. that make sense?
Babar Moghal (11:11)
Yeah, I think it’s crucial to have some level of healthy tension, primarily to hold each other accountable, right? It’s very easy for us to fall into default modes. But it’s also important that we have roles and responsibilities. There’s ownership. So in other words, it’s not like you hand off something. It’s like if you need to finish something, you take it from start to finish.So it’s really important to look at partnership just like a business, right? How you run a business, there’s accountability, there’s transparency, there is communication, there’s trust, there are processes that bring you together, whether that is financial reporting, whether that’s budget, whether that is planning. So there’s many, many facets to a partnership beyond just two humans doing things together.
Quentin Edmonds (12:06)
Absolutely. No, so well said. Well, so well said. So let me ask you this. As you was building, making the transition, has there been any times or moments of adversity? Has it been an easy transition or has there been some adversity as you was building?Babar Moghal (12:22)
Definitely a lot of adversity and almost I feel like it’s shaped me into who I am. ⁓ We’ve been constantly evolving and adapting to changing market conditions, changing market cycles, changing dynamics of you know population, GDP. ⁓ There’s various ⁓ externalities that we’ve had to become good at. initially,It was almost like going from one deal to the next deal. But now it’s more like, you know, having a strategy and a buy box where we actually say a lot more no than we used to say in the past. And, you know, that’s powerful because now we know what we want. We know how we want it. And it’s a very fixed criteria that allows us to be more targeted, be more focused.
And to do that, we’ve had to develop our skill sets as well. so managing these adversities forced us to go back and learn, forced us to go back to the drawing board and figure out your strategies, figure out whether you have the right resources to help you solve problems. Because at the end of the day, real estate is nothing but solving problems, right? And to do that, you need people. And to do that, you need to be an effective communicator.
You need to influence and you need to engage with impact. So those were the skill sets that allowed me to become who I am in order to solve those problems as they kept on coming as the market changed.
Quentin Edmonds (14:02)
I love it, man. They say trials come to make you strong. So it’s like those things come just to make you strong. Work out that muscle of not being a fixed mindset, but a growth mindset. So I hear you loud and clear. Let me ask you, what’s the next real goal? What are you looking to solve a scale next?Babar Moghal (14:18)
You know, for us, it’s been the last couple of years has really pulled the curtain in terms of, you know, where we should be focusing on. our business has a two-prong ⁓ approach. have a short-term active business. ⁓ We have a longer term. ⁓ It’s also active, but it’s more, you know, from a duration standpoint, we’re buying multifamily assets. We’re developing a land.We are doing ground up developing for multi-residential housing. So those are projects that typically take a year to two years. And often we have investors with us. So it’s a partnership that ⁓ executes the project together. And the way it works is that the investors eat first, right? We have to make sure that the investors are meeting their target.
But then from a long-term perspective, it’s great from building wealth and building passive income in the long-term, right? You can’t quit your job by just buying a multifamily asset and relying on the cash flow, right? That is where you have an active business. The active business for us is construction services. And a bit backstory of how we fell into this space is when we started in real estate around
the COVID timeframe around five years ago, we were flipping houses, right? So that was our skill set to be able to identify off-market opportunities, go in and out with effective, cost-efficient and schedule-driven renovations. Well, the market has now shifted where we no longer can flip. Well, at the same time, we have developed an excellent team, resources, we have a skill set. So we asked ourselves that, you know,
this is a great opportunity to offer construction services to other investors and homeowners. Because, you know, oftentimes you go to real estate seminars, they talk about how to find the deal, they talk about financing, they talk about legal structures, but not a lot of people talk about construction, because it’s a whole different language on its own, right? So we recognize that that’s an opportunity where we can add value. And so
For us, our goal is to grow that business here in the Greater Toronto area where we’re based, as well as find more opportunities on the multifamily land development site, both in and around Toronto, as well as Western Canada.
Quentin Edmonds (17:34)
Love it, man. Absolutely love it. So I’m listening to you. I’ve heard you say the word partnership. I heard you say we a lot, not I. You say we a lot. So I want to talk to you and get your perspective about relationships. Are relationships important? Have they served you well? What’s your, you know, your mentality on building relationships? Talk to me a little bit about relationships, Ms. Lavar.Babar Moghal (17:59)
You know, it’s really the binding agent for any partnership are the relationships, right? And I like to believe that relationships are, the right relationships are organic. They’re not forced. They’re not prescriptive. They don’t come with preconceived notions. You have to go for a slow dance before you, you know, get married, right? So it’s really important toget to know the individual. One of the key aspects of a relationship is that getting to know the person, not when the times are just good, but also when the times are bad, when the times are tough, when tough decisions and the stress of making those decisions are, is that an all time high? So you got to look at relationships from an all weather perspective.
One of the other aspects for me from a relationship is also having that trust. And that trust comes through the confidence in you being able to deliver the value that you’re promising, right? So I’m now at a point where I can do a 30 second sniff test and I can tell what this person is good at, what this person may not be good at, but essentially it’s really, really important that you partner with the right skillset and you get out of their way.
Right? I look at this as a publicly traded company, right? If you’re the CEO at the top, your job is to assemble the right team with the right resources and the structure and then get out of their way. Right? Your job is not to tell the expert how to do their job. Your job is to ask open-ended questions. Your job is to get their input and look at things from
different lenses. And, you know, that’s where I believe we all have blind spots. And having the right team around you, you really be risk and you really look at things from a holistic view. So all this at the end of the day is through having the right relationships and being surrounded with the right people.
Quentin Edmonds (20:09)
Man, I absolutely love you said so many things that make sense and I love the analogy and the way you talked about relationships, even just with business relationships, you know, and I’m just picking up on kind of what you said. No, it’s kind of like a marriage, you know, in a marriage, when you look at the definition of the word is a merger, like you are merging together. But I love how you talked about having people like autonomy, hiring people, let them work in their skill set and then get out the way and let them do what they do.And I love it. You know, when you think about an old school car, because know cars now electric, all kinds of things are going on. But the old school car that had the old school battery, we needed the battery to work for the car to work. But when you look at that battery closely, there was a positive and a negative. You had to have both on that battery in order for the battery to work. And that’s how it is in business. not calling anybody a negative, but I’m just saying you got to have two sides of the coin and they got to work properly in order for you to power the vision forward. And so.
I love what you said, man. It makes all the sense in the world to me. Listen, Mr. Babar, let me ask you this before we get out of here. Is there any topic that I did not bring up that you would want to bring up? Is there any other words of motivation, inspiration, or education that maybe you wanted to give to people?
Babar Moghal (21:24)
Yeah, I mean, there’s quite a few in real estate, right? We spoke about partnerships and relationships, which was very important. I think one thing that I’m finding increasingly critical is that, you know, we have to never forget that we’re students, we’re always learning. And sometimes when a new investor compares themselves with somebody,who has done quite a bit, there is this overwhelming feeling of like, when can I get there? And sometimes you’re comparing your chapter one with somebody else’s chapter 20. And I just wanna share that no matter how far down the line you are, something’s gonna hit you. And it’s gonna remind you that you gotta now relearn, re-strategize, ⁓
when the rules of the game change, then you have to change. And a lot of people are resisting of change. A lot of people have found their identity and they’re etched and they do not want to evolve. So, my message is that we have to stay humble. We have to not let fast success drive our ego. We have to…
you know, build our character and, you know, we have to give back because we learned from somebody else who was kind enough to teach us. And therefore you come across, you know, moments where it’s payback time. It’s time to give back. So how do you give back if you’re not learning? Right. It’s almost like you want to share.
what you’re struggling with, but you also want to share how you got there, right? So there’s so much of goodness that you can unpack and somebody else can either relate to your experience, get motivation, get clarity, and actually take action because that’s what matters at the end is taking action.
Quentin Edmonds (23:29)
So well said, sir, so well said. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,Babar Moghal (23:41)
Yes, I’m on social media, so very easy to find. It’s On Facebook, it’s Babar Moghal, R-E-I. You can find me on Facebook. And on Instagram, I am at bmoghal, so B-M-O-G-H-A-L.Quentin Edmonds (23:56)
There you go. Listen, not a Moghal in the making, already a Moghal by name. So I absolutely love it. Sir, listen, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Cause like you just said, we leverage our time all the time. So I guess redundant, pun intended, but we know we can put a premium on our time, right? Our time is our most precious commodity. So thank you for your time. Definitely. Thank you for your story. Thank you for your authenticity, for your transparency. I greatly appreciate that.And more importantly for me, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I really appreciate you,
Babar Moghal (24:34)
Thank for the opportunity.Quentin Edmonds (24:36)
Absolutely. So listen, I can’t tell me you didn’t get the value from this Definitely check out mr. Babar check out the Moghal go check him up right in the show notes You can connect with them, but definitely make sure you are subscribed here because I promise you we’re gonna continue to bring up incredible people Just like mr. Babar. So thank you again, sir. It’s everyone else. I have a fantastic day


