Hi Everyone,
Thank you for taking the time to find my blog. This is the first time I’ve actually started a blog, well that’s actually not true, I started a blog a couple of years ago but never really wrote anything after my first entry.
So what can you expect from this blog?
I will be posting regular entries that relate to both retain medical clinics and the general real estate industry. This combination might seem odd, but trust me when I say this, it works, at least it does for me.
A little (a lot more than you want to know) about me:
The last few years for me has been very interesting. I have been involved in a number of different business ventures. Fortunately, I am still working on all of them and they seem to be on track for success.
My business aspirations started back in high school, I started a small business with a friend of mine out of my garage. We were mixing different chemicals to make what we thought was a great carwash solution, we called the company QuickShine. It was the first time I went to the bank to open a business account. We both $200 into the company account and made our first capital expense; a large garbage can. This garbage pan would become our cauldron for us to mix different solutions together. We decided that we were going to use the power of the internet to sell our product; now keep in mind this was back in 1996, when the internet was still very young! We put up some posts on some newsgroups and got our first and only order, we sold two bottles for $20 dollars each to a user in New Jersey. So once we realized that we were not cut out for the manufacturing business we both decided to focus our energies on Biology, our supposed first love.
After years of gruelling studying in molecular biology I decided that I wasn’t going to have much of a future being a scientist. So at 24 I decided to write the GMAT and apply to business school. I didn’t really do much research and applied to UofT’s Rotman School of Management. I ended up getting accepted and was now in the world of business. Whatever I had thought about business had quickly changed and I realized that there was actually a science behind being successful in business. I ended up specializing in Corporate Strategy as well as Health Care Delivery. In my final term of B-School I ended up being recruited by my professor to join his Real Estate Company, Smart!Centres.
I learnt a lot about retail commercial developments while my time at SC, however, after being there for about a year I realized that I don’t have the qualities of someone that can hold a steady job as an employee. I was always thinking of ways that things could be improved and I wanted to implement them all. I ended up writing my first and only resignation letter to date and went off on my own. I had a real estate license that I had gotten after undergrad, I did a bunch of deals with people from school when they wanted a condo, other than that I wasn’t much of a REALTOR. I ended up stumbling across a new condo development that I wanted to buy, I had no clue how to evaluate new condos, but I went to the VIP event and just grabbed a number and ended up buying it. I was happy with the purchase, I ended up using all my savings and realized that it will be at least 3 years before I’d see my first dollar of return. A few months later I ended up getting an invite to the release of a new project in downtown Toronto. I decided that I wanted to buy a unit here, but would need a partner to help me with the payments. I spoke to one of my closest friends and we decided to go in on it together. We met up at a bar downtown where a bunch of my friends were meeting up. In a matter of minutes I had just sold units in that project to 5 other people. After selling these units, I realized that I had just made my annual salary x 2 in a matter of 24 hours. A few weeks later I got a call from the developer telling me that I was one of their top agents and that they would like to invite me to some private events. Needless to say I was excited and was a bit in over my head. In any case the next year proved to be very fruitful for me and I had my most successful year till date, this trend continued for a few years until I got tired of acting as a Real Estate Broker.
At this point I decided that it might be better for me to own my own brokerage. I ended up partnering with a couple of friends from business school for this venture. This was one of my only ventures that wasn’t as successful. I would say the main reason for this was that we didn’t stick to our original plan. We were supposed to be a business brokerage but ended up becoming a residential brokerage. What I did get out of this experience was what to do and not to do in partnerships, learnt a lot about what issues new broker/agents face and I also learnt a lot about myself. I feel that I came out a much better person than I did going in, it was truly a humbling experience.
After dissolving my partnership I ended up converting what was left of my brokerage into a franchised Homelife Office and at the same time I ended up purchasing a mortgage brokerage franchise. I had decided that I will try to build up my new franchises by spending good time as a broker. However, faith had another path for me. While driving to work one day I had a Eureka moment. I conceived the idea of iBidBroker.com. I thought that if homeowners can put out an RFP for the listing on their home then they could get the best value for selling their house through a broker. The more I thought about the idea the more I loved it. So as soon as I got to the office I started building a powerpoint presentation. I don’t know what compelled me to make a presentation, but I did, and once I did I showed it to a few people and they loved the concept.
The next few months were all about learning web development, marketing, how to deal with off shore development companies. I typically got 2-3 hours of sleep a night but at the end of it, it was worth it. I launched iBidBroker at the Toronto Real Estate Board tradeshow. The website had a lot of success, I got national press coverage and a lot of people used the service. It was amazing to have my 15 mins of fame. Today, I am in the process of going through all this again, I am relaunching iBidBroker with a tonne of new changes and making the site a lot more user friendly and we will introduce new features that will allow home owners to be in full control of their listing.
I’ve written a lot about myself and the details are getting more vague, so I will write more about myself a bit later.
Finally
I am hoping that my readers will be interactive on this blog. If you want me to write about something specific I would be more than happy to. I hope to provide information about real estate, investing and medical clinics. I know I’ve not talked about my experience in the health care field, I promise to write about this in my next entry.
Bye for now.
Ajay
ajaykjain 