Welcome to Abundant Homes!
We are Dawn and Lorne.
Lorne and I started real estate investing a few years ago. It was not something we knew about or considered as an option. We had spent most of our adult life doing what others were doing—working, trying to save money, trying to give the best to our kids. We were succeeding in some ways, and often spinning our wheels. We felt trapped in the rat race not knowing another way.
I spent over twenty years home with our four children, homeschooling them through high school before they spread their wings in post-secondary, marriage, and parenthood. As I was transitioning to a less active role, of driving them places, and volunteering for their school-related activities, other priorities surfaced. We began looking after senior family members and their affairs; many tasks—taking them to appointments, cleaning houses—were more convenient for me, with my flexible schedule. Life morphs that way from one thing to another, sometimes with less conscious choice than we care to admit.
Then, as happens with many, we were faced with job insecurity that was stable for over 15 years….until it wasn’t. With the downturn in the oil and gas industry in 2014, there were mass layoffs in many industry-related companies. Lorne was working for a global company that, at the time, was 2600 employees strong in Edmonton. That number reduced to 600 in less than a year. He was able to hang on in a couple of ways. He was on the ‘right’ ongoing projects, and took all his accrued banked time vacation time off, to stay on the books. This led to a desire to retire, especially when vacations planned were awash, due to lack of time.
We were also concerned about retirement potential. Freedom 85 didn’t seem like it was for us. That’s when it happened.
We have some friends who were posting on social media, things about a business they were doing. They had talked about a project they were working on. It appeared they were in a house, tearing down walls. We didn’t know what they were doing. We didn’t ask. Looking back I ponder at the blinders we had.
Then, in conversation about his job with them, Lorne said, “We need to do something different.” They replied with, “Come see what we are doing.”
And we did. We went to that project, which was nearing completion. It was a flip they were doing with partners. We were curious, we were interested and we became excited by the possibilities. We set up a joint venture with them, and a couple months later we got a property through a wholesale deal, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“History” with real estate is different for each person. We learned a lot from that first project that became a suited property. We learned what worked and what didn’t work. We had a beautiful product in the end. We have the fondest memories and those stories to tell that which didn’t have us laughing at the time.
We noticed how similar and how different it was from the half-hour or hour-long flipping shows we had watched for years. It was the same because there were those things that we needed to deal with, the contractor problem, the time problem, the ‘didn’t see that coming’ problems. It was different because we were feeling the time pressure, the headaches, the pain and pain of expense of mistakes, and carelessness. Everything is more enhanced with personal emotions involved.
We moved on from that experience with our friendship intact and in some ways stronger. We also were able to apply some of our learnings in future endeavours.
Immersion in learning has been constant over the last few years. I have taken the reigns in most of the endeavours as Lorne continues to work for the same company. This has provided us the ability to get some mortgages. We have done several transactions, buying and selling, agreements for sale, wholesales, and buy and holds.
We have mentors and advisors and we have worked on learning more and applying more things over the years.
During covid, I have spent more time writing a book, writing blog posts, and working on the foundation of our business.
We chose some trade names for the real estate part of our investments. We chose Abundant Homes, and with that our community Abundanthood was born. Next came the logo. I wanted it to represent both our names which I had been trying out for our trade names. Lorne’s name is Lawrence and it means from the laurel tree. My name is obvious. So we wanted something that was laurels rising, with a neighbourhood and a sunrise. With input from a few people on our team and much back and forth, our logo came to life.
Over the years we have connected with many people in the industry. We have advisors in all areas of real estate investing. We have built our business and lives on those who have gone before us, who have shared hours of knowledge and insight into doing life well. Those who we can call and they will answer, those who are walking the walk and taking action. And for all the abundance shared for us, we choose to give back in the same way. We help those who are starting out, or those who haven’t experienced what we’ve had, and encourage those who are walking beside us.
We believe in community so we have Abundanthood. It’s our community; it is where Abundant Homes meets neighbourhood. @Abundanthood is where we connect on social media. We have Abundanthood Book Club on Facebook and Abundanthood Mastermind.
Abundance is what we desire for those who experience Abundant Homes and Abundanthood. It is the heart of our business and is foundational to who we are at Abundant Homes.