Rory Sutter
REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT SPECIALIST

President, Realstar Real Estate Corporation

"Over 90% of all millionaires become so
through owning Real Estate"
- Andrew Carnegie

Rory started his twenty year real estate career as a Commercial Real Estate Consultant in the Investment and Land Division of Colliers International, where his clients included leading development companies in B.C. and Ontario.

He then joined Aragon Development, where his roles included site acquisition, project and property management and project marketing.

Later he became the Property Acquisitions Manager for Concert Properties, one of B.C.’s most successful builders and investment companies and past builder of the year recipient in the province.

Rory has been involved in the development and sale of more than 2000 homes, condominiums, townhomes and multi-residential units.

In addition to his real estate education at the University of British Columbia, Rory has spent years receiving highly specialized training in the field, where he analyzed countless investments and honed his acquisition skills by conducting negotiations on behalf of major players in the Canadian and International real estate industries.

He then took this specialized knowledge and began purchasing revenue-producing real estate using unique strategies that he developed. Rory started building his personal real estate portfolio in B.C. and is now actively purchasing properties in other areas of Canada and the United States on behalf of himself and with investment partners.

Presently Rory carries the Associate Broker license designation in British Columbia and is well known as a passionate Real Estate Investor, Coach and Consultant. He is also the Director of Realstar Real Estate Corporation.

The Parable of the Bucket Carriers

“Picture two brothers, ten years apart in age, who win a contract to provide an Old Italian village with drinking water. As there is no water flowing to the Village they are paid by the number of buckets they carry each day from the river to the village; a distance of 500 meters. For twenty years they carry thousands of buckets day-in and day-out regardless of the weather.

In return for their hard labour they make a good living and are able to eat well, provide for their families and live in nice homes and there is only one condition to maintaining the lifestyle they have come to enjoy and that is they must carry those buckets each day.

When they first started their buckets we’re smaller and they found that by carrying bigger buckets they could move more water in less time and instead of working 14 hours per day they were able to reduce their work time to 12 hours and make the same amount of money. If they worked the full 14 hours they had the ability to make more money than the other villagers and it was all because they were carrying bigger buckets.

As they aged the eldest brother found that his body would get tired and he could not carry buckets like he did when he was younger and his earnings started to decline. He thought about his options and realized that his best course was to stop carrying buckets and invest his savings in building a pipeline from the river to the village. He asked his younger brother to join him in project, who was unwilling to interrupt his income as he was used to living the good life provided by carrying buckets each day.

It took the eldest brother ten years to build his pipeline as he still tried to carry some buckets, although he could not carry the big buckets like his brother, or with the same frequency and it showed in his earnings which were much lower.

But when the pipeline was finished his younger brother was now starting to get tired and was unable to stop working or he would have no income where the eldest brother was now making more money than his best year carrying the big buckets and he no longer had to carry any buckets. He was free to do whatever he wanted to do and didn’t have to work and he was making money even while he was sleeping for the pipeline was always running, even while he slept.”

The Reality Of Carrying Buckets

In the modern context we are all bucket carriers. Most people are paid a certain amount of money for their time, or for performing certain functions. Some are employees; others are independent contractors or self-employed businessmen. But the principle is the same we are being paid based upon the number and size of the buckets we are carrying and if for any reason we were no longer able to carry buckets are income would be interrupted.

Recently my wife and I were enjoying a lovely dinner with four other couples, two of the men were well paid anaesthesiologists (medical specialists), one of the men was a very successful lawyer downtown and another was an investor who appeared to work exclusively on managing his own investments.

In conversation we talked about investments and I told the parable of the bucket carriers and the lawyer looked at me and acknowledged that he was now carrying a very big bucket. He noted that he was so busy carrying buckets and developing new business (finding new buckets to carry), that he had little time to think about building a pipeline for the future.

To protect themselves from calamity most big bucket carriers are heavily insured against disability because they know that their earnings are dependent upon carrying buckets. For the masses that carry smaller buckets it is difficult to imagine a life where they are not carrying buckets and even more worrisome is the fact that their retirement savings have been threatened in the last twenty-four months by severe drops in stock values.

It seems that the busier we get carrying buckets the easier it is to delegate the responsibility for our personal investments to others and it has cost people greatly. As Warren Buffet says, “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

We are trained to believe that our RRSP account balances are real and that we can trust the numbers printed on paper statements, but some of the most sophisticated investors in the world learned with Bernard Madoff that their statements were bogus and that their life savings had been eradicated.

The reality is that there is a huge financial services industry in North America that has been preying for years like piranha on the cash flow of the bucket carriers. It is no wonder that Canadians now have more that 1 trillion dollars sitting on the sidelines in money markets, including government bonds, term deposits and cash savings that are guaranteed by the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC).

Unfortunately our money has become a fiat currency and it is no longer attached to anything of value such as gold and all banks deposits are now governed by the fractional reserve system, which means that if all Canadians showed up to withdraw their savings there would be little chance that more than 10% would see any paper bills – enter the CDIC. Without the CDIC savings in any bank would be crazy.

Of equal concern is the fact that governments are trying to spend their way out of the recession by printing billions and trillions of dollars on paper that is not worth more than the government’s promise to pay. As new dollars flood into our market the purchasing power of our cash savings are being eroded and severely devalued in the safety of our cash accounts. The governments are the big winners and once again we are paying dearly for our lack of financial education.