These techniques should work in any country, city or area. The trick is to simply find the real deals. Let me tell you the quickest way you could start making money in real estate right away.
Call all the “We buy houses” classified ads and signs you see around your area and tell them that you are unemployed and would like to bird dog for them. Ask them for $100 when they sign contract to buy from seller and $400 more when they close ($500 is pretty typical amount). Ask them to let you go with them when they go see the property so you can get some experience. Also try to join you local investor group, in most cities they are $20 or less for each monthly meeting (it’s a bargain). Go visit your local section 8 housing office and ask for the list of landlords and contact some of the ones who deal in single family houses.
Also, go around and start looking for empty houses. Call real estate agents and tell them you are looking for investment properties. If you have lined up 5 or more investor buyers and you find a real deal one of them will snatch it up and pay you a bird dog fee. While you are out look for home for rent signs, call them, ask them if they buy houses, if yes get their phone, fax, email etc and send them deals too. If they don’t find out if they are looking to sell their rental homes. You will be able to find owner financed deals this way.
Shortly you will be able to know what properties to get under contract yourself and move up to wholesaling where you will make $2000-10,000 per deal instead of $500. It just keeps getting better from there.
If you are aggressive and get out and look for properties today, you could be making a few hundred dollars a week by next week, A thousand dollars a week within a month, and $10,000 plus per month within 6 months. These techniques work but they require work. Interestingly enough you could do a lot of this work from a bicycle if you had no car (but maybe not in Canada during the winter).
None of these techniques require cash or credit and will get you started in real estate investing right away.