The Critical Lane

I’m thrilled to have Matthew Young, President and CEO at Republic Developments, as our special guest on this week’s podcast. Here are a few items we discussed:

1. High rise: Republic developments’ focus is high rise and one of their key projects is for the development of 7,600 units in Scarborough.

2. Innovative Culture: Fostering an innovative culture within an organization is essential for staying competitive and adapting to changing environments. Republic developments is investing in key technologies to be more efficient.

3. Frog and Hot Water Analogy: This analogy is often used to illustrate the concept of gradual change and the importance of recognizing warning signs before a situation becomes critical. The same can be said about how the current housing affordability crisis came to be.

Click the link below to listen to our conversation!

In this week's podcast episode, I’m delighted to have Sandy Shindleman, President of the Shindico Group, a leading real estate company in Winnipeg, as our special guest. Sandy discusses the three R's of real estate, giving back, and investing for the long term.

Sandy emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships in the real estate industry, highlighting how they contribute to success and growth. He also talks about the significance of giving back to the community and shares insights into long-term investment strategies for sustainable growth.

Don't miss out on this enlightening discussion! Click the link below to listen and gain valuable insights from Sandy Shindleman!

I’m very thrilled to have Jean-Pierre Poulin, Founder and CEO at Devcore as our special guest on this week’s podcast. Here’s an excerpt from JP during our conversation, “How cold should it be for people not to sleep outside with electricity and water… we’re in Canada, this is totally unacceptable. And everybody right now are shoveling this into somebody else backyard… it’s the federal government that should take care of them… no it’s the provincial… it should be the city… I think we have to stop doing that and we have to sit down together… we can… and just force the discussion and force action…immediate action.” Click the link below to listen our conversation!

“Productivity growth in the long term, in any economy, is how you get stable inflation growth and improvements in real living standards and improvements in long term income and improvements in per capita GDP… it gets very little attention but it’s probably the most important economic number out there. And in Canada it has been shrinking…” said Dylan when talking about productivity being the most important economic number out there. Dylan Smith is the VP and Senior Economist at Rosenberg Research. Click the link below to listen to our conversation!

I’m super excited to have Bob Knakal as our special guest on this week’s podcast. Here is what Bob said when I asked him about what’s new and noteworthy about his career, “Hopefully if God blesses me with good health, I can keep doing this for another 20 or 25 years… It’s the greatest business in the World… Do the right things, work hard. The great thing about real estate is that it’s probably the purest form of meritocracy there is. You get out of it what you put into it… do the right things, work hard and good things will happen for you.”

I’m very thrilled to have Jeff Moffatt, President at SpaceWerx as our special guest on this week’s podcast. Here’s a quote from Jeff during our conversation, “Nothing great can get done by these micro interest groups coming up with opposition, that makes absolutely no sense. When you look at the city of Ottawa, with so much potential, there’s a all bunch of projects that are in the planning stages right now… A lot of times with these projects, great ideas happen, but they get knocked down, until they become mediocre, until they actually don’t work. And Landsdowne is great example where it got killed, it could have been amazing…” Click the link below to listen to our conversation!

I’m very thrilled to have Kevin Leon, President and CEO at Crestpoint Real Estate Investments as our special guest on this week’s podcast. Here’s an excerpt from Kevin during our conversation, “When you go to refinance a building… sometimes you can’t count on the lenders to either take out your entire financing, meaning refinancing upward, and in some cases now what you’re in the office market especially… lenders don’t want to finance an office. So you have to make sure you have enough equity in your portfolio, through your investors to make sure that you’ve looked ahead and are prepared to provide enough equity even if it means paying down debt.” Click the link to listen to our conversation!

I’m very thrilled to have Hugh Gorman, CEO at Colonnade Bridgeport, as our special guest on this week’s podcast. Here’s an excerpt from Hugh during our conversation, “Historically we’ve overbuilt, we go through these boom bust cycles were we overbuild… It doesn’t matter what type of development… it’s a long lead time… by the time you’re through land acquisition to entitlement to design to construction, stabilization… it’s three four five years depending on the scale of the project. Lots happens in three or four or five years from the demand side. Our view is… for the next decade… Ottawa is extremely short supplied.” Click the link below to listen to our conversation!

I’m very thrilled to have Mike Bonneveld, President at Skyline Industrial REIT, as our special guest on this week’s podcast episode. Here’s one of my favourite quotes from Mike in our discussion of industrial assets types on the podcast, “You’re seeing groups like Amazon… Walmart and Sobeys with these large… scale robotic pick and pack facilities, which is changing the dynamic of who the employee is… it’s not just a warehouse employee… driving around and picking stuff up. I toured a Sobey’s… about a year and half ago. And I think they had 30 robotics engineers on full-time staff because they had 400 robots that were moving constantly and was a 24/7 operation. And if you have a robot that goes down, it needs to be replaced, pulled off… put a new one back on so it doesn’t slow the process.” Click the link below to listen to our conversation!