01 · Downtown Toronto
The height cap wasn’t zoning. It was a helicopter flight path.
OWNER’S REPRESENTATIVE · 12 → 54 STOREYS
In 2009 we were retained as owner’s representative on a half-acre corner in downtown Toronto’s east side. Every tower proposal in the district was hitting the same invisible ceiling: the hospital’s helicopter approach, a ninety-degree corridor that capped height for blocks.
Two years working it with the hospital and with the university across the road, which couldn’t grow without student housing. The approach narrowed to roughly forty-five degrees — lifting the ceiling for every site in the corridor, not just our client’s.
We ran a national-team sale with competing offer structures, and advised keeping a share of the future density. The client chose certainty and sold well. The buyer carried the site to fifty-four storeys.
Client and address withheld. Owner’s representative engagements are confidential by default.
02 · Four US states
Buying when everyone else was leaving.
2009–2013 · NEW YORK, CONNECTICUT, FLORIDA, WYOMING
Five assets, acquired out of the financial crisis and worked over four years. In New York, an eleven-million-dollar note bought at a deep discount — the borrower kept in as a partner in the outcome. Converted to ownership, cleared of its violations, and sold to a veterans’ organization that built affordable homes on the site.
In Florida and Wyoming, garden apartments running fifteen to twenty per cent vacant, modernised with an operating partner and re-let at market.
And Connecticut — the one we tell first when someone asks what we’ve learned. A four-parcel assembly missing its critical fifth. Years of complications, an exit at cost, and our own money subordinated behind our partner’s. Since then we diligence the people as hard as the property. Every firm has this story; few print it.
03 · Four continents
$2.0 billion of real estate, transacted.
EUROPE · RUSSIA · INDIA & THE MIDDLE EAST · NORTH AMERICA
Most of it inside a global investment bank’s European practice: preparing private developers to go public, and writing the credit that bridged them to listing day. Valuing what needed valuing — thirty grocery stores in one portfolio, half-built commercial parks, an unbuilt resort on the Gulf.
And brokering the partnerships in between — including matching a US hotel family with an Indian developer to plan a hundred budget hotels across India. Retail, hospitality, office and residential, across four continents and as many legal systems.
04 · Toronto, again
A syndicated position in Toronto’s flatiron.
THE GOODERHAM BUILDING · PASSIVE MINORITY INTEREST
The 1892 flatiron the Distillery District’s founders built as their head office sold for the same eleven million it had fetched a decade earlier — deferred maintenance had eaten the growth. Our stake is passive and small, and we treat the seat the way we treat every seat.
We built the heritage grant strategy — funding that puts subsidised skilled trades on the restoration — and made the case that a ground floor beside Berczy Park should answer to the park: one flagship operator rather than another chain, at the rents a true one-off commands.
05 · Brockville, Ontario
Fourteen acres. Open.
STEWART VILLAGE · 2021–PRESENT
Everything the first four stops taught — distress bought well, approvals earned patiently, partners kept close — applied at full scale, with our own name on the title. The record continues at Stewart Village: open, trading, and mid-transformation.