Real Estate Experience Helps When Negotiating Trends, Risks and Opportunities in Calgary
What does it take to build success over time in the Calgary market?
Great real estate investment is all driven by risk assessment,” says Jon Love, a managing partner with KingSett Capital and former head of Oxford Properties Group. “And risk assessment is an art, not a science.”
Love claims that risk assessment was just as crucial to the investment decisions he made with Oxford in the 90s as those he’s making with KingSett 20 years later, even though the two eras and companies are mirror images. While he was building a portfolio at Oxford, Calgary’s economy was stagnant with high vacancy rates for commercial space. Now he invests in third-party projects and Calgary has little commercial vacancy.
What’s going on in the city is really what drives the cycles,” says Arthur Lloyd, Ivanhoe Cambridge’s executive VP and Killam Properties founding shareholder. Growth in the energy sector has created a financial and capital market services industry in Alberta. “Most of the Canadian and US significant investment banking firms have offices in Calgary, and that wouldn’t have been the case 20 years ago…I’m starting to see capital markets expertise which used to be something the energy business went to Toronto or New York for and now there’s starting to be a significant pool of talent here in Calgary.”
A growing market and an increasing need for space, labour and energy could be even stronger in the coming years, says Don Fairgrieve-Park, Bentall’s Real Estate Services Senior Vice President.
The oil sands have really taken over industry in the province and the price of natural gas has been depressed over the last number of years; if that rebounds, this place is going to be crazy.”
Note: This article was published on pp 38-40 of Canada’s Leading Real Estate Forum, Ottawa, Fall 2012.
