Unlocking Multiplexes - Organized by Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast - April 8, 2026

Given my interest in multiplex developments, I was attracted by a recent advertisement for an event titled Unlocking Multiplexes scheduled for April 8th at the Roundhouse Community Centre. I was intrigued by the title, the choice of venue and the fee being charged to attend. Usually, these events are free since they hope to attract potential investors. Nonetheless, I decided to attend. 

When I arrived, I found a parking spot right in front of the venue and assumed it would not be well attended. Boy was I wrong. Once inside, I discovered hundreds of predominantly 30 and 40-something men and women waiting for the program to begin. I was told there was broad mix of builders, developers, investors, finance and design professionals, and homeowners. 

The event was organized by the Toronto-based Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast hosted by Daniel Foch, a real estate broker and analyst, and Nick Hill, a real estate investor, which has over 100,000 monthly listeners. This was their first Vancouver event although similar events had been organized in Toronto. 

The program featured three panels: a Finance Panel that included representatives of CMHC, a mortgage broker, and Vancity; 

a Contemplation Panel including a realtor specializes in multiplexes, an architect, and representative of Small Housing BC; and an Execution Panel that included a multiplex developer and property manager. All the speakers were men, but I subsequently learned a lady scheduled to participate on the final panel cancelled at the last minute and so the moderators filled in. 

The following are some of my key highlights and takeaways 

In Toronto, multiplex developments now make up half of all multi-unit starts. This is because they are generally exempt from development cost charges and most condominium and rental apartment developments are no longer financially viable. 

While most projects in Vancouver are four units and strata-titled, in Toronto most projects are five units or more rental units. As a result, CMHC is insuring many of the loans. Vancity is actively involved in financing projects in Vancouver for both small builder/developers and multi-generational families, also referred to as ‘citizen developers’. 

Too many people appear to be seduced by misleading social media reports on how investors can get involved in these projects with as little as 5% down. In fact, upfront costs can easily top $100,000 for plans, studies and reports, permits, etc. before a loan can be arranged. 

Projects catering to families with adult children are popular since some units may be kept and lived in and others sold. However, these projects can be complicated because you’re dealing with families with adult children! 

It is important to carefully consider all the site features, not just location and size. Many ignore soil and environmental conditions, until it is too late. It is also important to begin the project with a team approach including the designer, the builder, the environmental consultant…. and a yes, a realtor. 

Don’t always try to maximize the amount of floor area. Try to find the 'sweet spots and include a mix of unit types and sizes. If the units are too big and expensive they may be difficult to sell, especially if they cost more than conventional nearby houses. Larger units also need at least one parking space which can not always be accommodated on site. 

The final session explored some of the real problems that can be encountered once projects get underway. For example, while Vancouver claims that approval times have been improved, the builder said it can still take 6 to 10 months to obtain approvals. 

Also, a major problem often arises when third party utility companies cannot perform on time. Special mention was made of BC Hydro since many projects require substantial upgrades including pad mounted transformers. It is not uncommon for a project to complete construction but still not have permanent power. 

It is important not to ignore property management considerations especially if the project includes a mix of ownership and rental units. Many small landlords do not appreciate the importance of properly screening potential tenants to ensure they have sufficient income or are not going to operate illegal activities in the unit. 

Interestingly, the property manager suggested that in his opinion the ‘sweet spot’ for rental units is often a two-bedroom, one bathroom unit which is not that typical today. With Luxury Vinyl Plank (LVP) flooring in case a dishwasher or washing machine break down.

It was suggested that as more ownership multiplex projects come on stream, there may be a need to revise the Strata Property Act to better accommodate smaller projects such as these. 

I encountered this issue when I developed three small developments in West Vancouver. These projects are bound by the same comprehensive legislation, regulations, and bylaws as a 100-unit high-rise. This creates a high administrative burden for owners who must manage insurance, contingency funds, and repairs informally or risk legal non-compliance. 

Small multiplexes can rarely afford to hire professional property managers, meaning owners must manage building operations together. The Act requires formal meetings and strict financial management, which is often impractical for a small group of neighbours. 

In summary, while there was literally no discussion about neighbourhood concerns towards multiplex projects and how these might be addressed, the session offered a lot of down-to-earth practical advice. I suspect those in attendance left with a much more realistic understanding of both the pitfalls and opportunities offered by multiplex developments. I am glad I attended. I'm also going to check out this podcast. 

Is it now time to rethink Lenders' Requirements for Condominium Presales?

This year marks the 55th year during which I have been involved with the development of condominium projects. I started as an architect designing a project in Ottawa while working for Irving Grossman in Toronto . I then joined CMHC where I helped obtain approval for the first condominiums on leased land in Canada (South Shore False Creek). I was subsequently involved with dozens of condominium projects, first with Narod Developments, and then as a developer and planning/development consultant. 

Presale condominiums really didn't become popular until the mid-80s. When I first started in this business, there was no such thing as condominium presale programs. Developers would design a project, undertake market studies, fina a lender to finance the project, and start building. They would start selling three or four months before completion from a model suite on a lower floor of the building.

I can remember when presale programs first became popular. They were the creation of a brilliant Toronto advertising/marketing executive named Stan Kates who started with a project by Tridel on Bay Street in Toronto. He came up with the concept of 'priority marketing' which invited buyers to get on a list so that they would be allowed to purchase a unit in the project. It was a high-pressured approach that included a sales trailer with no door handle, announcements over a loudspeaker each time a unit was sold, and so on. 

What is the definition of Selling? After witnessing condominium presale programs I often quibbed that selling something you have to somebody who needs it is not selling. But selling something you don't have, to somebody who doesn't need it, that's selling!  And that's what presale condominiums are all about. Selling something that doesn't exist to somebody who didn't even know he needed it!

I wrote about this ten years ago when the provincial government was considering the introduction of the SVT and I was writing a weekly column for the Vancouver Courier. 

https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/courier-archive/opinion/speculating-on-a-speculation-tax-3012291

Last year, I elaborated on this history in a blogpost following a CBC radio interview during which I questioned the need for lenders to require presales given that so few projects were proceeding.

https://gellersworldtravel.blogspot.com/2025/08/cbc-early-edition-ways-to-advance.html

The investor presale market is dead. Recently it was reported that presale condominiums are down 95% in Toronto, and the situation is not much better here. According to realtor Steve Saretsky, "there have only been 121 condo units sold in Metro Vancouver this quarter. Down from a peak of nearly 6000 quarterly sales back in the bull market."

Builders are being increasingly cautious about launching new projects and are now focusing on homes for end-users - people who plan to live in them - rather than investors. This is because the investor market is dead. Yes dead.

Why? Because of a plethora of government taxes and initiatives intended to get 'speculators' out of the market. These included the Foreign Buyers Tax (and subsequent ban), Empty Home Tax (in Vancouver), Speculation and Vacancy Tax (SVT), restrictions on short term rentals, an anti-flipping tax, etc.

Furthermore, potential investors had to compete with a surge of 'purpose-built' rental projects encouraged by municipalities through density bonuses and reduced development charges and funding programs offered by senior levels of government.

'End-users don't want to buy years before completion. The other reason projects are not proceeding is that most 'end-users' no longer want to buy a presale unit years in advance of completion. For one thing, most buyers want to see what they are getting. For another, they need to time the purchase of a new home with the sale of their existing home. And given what has happened to prices over the past years, buyers are no longer confident prices will go up. 

So what's the solution? I think it is time for lenders to go back to the future and reconsider the need for insisting on presale requirements. After all, 50 years ago most condominium projects proceeded without any requirement for presales. 

What about GST, DCCs? While eliminating the GST on new units (I was president of UDI Canada when the GST was first introduced in 1991) as well as the HST in Ontario will definitely help the condo markets, as would reducing DCCs and taxes that discourage investors, until lenders start doing their own proper underwriting, rather than rely on presale performance, I don't think we are going to see many new projects launched in the year(s) ahead.

I recently discussed this Jami Makin at Business in Vancouver 

https://www.biv.com/news/bc-experts-weigh-in-whether-the-condo-presale-model-is-obsolete-12069541

And Monte Stewart. https://www.connectcre.ca/stories/condo-project-lenders-must-relax-presale-requirements-geller/?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8MaqfQnVQoTKxCSx7_IM46FVAnJFG4aFKJEa3Bgkv605jaIVyVaWnR8C2tHifzMpYQvwipslNkuSK1FmWRt0-C5VgOyQ&_hsmi=411870911&utm_campaign=Connect%20CRE%20News%3A%20Canada&utm_content=411870911&utm_medium=email&utm_source=hs_email

To conclude, while eliminating presale requirements would mean developers and lenders would have greater difficulty testing the market, and more units would likely be unsold upon completion, this would allow many projects that are currently stalled to proceed. It would mean more jobs for those in the construction industry, more tax revenues for the province and municipalities, and over the long term a healthier, less distorted condominium market. I say less distortion since the reason we have seen so many small units in new projects is not simply due to shrinkflation. It is because those were the units that appealed to investors. And now they are gone.

I look forward to hearing what others have to say. 

Gwynne Dyer on the war in Iran.

When I woke up to the news on February 28 that the United States and Israel had initiated coordinated strikes against Iran, I feared this would not go well. I wrote as much on Facebook and was severely criticized for saying so. 

Since then, I have become increasingly disturbed by the loss of innocent lives on all sides, and the incredible damage in Iran, Israel, and other middle east countries. I despise Trump and Netanyahu for causing this war.

Today I came across this article by Gwynne Dyer who knows much more about the history of middle east conflicts and the current situation than me. I found it most disturbing. But, at the risk of upsetting those who think Trump and Netanyahu are to be applauded, I am reprinting it here.

Another Forever War: Fanatics, an Obsessive, and a Belligerent Fool

By Gwynne Dyer

 

We don’t have to look very far to find a useful historical analogy for the current crisis in the Middle East. In 1967 Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships, and Israel replied with a surprise air attack that destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force on the ground.

 

Israel followed up with a ground offensive that reached the Suez Canal – which then remained closed for the next eight years. Could something like this happen at the Strait of Hormuz now? Of course it could. In fact, at this point in the confrontation in the Gulf it will require a great deal of forbearance on both sides to avoid it.

 

Unfortunately, forbearance is a virtue conspicuously absent on either side. US President Donald Trump let himself be talked into a surprise ‘decapitation’ attack on Iran by his Israeli partner, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanhyahu, but it did not deliver the promised results. Dozens of Iranian leaders were killed, but the regime did not collapse.

 

So now Trump is desperately looking for a way to get out of the war he started without losing face, but his only available method for putting pressure on Iran is endless escalation. Israel, meanwhile, is determined to press on until the entire Iranian regime – or if necessary Iran’s whole economy – is destroyed.

 

And while the United States and Israel must bear the main responsibility for this increasingly bloody mess, Iran is also behaving badly.

 

Many of the surviving Iranian leaders have lost close family members in what can reasonably be called a treacherous American attack (the US was in the midst of negotiations with Iran). Now they believe that their control of the Strait of Hormuz gives them the upper hand in the struggle, and they are in a vengeful mood.

   

Despite Trump’s ludicrous claims to the contrary, there is no deal on the table, no meaningful negotiations of any kind underway. The Iranian leaders who are in power now are only there because the Americans and Israelis killed everybody more senior than them. They want to watch their enemies twist in the wind for a while before they deign to talk to them.

 

This is almost as childish and brutal as Trump’s threat to “unleash Hell” on Iran if its leaders do not bend to his will, and that is not an empty threat. He has promised to destroy Iran’s electrical power industry, its oil and gas resources, even its desalination facilities. That will mean no electricity, no income, and precious little water for a country of 92 million people.

 

Iran has made counter threats of the same sort, except that the United States is beyond its reach and so instead it promises to inflict the same misery on America’s regional allies: Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and of course Israel.

 

These actions are all crazily disproportionate to the issues at stake, but there is a difference between the United States and Israel, which are fully capable of carrying out this programme of mass destruction, and the Iranians, who lack the means to do the whole job. However, the longer-term consequence of that scale of destruction is probably a ‘forever war’

 

Are the Iranians willing to accept the wholesale destruction of their country’s economy in exchange for doing only major damage in return – especially when that damage is mostly being done to Israel’s and America’s local allies, not to the perpetrators themselves? The wisest course would be to stop now, but nobody in this game is showing much wisdom.

 

The people making decisions in Iran are grief-stricken true believers who think it is their religious duty to oppose evil at any cost. Yielding to the demands of the Great Satan is unthinkable, however grave the consequences of resistance may be.

 

Netanyahu is not fanatical, but he is obsessive. He first warned Israelis that Iran was  “three to five years” away from getting nuclear weapons in 1992. He issued the same warning in 1995 (“3 to 5 years”), in 1996 (“extremely close”), 2012 (“a few months”), 2015, 2018, 2023 and 2025. This year he finally got somebody to listen, although Iran still has no nuclear weapons.

 

And Trump is beside himself with rage and fear: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump.”

 

Trump knows he has been suckered into Netanyahu’s war, and he sees defeat looming in the mid-term election this November. The only exit he can see is a military victory that grows less likely by the day. Escalation is his only hope, and we all know where that can end.

Happy April Fool's Day

For as long as I can remember, April Fool's Day has been my second favourite day of the year. (The first is the anniversary of the day I was born.)  I have always enjoyed April Fool's Day pranks and carried out a few of my own.

In the late 1990s, I undertook an apartment development in Kerrisdale, known as Elm Park Place. Prince Charles had recently visited the the city, and rather than a conventional marketing advertisement, The Vancouver Courier allowed me to create an article reporting that during his recent visit, the Prince was rumoured to have purchased a Kerrisdale condominium near a park. 

A number of my purchasers phoned our office to question whether he had bought at Elm Park place. However, my favourite call was from one purchaser who was furious that I would sell to a member of the royal family without consulting the other buyers. "How are we going to afford all the extra security" she asked?

The following year I still had a couple of units left and wrote an 'advertorial' that the provincial government had secretly approved a SkyTrain extension along West 41st with a station next to my project. A surprising number of people were fooled, including one of my daughter's Crofton House classmates who brought in a copy of the Courier as her 'show and tell' story. 

"There's going to be a SkyTrain to Crofton House" she told her classmates. My daughter explained that this wasn't true. It was just one of her dad's April Fools' Day jokes. Unfortunately, the girl had never heard of April Fools' Day.

In 2013 I was developing Hollyburn Mews, a small infill project in West Vancouver. It had been highly controversial with over 150 people writing letters or speaking in opposition. But it was a approved by a 4-3 vote and construction was underway. Once again, I saw an opportunity to market the project and have some fun. Below is an advertorial I purchased in the North Shore News:

    Vancouver developer Michael Geller has been in secret discussions with members of the West Vancouver Council appointed Upper Lands Working Group regarding a proposal to blanket much of the property above the 1200 foot level with duplexes and coach houses linked by a network of gondolas. The housing would be similar to his development that is just now being completed on Esquimalt Avenue, across from West Vancouver United Church.

     While Geller was reluctant to comment on the record, he admitted to attending recent meetings of the Upper Lands Working Group. He observed that given West Vancouver’s changing demographics, cottage-style duplexes and coach houses are a very desirable form of housing. He added that he thinks West Vancouver has thousands of acres covered in trees, especially in the Upper Lands, which should be converted to housing.  If Geller’s proposal is approved by Council, West Vancouver’s population could double over the next two decades.

     Geller is no stranger to controversial developments. In 1989 he managed the failed Spetifore Lands proposal that was rejected by Delta Council following 27 nights of Public Hearings. Since then he has been involved with two other mountainside developments at Furry Creek and SFU’s UniverCity on Burnaby Mountain.

   Metro Vancouver`s Director of Planning Brent Bartholomew applauded the proposal. He said building on mountainsides is preferable to building on farmlands. He also liked Geller’s proposal to link the new housing to Dundarave and Ambleside villages with a network of gondolas similar to those proposed at SFU.

    He noted that for far too long West Vancouver has been an enclave for the rich and very rich. By adding 14,000 new homes in the Upper Lands it should be possible to accommodate more lower and middle income households, including the children and parents of the rich and very rich.

     Councillor Craig Cameron, one of two council members on the Upper Lands Working Group, said it was premature to comment on Geller’s massive proposal. “The Working Group has only just started its deliberations” he said, although he acknowledged more projects like Hollyburn Mews might be preferable to  the sprawling monster homes being built around the District.

     Geller will be presenting his proposal to Council at its meeting tomorrow on April 1^st. aka April Fools’ Day!  

Unfortunately, many readers did not get to the end and became most incensed. As a result, I had to purchase space in the following week's edition to apologize!

In 2014 I spent April Fool's Day in Odessa Ukraine. I was suprised to discover that April Fool's Day is a big deal in the city, featuring a Humorina Festival and parade through the town.

Last year, as the war in Ukraine continued, and with everything else going on, I wrote that April Fool's Day had been cancelled in Odessa and Vancouver. As CBC Early Edition host Stephen Quinn quibbed, with so many foolish things happening in the world, April Fool's Day pranks seemed superfluous. Here's hoping we can get back to having a bit more fun in years to come.

https://gellersworldtravel.blogspot.com/2025/04/april-fools-day-is-canceled-in-odessa.html

HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S DAY.