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26 S h u t t e r s t o c k B C B U S I N E S S . C A J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 5 REAL ESTATE with thousands of basement suites and laneway houses. The real estate fever doesn't get to those Hot Ones temperatures on its own. There are endless seminars, workshops, conven- tions and investment clubs (not to men- tion emailed newsletters, online blogs and a steady stream of promotional news arti- cles) enticing even more people to plug into the dream. At a September workshop put on at Surrey's Sheraton Vancouver Hotel Guildford by developer Alfonso Cuadra, affiliated with Ontario-based WealthGe- nius, the sense of quasi-religious mission was in the air. "You create freedom for yourself " by investing was the steady reminder all evening from Cuadra as he boisterously recounted success stories about others who have taken his seminars to the crowd of 30 potential new disciples. He talked about his former student, Maulen, who just built a 59-unit apartment building. Mike, who bought a four-unit cash-flowing property. James, who graduated from buying bunga- lows and putting suites in the basement to acquiring a 33-unit building for the low, low price of $3.2 million that he "repositioned" and "ethically exited 21 tenants," turning it into an asset now appraised at $8.5 mil- lion. To keep the high spirits going, Cuadra would get his small audience to repeat his mantras loudly throughout the two-hour session: "Good times are coming." "I want to learn how to raise millions and millions of dollars." "You can do this using other people's money." The crowd he spoke to was young, a faithful multi-ethnic reflection of Vancou- ver, and ranging in experience from Jas- mine Kaur, a marketing student at BCIT, to Joanna Huang, an environmental engineer turned mortgage broker, to Farsheed Farid, a local operations manager, all trying to understand the first steps. But there were also some with more experience, like Annie and her husband, who are thinking of buy- ing an eight-unit property in Edmonton—a different kind of investment approach from what they have been doing recently, which is just investing cash directly with develop- ers and then getting their returns when the building is sold. Younger people like Sharma, along with many at the WealthGenius seminar, are part of the new wave that seems even more fired up about owning investment residential than other cohorts. According to a report by Royal LePage, 18- to 34-year- olds in Canada are more likely to own more than one investment property than older people—even though 15 percent of those young people don't own a home they live in themselves. That's a group that's likely to move into the next category up for real-estate inves- tors: portfolios with half a dozen prop- erties. Then, if they remain ambitious, maybe an entire small building. Or three. Maybe they start putting straight wads of cash into a project, through a developer's private circle of investors. Or they might take what seems like the safer route and put money into the growing vehicle of real- estate investment trusts. That would be entities like Skyline Wealth Management, a company that promises participation in "private alternative investments," with an apartment REIT started in 2006 "that is positioned well to meet the demand in Canada's housing crisis." Skyline, with $9 billion in assets and 7,000 investors, is the fifth-largest REIT in the country, counting 23,000 apartments in its Canadian portfolio and growing, though with only about 800 in B.C. so far, all on Vancouver Island. The company is popular, and not just with investors, says relationship manager Sasha He: "We have municipal governments approaching us to build rental. A lot of people cannot afford to build these days." To people in the housing and build- ing sectors, most of these investors are doing a good thing. "Investors provide a lot of liquidity to the market," says CMHC's Dugan. "Even if they are intending to flip, they're causing the projects to go ahead." He even sees REITs—which have grown from almost nothing in the late '90s to People who are far from being a bunch of characters on Succession but rich enough to have money to invest beyond a main house and retirement savings... have added residential real estate to the ways they try to grow what money they have.

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