The latest episode of the Livabl Launch podcast features an exciting interview with Greg Zayadi – where Matt and Greg chat everything from construction costs to family investors.
Greg Zayadi has over two decades of real estate experience working with industry-leading brands. Today, he’s president of rennie, a full-service real estate company in Western Canada that aims to put thoughtfulness back into real estate.
Here are some highlights from the episode:
On the demographic of family investors:
“We always use the term, the family investor. And this is something that I don’t think a lot of people fully appreciate. In the market here in the Lower Mainland there are a lot of people who were buying as a family investment. And what I mean by that is you’ve got people who live in the neighborhood, grew up in the neighborhood, moved into the neighborhood, and they want to reinvest in the neighborhood. They liked the development that’s coming around the corner, and they like investing in real estate, it’s part of their portfolio, but they’re not investing to necessarily flip it or rent it out. The truth is they don’t know what they’re going to do with it. But they’re just investing in their neighborhood. And it could be a mother brother, father, their sister and uncle, someone might move in, someone might rent it, they really don’t know the end use. So, we’ve kind of always called that the family investor. And that’s always been a big part of that large-scale high-rise development.”
How the pandemic changed the way architects think about designing for new lifestyles:
“I think overall, what we’ve seen is people take into consideration how people may be using their homes a bit differently. Especially the impact of Uber, Amazon, DoorDash – these are things that people are trying to figure out the load on the building, right? Like how many deliveries are showing up a day? How big does the package room need to be? What are those types of deliveries? What does access look like? What about security?”
“Another problem that everyone’s figuring out is e-scooter parking. Everybody’s got an e-scooter, so forget the car parking spot – what do I do with my e-bike? What do I do with my e-scooter? How are those things impacting [building design]? Pets obviously, too, during the pandemic became a common thing, so how you creating a more pet friendly building?”
On what’s happening in the market now:
“A year ago, people were really nervous, then people got scared, then people got lost, they just didn’t know what to expect what to think how to figure out this market. I think people are getting calm, if not comfortable. But nobody is confident. And without that confidence. Everyone is struggling to figure out when to launch how to launch. It’s competitive out there.”
