We sat down with one of our awesome General Partners, David Porte, to hear from him about why he aligned with addy and how he got his employees involved! Check it out:
David, tell us about yourself and your background.
My name is David Porte of Port Communities, we have a real estate company where we develop, own and manage real estate. Our company’s been in business for 53 years, working in Vancouver, Victoria and in Calgary. We started here in Vancouver and grew from there. We develop residential, primarily six-storey buildings in the Lower Mainland, and we own and manage real estate in Victoria and Vancouver and now in Calgary as well.
We’ve been doing it for a long time and have some really great people here that are really good and really passionate and really care about the real estate and really care about our customers, homeowners, tenants and everybody that we work with. We have developed quite a number of residential communities in Surrey and Vancouver of various sizes. We’ve also developed some retail plazas. We’ve developed some industrial. The Park at Willowglen [which was on the addy platform] is one that we purchased last year.
For those who didn’t invest in that property, what’s it like?
It’s 11 buildings, almost three hundred thousand square feet in a great location just outside of the downtown Calgary with easy access to the airport.
How did you get your employees involved in this project?
When we got engaged with addy, we gave our staff an opportunity to invest through them. I think they were excited to have the opportunity and just see what was going on. We really wanted to get them engaged with the real estate that we’re investing in and give them opportunities.
We’d been looking for a way that the staff here could do it on smaller dollar amount so and that was a great way to find them and integrate into investment real estate. We do a variety of different real estate deals here. Our development is mostly six-storey condominiums. But on our investment part of our business, we’re invested in office and in retail, industrial and rental apartments as well.
We like working with that. It’s a really interesting platform and it’s a way for people to invest in real estate. And we thought that was really interesting to see how that platform would work and how it would connected with our overall real estate investment strategy and and again, having our staff get involved in it through adding this kind of an interesting way to test and see, OK, what was that like? What was it like from the investor investor perspective, not from us as the real estate owner manager, but from the investor side mission and business. Super interesting way to connect people with investing in real estate.
It’s something that we really promote here. I really promote here with our staff to invest in real estate where people are talking about real estate all day, every day. And the opportunity to invest in real estate is really important to me. And through that platform, it’s super interesting to see there’s a way for people at any financial level to get there first, or maybe not only that first, but their opportunity to be invested in a variety of real estate throughout in a variety of locations and a variety of different types.
So far, the partnership on the park has gone great and would love to see that there is an opportunity to work with them on other buildings, future buildings and other opportunities to invest together. And as we grow our business and continue growing, our business is a chance to have Adi come in as a partner with us in future opportunities.
