This book has been published to attempt to facilitate a leveling of
the playing field for purchasers of residential condominiums, lofts, and luxury  townhomes included. The theories
presented herein apply to pretty much the purchase of any type of real estate, anywhere
however, each specialty market within the broad range of real estate carries its own
unique twists, and condominiums are specifically a highly specialty “niche”
market.
Establishing a level playing field within this multi-billion dollar a year condo selling
industry means delivering a major benefit to Buyers (and prospective Buyers) of condos and
this book stands as a “one-of-a-kind” when it comes to speaking to
Buyers. As a “recovering” high pressure condominium site sales
specialist I bring a unique slant on the condo sales game and share with you a unique
perspective on what consumers really face when they decide to fill their spare time
visiting condominium sales sites.
Suffice to say that real estate is simply one of the largest ticket items in the world and
entire libraries have been published on strategies and tactics employed by tactics
employed by sales people to get consumers to buy from THEM, right then and there! Prior to
my career in luxury condominium sales I was a professional sales “trainer”,
having undertaken intense ongoing advanced professional corporate sales training with Dun
& Bradstreet Canada. To those of you who don’t believe that there is a game going
on out there or that the execution of tried and proven successful sales “tactics” are not being employed
to get you to buy, I would strongly recommend this book and reassessing your position
especially if there is even the remote potential that you may be buying something in the
future. In the early 1980’s I
was retained by Canada’s, then renowned Reichmann Family, when their flagship
development on the then rather desolate Toronto Queen’s Quay was proving to be more
of a challenge than their marketing agency had contemplated. Condos were a brand new thing
in 1982 and as a result of a change in statute allowing “the air above the ground”
to be included within the legal framework of real estate, the concept was just taking hold
in Canada. Canadians are not known for accepting change quickly let alone when the product
was the largest single investment that they would probably ever make. The Reichmanns had
seen their initial launch of the residences fail, something that they were not accustomed
to.
 They retained me to analyze the cause of the failure and to remedy the
situation.
I had to first learn the product. At that time, the
city had only a very few condo developments. Thirty Three Harbour Square was about all
that I had to work with to measure the market’s receptivity to residential condos
against. Market Square at Church and Front St. was another project that the
Reichmann’s were involved with but like the Queen‘s Quay Residences (my project)
as well as King‘s Landing they were still in the presale stages. I remember visiting
a young condo sales rep (who today owns a major condo marketing company) sitting
frustrated in an elaborate sales office for Harbour Square expressing his exasperation
over NOT being able to sell $50,000 condos “with unobstructed views of the lake”.
Today these same condos sell in the upper $300’s and recently while attending the
launch of a new condos site "London on the Esplanade", I ran into the gray
haired version of this same salesman (a Broker today).
 I
immediately caught onto the “concept” of this new form of home
ownership and/or lifestyle alternative slash investment tool and in my business, if you
can sell yourself something, you can sell it to anyone. The task always starts by finding
the right buyer for whatever it is you are selling. It didn’t take long to realize
that their independent marketing company was targeting the wrong target buyer. Even back
in the early 1980’s, it didn’t take rocket-science to understand that our buyer
was global and our major local advertising budget was speaking to the wrong people.
I felt that we had to quickly adapt our thinking to the
mindset of a foreign buyer contemplating moving into or investing in this new phenomena
known as luxury residential condominiums. Upper income individuals and corporations in
Europe, Asia and America were much more likely to understand the investment dynamic of
owning prime quality residential real estate in the heart of the nation’s most
cosmopolitan and financial city (and if they had offices here in Toronto and used hotels
frequently, the upside return potential of real estate would prove attractive). They would
also see the per square foot prices in Canadian dollars as attractive. This conclusion
still holds well today and Canadians are establishing the benchmark for developing high
density residential condominiums in all core areas (“urban infill” as it is
known in Toronto).
With a major communications adjustment and applying subtle
but lethal on site sales skills or more accurately stated: “closing skills”
and proven sales “tactics”, we immediately sold multiple units to a
foreign bank and to a European car manufacturer’s wife who did not like to stay in
hotels when she infrequently visited the city and a virtual host of other somewhat
celebrity buyers. The Queen’s Quay Residences offered a lifestyle that Torontonians
could not understand at the time, at prices that they could not understand (principally
motivated by a lack of understanding of what this new phenomena had to offer).
The uniqueness of the product added another level of
vision that Torontonians were not jumping to pay for (at under $300/sq.ft). Our
product, “The Residences at the Queen’s Quay Terminal”
was being constructed above the massive terminal building at the foot of Bay on the
Harbour in which the trains would actually pull into and exchange cargo with ships. The
Reichmann’s were and remain to be Canada’s pre-eminent visionaries of true condo
luxury living. They postured a magnificent residential community of seventy plus private residences consisting of four
levels of stately homes, all with lake views.
Many of the homes offered two sided glass
residences resulting from a magical garden positioned in the center with it’s own
fully matured trees and a thirty five foot waterfall with a lighted elevated walkway over
the manicured private garden area (all above a thoroughly modern shopping facility). These
condos remain today as one of the city’s better residential addresses.
Our success wasn’t as a result of finding some magical
buyer’s market or anything. Frankly, I brought in a high-powered and structured sales
strategy that rested primarily on direct, one-to-one sales supported by an effective
communications foundation (sufficient to bring in sufficient “traffic”).
The sales infrastructure that I developed and employed way
back  then is still, amazingly employed today with surprising success at pretty
much every sales site! Have you noticed the small entrance/waiting area at all of the
condo sales sites or the consistency that you are then required to “register”
prior to being granted entry into the presentation area (where you can only get any
information)?
This is all a part of the structure of the
“game” and it is working as well today as it did two and a half decades
ago for me. All of the structure and all of the tactics are useless without a strong and
impressionable sales force. No sale happens by itself and most require professional
tactics to become a reality at all! Even when the buyer wants to buy, there are psychological hurdles that we all
have to overcome. A professional seller knows how to walk you through the course and
assist you in making those critical decisions along the way. This “assistance”
is also stated as “influence” and when it comes to spending in the six figures
you should first assess whether you want someone “influencing your buying
decisions”. I would strongly suggest that you will always be better served
having NO outside influence when considering spending the kind of money required to buy a
condo. You are strongly advised to get professional advise and input sufficient to become
knowledgeable and/or educated to enable you to make your own “informed
decisions”.
 It
is absolutely imperative that you understand that anyone selling real estate using a
Realtor enjoys a legal obligation from that Realtor to ONLY represent the best interests
of their “client”, the Seller. They also have a legal
obligation to not lie or misrepresent to anyone else (their “customers”). That
means that you cannot get legitimate information out of a seller’s agent sufficient
for you to make an informed decision because it would be against the law for their agent
to assist you in any way more than not misrepresenting anything to you. The burden of due
diligence rests solely on your shoulders.
In the process of maintaining such a mammoth financial
industry (real estate is a multi-billion dollar industry) you can bet that the absolute
best trained personnel are the grass roots. Few industries can boast the high ratio of
professional sellers as does the real estate industry.
With professional selling there are a  million games being played, many times totally
subconsciously to many of the participants. The ultimate object of any of the many games
in the condo business is to get you to buy, from them right there and then. Sales people
at condo sales sites are some of the most highly trained sales pros that I know. When I
worked the sales floor at a site I understood only one basic thing: “my job was to
sell you and your job was to buy” and the odds were very good that if you visited my
sales site you were buying.
 With powerful “closing techniques” I could usually get
you to buy it. You could go home and cancel by phone but I would get you to buy it,
leaving canceling up to you.
At the height of the condo boom of the 80’s
while producing a television series (I always balanced my condominium career with artistic
endeavors when I was young) we sold out 1001 Bay Condominiums in ten days! As the
1980’s drew to a close it became apparent that the  heyday for condo sales was drawing to a
close. We had done it to ourselves by selling too many condo units without fully
anticipating the negative impact that an imbalance in speculation could introduce. As
interest rates moved up most speculators walked away from their investments when they
realized that negative carrying costs were in fact stupid, even though they were being
touted by the nations leading banks and financial institutions at the time (remember Royal
Trust, Greymac Trust, among others).
As the Toronto real estate market crashed around us, I
traveled to Florida for a well deserved rest and to strategize
 what
I would do next. Selling condos is what I had grown to know and understand. It was what I
enjoyed being involved with. Again, the necessity of a global target market came to mind
and with a dual career portfolio in music videos/television and condo sales I struggled to
envision an opportunity within the dark clouds of the crashing real estate market.
Sitting at the beach in Delray Florida reading the Sun
Sentinel I was attracted to pictures of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The 1997 reversion of Hong Kong became the focus of the day and a bell went off in my head
telling me that the money people in Hong Kong would want to, at minimum, get a good
portion of their money invested elsewhere before the Colony was returned to the Communist
Chinese. At best they may want to move to Canada which was the number one destination of choice for immigration due to very
aggressive and lenient Canadian government policies regarding immigration programs. The
concept of linking these motivated buyers with motivated sellers (banks in the process of
foreclosing on Toronto developers) set in and introduced a whole new chapter in my book of
life.
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The
challenge would be how to take the plethora of Toronto depressed developments around to
the other side of the world in an effective enough selling manner sufficient to transact
sales. While in Florida I visited an acquaintance, a retired IBM executive who  unfortunately had lost the greater
majority of his sight (not a great statement for cathode ray tube monitors). On his home
PC (286-DX) I saw an astounding photograph of a pink rose with a dew drop falling from it.
Knowing nothing about computers, my question was quickly “how did you get that
picture onto your computer”? Today, all of this sounds rather lame however in those
days computers ran only DOS (ugly green letters on a black screen) and had no multimedia
capabilities whatsoever. With no Internet, CNN, Time Warner/AOL, Bill Gates, etc., I set
about pioneering digital media condominium selling, building a modest interactive
application (in DOS) carrying a dozen or so “under construction” condominium
developments in Toronto and Mississauga, and approximately 100 luxury mansions supplied by
Harvey Kalles Real Estate. I went to each location and shot hand-held videos adding
voice-overs later which enabled users to call up video of area shopping malls, schools,
churches, parks around each development. The multi-million dollar residences  that I video taped for Kalles Real
Estate drew a great deal of attention and interest so I figured they would be worth the
hassle of producing. I then hopped onto a United Airlines 747 and flew to Hong Kong with
my mini-tower PC. At that time you could not burn a CD-ROM without spending tens of
thousands of dollars and I honestly didn’t even know what a CD-ROM was and being
unable to get it out of my box I became a long distance courier. It really didn’t
embarrass me to conclude that I could not figure out how to get the “show” (as I
called it) off of my computer hard drive (50 megabytes - huge at the time). Hey, I’m
an entrepreneur and not a techi-guy I would tell my associates and anyway, it sure was
better than sitting around sucking my thumb like all of the other condo sales people that
I knew.
I later met my business partner who possessed an uncanny
ability to learn computers, design, video  editing, sound editing, multimedia production and add her own artistic
graphic design without any formal training whatsoever! For over a year I flew back and
forth to Hong Kong carrying as onboard luggage a mini tower computer with the updated
“show”. Years later the introduction of Windows operating platform enabled us to
put the “show” on CD-ROM. With the introduction of the Internet and World Wide
Web we launched simplycondos.com. This Condominium “Specialty Channel”
web site has enjoyed tremendous growth becoming one of the busiest and most popular
Toronto condo websites, frequently referred to as the “only meaningful condominium
web site” by those looking for condos.
 I
now am an Exclusive Buyer’s Agent, something that very few people understand (even
industry insiders). With income conventionally coming from the seller of properties it is
very difficult, from a business perspective, to not “List” properties.
I personally represent ONLY those buying a condo, a job that keeps me going pretty well
every hour of every day. If you are buying a property, whether new or resale and you are
not using your own Buyer’s Agent, then you are not availing yourself of the most
valuable service available to you. Best of all, at present my services are absolutely FREE
to Buyers.
 At
some point in every career we reassess our activity from a professional point of view. I
had proven very adept at SELLING condominiums. Actually I repeatedly proved that I could
sell someone a condo even if they didn’t want to buy it regardless of whether they
opposed me or not! Customers would ask and sometimes plead with me to just let them go
home and think about it and I would tell them “no” explaining that they had come
out to buy one and telling them that they were just going through normal buying decision
stress. There are a million games played on a condo sales floor (and lots more played to
get you to visit the condo sales site) but none are favorable to the purchaser and if you
are buying resale from open houses, ads, whatever . . . you must understand that the real
estate person that you are meeting holds a LEGAL OBLIGATION to protect ONLY the interests
of the Seller!
 I
“went clean" and quit SELLING condos when I realized that my
ability to make people buy, in spite of wishing to not buy, carried serious
responsibilities. Today I put this skill to work ONLY for Purchasers, protecting them
against the tactics of highly trained site sales specialists like me (or like I used to be
- no matter how subtle or polished). Most credible developers invite purchasers to have
their own professional representation at sales sites providing that disclosure is made up
front during the initial visit to the site. If you visit a sales site that will not
“co-operate” (industry term for having you use a Realtor) their stance possibly
should make a distinct statement to you.
Amazingly to me, the game is alive and doing very well (for
the developers) today. To understand it one must see it in it’s totality and be able
to identify all of the players in context to their role. It is set up to keep everyone
isolated through creating an illusion of available information that is designed
fundamentally to condition you to buy retail on your own. I have said that credible
developers invite you to have your own agent but do not misconstrue this to mean that they
do not prefer if you show up
unaccompanied. They distinctly prefer that you do pop in without professional
representation for obvious reasons (who would buy the dog suites if no-one showed up
alone)?
To motivate consumers to stop in unaccompanied means
building relationship infrastructures (with various publications) establishing the
perception of making available sufficient independent looking information in a manner
under which the Buyer feels that they have done sufficient personal research to justify
making such a substantial investment. Even a small studio condo today costs serious money
and when it comes to spending so much money caution is always advisable.
The condo industry and newspaper/magazine industries in
Toronto flourishes on relationships shared between the media and these developers. Quite
simply stated, those who advertise can expect editorial exposure which is considered
substantially better exposure than a direct ad.
In Toronto we have three newspapers (some area specialty
papers as well but basically three majors). These major newspapers sell ads and one of the
major markets for them is condo and new home developers. Yes, you will find editorials
written by independent journalists
but these editorials are consistently limited to profiling advertisers' properties. I
cannot recall an instance where a newspaper profiled a developer or development that did
not advertise in their publication. I guess this is called journalistic integrity,
although my own first hand experience shows that the expectation is that one hand holds
the other (“advertise and we’ll talk nice“). If you are a buyer, and
counting on these publications for your research you can quickly see that your interests
can hardly be considered being taken care of. All newspaper ads invite you into the
developer’s sales site and none of them suggest that you bring your own agent along.
When I worked the condo sales floor I loved buyers
who came in without their own professional representation. After all, “someone has to buy the dog suites”. For the record, a dog
suite is a suite that basically a professional buyer would not buy. Dog suites are located
immediately above the garbage storage area or has the garbage chute immediately across
from the front door of the suite or a plethora of other “bug-a-boos” that you
can find on my web site. The likelihood of have a buyer who is represented by a
professional buyer’s agent buy a dog suite is pretty  much unheard of as a professional buyer’s
agent is legally obligated to protect their client’s best interests and a dog suite
would not constitute “best interests”. As a sales site sales representative you
feed on those who stumble in without adequate representation. Unless you can read floor
plans, architectural drawings and renderings and juxtapose them into a non-existent
physical environment, a buyer’s agent should be your first step in the often long and
sometimes tedious task of selecting the right condo within the right development by the
right developer.
Toronto also has a number of FREE Condo magazines which are
represented as, and perceived (justifiably due to presentation) as objective, journalistic
publications by unsuspecting buyers. Again, these magazines are simply extensions of the
marketing departments of condo developers, a part of the game. Pages that  appear to be editorial are in fact unpublished
“advertorials” written and inserted by the developers themselves to appear as
editorial. Again, if you are trying to do your own research this is not the best way of
going about it. Have you ever seen a bad ad written by the advertiser about themselves or
their condo communities? What about full disclosure? Can you afford a six digit investment
relying ONLY on input furnished by the Seller?
Recently some editorial or more specifically
editorial appearing formatted articles have been popping up in these FREE magazines, but
the bottom line is that they are simply ads written of mirror editorials designed to give
readers a confidence with respect to third party  referral. As with most things in life, “you always get what you pay
for” and if you are getting your research free, possibly you should question its
merits. Buyer- agency services are FREE but again you must always check the
track record and credentials of those offering these highly specialized services when it
comes to condos, lofts and townhouses. There is presently an undercurrent to shift
FREE Buyer Agency services to Buyer paid but only a few Realtors have tried to implement
it and they have not been successful. duh
I cannot really get into actual “Closing
Techniques” most frequently used at the sites as this is not a sales training
manual but rather a guide to Buyers, specifically to assist you in avoiding the pitfalls
set out before you. Suffice to say that these highly proven “techniques”
have remained surprising constant over the two and a half decades since my coming into the
business. Skillful closing techniques consistently applied by a professional closer
consistently leads one development to succeed over others. You will meet many of the most
affable and enjoyable sales people while visiting the various condo sites. These are the
elite in the real estate sales industry and ALL are specifically trained and skilled at
employing all of the latest selling techniques to get you to buy their product from them
that day. Remember, this is their job, and they hold legal obligations to protect the
interests of ONLY the Seller. You can count on them doing
that very well.
You will find that there is absolutley NO PRESSURE when you visit the sites
with me or at least tell them upon arrival that you are represented by me.
Those who suggest a willingness to jump out into the
fast lane of luxury real estate choosing to represent themselves simply don’t
understand the unnecessary risk that you are inviting (most find out only after moving
in). Any investment councilor will tell you to minimize risk and when you can get my years
of knowledge and negotiating skills FREE (the developers will actually pay me for my
services providing you DO NOT VISIT THEIR SITE FIRST! So do NOT
visit sales sites without contacting me first!
The science to success in buying a condo rests in avoiding
as many of the traps as possible and shifting as much momentum over to your side as
possible. It starts with understanding that there is, in fact, a multitude of games being
played out everyday. A thorough understanding of the selling game and knowledge of the
rules, tactics and procedures is only good common sense.
 The truth of the matter is that, under the present structure, you cannot do
enough personal research sufficient to be confident that you are making “informed
decisions”. There is virtually NO unbiased source of information (other than my
website that I know of - the hate mail I get from developers and/or their lawyers
testifies to this). Information is limited to only the commercial publications that
report what the developer wants represented. Following this school of due diligence you
will never find a bad developer or one with a questionable history, nor will you ever find
any of the negative aspects to any condo (what developer in his right mind would publish
or pay to have published anything negative about their own developments and seeing that
the publications allow developers and Realtors to publish their own editorial looking ads,
you tell me the odds).
In this book I will share meaningful insider information
that purchasers and prospective purchasers can use to formulate sound investment plans and
learn how to go about making your own informed decisions regarding purchasing a
condominium, loft and/or townhouse. I’ll give you an up-to-date assessment of the
condo market and where it is going and set out many of the pitfalls you will undoubtedly meet along the way.
I’ll even give you some tips about selling your condo either on your own or using the
services of a Realtor and the multiple listing service.
This book is a MUST READ for anyone considering jumping
into this fast paced big ticket item game of condominiums.
All Photography shot by C. L. Hanes (me) included to help
you get to "know Toronto" |
