Crestpoint's CEO and Founder Once Used Legos to Build Skyscrapers. Now He Manages Them.

Kevin Leon runs a real estate asset management firm with almost 10 billion Canadian dollars, but his career's building blocks might have been formed while playing with Lego blocks as a child.

"The first thing that intrigued me about real estate was a fascination with skyscrapers," said the founder, CEO and president of Crestpoint Real Estate Investments. "My favourite thing as a kid was building with Legos. I was a huge fan. But the second thing that drew me to real estate was my favourite subjects in school were math and geography,"

These days, instead of imaginary towers made of plastic bricks, Leon manages a diversified portfolio of 36 million square feet across Canada for Crestpoint, which is part of the Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group. The boutique asset management company is responsible for 104 billion Canadian dollars in assets.

Leon, who started Toronto-based Crestpoint in 2010, got his first real estate jobs growing up as a roofer and later in a warehouse. "Those were as a kid, and I realized I wasn't going to be a labourer," told CoStar News in an interview.

Between his third and fourth year at university earning a business degree, he got a job as a summer intern at CBRE.

"It was 1988, and commercial real estate was the big thing, and everyone was a hotshot. The world was humming," he said.

So when he graduated, CBRE offered him a full-time job starting in research in Toronto. "I was cocky. They wanted younger people to go into leasing and research, but I wanted investment sales."

Leon struck out on his own in investment sales at CBRE in 1990, so he could be in the "big leagues" as he puts it.

"Then the whole world crashes. It was a little bumpy," said Leon, referring to the real estate crash from the 1990s. Over the next two years, "we probably had 40 or 50 salespeople in the downtown CBRE office, and maybe three made a sale that year and I was not one of them. For people who remember, it was doomsday. Prices started falling, and lenders started taking over properties."

The real estate company let people draw on their future earnings as a loan, and two years into his career, Leon was in the negative.

"I was young, but the period took its toll on people who were relying on their historical income," he said. "A lot of people left the business and gave up. I didn't know any better. I kept going."

He started working closely with Peter Senst, now president of the Canadian capital markets national investment team at CBRE, on deals with banks.

"The banks needed people to help them with all the properties they were taking back from owners and investors," said Leon, noting by 1993, the market had started coming back.

Some deals stand out to Leon during that time, like the building he had to sell on Bloor Street, one of Toronto's main streets. He was called in to market the building in the west end.

"It was a storefront with 20 apartments above, and three people were sleeping in stairwells, needles all over the garage, a mugging the night before I went there," said Leon. "I'm thinking, 'what am I doing in this industry' but I did a couple of showings during the day because I didn't want to go after dark. And we sold it."

Today, running a shop with about 50 people, Leon's experiences help him understand the market, from zoning to what owners were thinking, as he provided that information to people in tumultuous times.

"People don't forget, you develop credibility and relationships, and maybe it doesn't provide immediate results," said Leon, who eventually left CBRE to work in investment banking at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

"People ask me, 'what would you have done differently?' and I always say, 'start Crestpoint 10 years earlier.' But would I have the same knowledge, experience and relationships without that experience at CBRE and CIBC? Probably not."

Case in point, when Leon was selling the Toronto Stock Exchange Tower in 1996, the group that bought it was a company called Gentra Inc., a predecessor company to Brookfield Properties, which was run by Michael Freund at the time. Freund is now chairman of Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group.

Looking back, Leon reminds employees to be inquisitive and be able to work with people and have fun at what they do.

"If you are not having fun and working long hours, you probably won't be successful," said Leon.

Everyone in commercial real estate had to start somewhere. CoStar's First Job column explores where careers began.