While some of Canada's top real estate executives relished spending time with family — and away from the office — during the pandemic, they say it is now time to come back.
Asked to discuss the positives of the pandemic, Oxford Properties Group CEO Michael Turner said during a roundtable discussion at the Real Estate Forum this month: "I struggle with that. As a society we are going to see a long tail of the consequences of how policy was implemented."
But Turner, who heads the real estate arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which has $82 billion in assets, said he also got to see his kids every day.
"We became much closer as a family, but they are over that now," he joked. "A true story is my wife said, 'You are going back to the office, or we are doing something different."
The discussion intensified when Samir Manir, president and chief executive of Artis REIT, said the real estate community needs to lead when it comes time to return to the office.
"In my humble opinion, if the 2,000 of us are not in the office at least four days a week, if not five days a week, then shame on us," said the executive to the audience, after conceding he did enjoy the three months of spending time with family. "In the short term, work from home might be ideal, but fast forward three to five years, the culture, collaboration and innovation will not happen on Zoom call screens."
Mentoring Sought
Turner said people made many life changes because of COVID, but the crisis has eased, and some employees are demanding more contact, recalling a recent event in the company's New York office.
"The youngest people in the office were calling out the more senior people and associates and saying, 'You benefited from someone mentoring you and better onboarding experiencing, and it would be kind of nice if you showed up,'" said Turner.
Amy Price, president of BentallGreenOak, which has $80 billion in assets, encouraged a much more open idea about work.
"Someone described how the word shop used to be a noun, and then it became a verb. It went from something you went to, to something you did," said Price. "Work is the same thing. It used to be a place you went to, and now, it is a verb. It's what you do. We have to rethink the model and the way we engage with employees."
Price said the pandemic did have some positives. "It forced us to think about how we operated our business, and we obviously all pivoted to operating differently. Coming out of it, I see more of a distinction by business and region on how we operate. We used to be more of one approach for everybody," she said.
Manji, who exercised a management shakeup at Artis through the middle of the pandemic and was part of a group that took over the assets of Quebec City-based Cominar REIT during the same period, said the positive with COVID from a business perspective was getting to see the resiliency of his business.
"Our focus has been, and I hope it will remain, to look at fundamentals and then, whatever short-term factors that are uncontrollable are in front of us, work through those by taking a long-term approach," he said
Rob Kumer, president and chief investment KingSett Capital, said the pandemic taught him managing stakeholders is paramount.
"You have to really put a lot of focus on managing your investors, your lenders, your employees. The people who have a vested interest in how you are performing," said Kumer. "I think I learned the biggest risks are the things that are unknown and unidentifiable. We would never have predicted the pandemic before it started."
Kevan Gorrie, president and chief executive of Granite REIT, which owns 58 million square feet of industrial space, said the pandemic reinforced the lesson of maintaining liquidity at all times and running businesses prudently.
"Things like underwriting risk objectively," said Gorrie, "is something many in our sector got away from the last few years, and now it is coming back."