Since 1980 my life has revolved around residential condos.
Being a Realtor is a relatively new thing to me, having gotten
my real estate license just seven years ago when I launched
simplycondos.com.

I’ve been an entrepreneur since long before one came
into vogue in the late 1980’s. I was an entrepreneur when being one was not viewed upon as a good thing!

The initial two thirds of my career in condos was spent
working for the developers of residential condos, selling and
marketing condos within the conventional frame work of the
business. Buyer’s had no representation back then. We
opened sales sites and consumers came in. We didn’t
“co-operate” (work well) with Realtors.

When the market crashed in 1989 I applied my entrepreneurial vision to three (3) specific concepts:

1. Keep doing what I did for a living which was sell and
market Toronto condos – a challenge as the market had just crashed and interest rates went from around 6% - 21%
almost over night.

2. Find a buyer for the glut of overbuilt condos being built.

3. Find a cost effective way to link these condos with buyers who were obviously not in Toronto’s crashed market.

The target buyers market was simple to identify as the
Tiananmen Square incident screamed out at me that there
were people in Hong Kong, (about to be taken back by the
Communist Chinese), who would emigrate to and/or invest in Canada. The challenge was to come up with a cost affordable way to link the glut of Toronto residential condos with this buyer’s market.

Entrepreneurs are problem solvers and while sitting on a
beach in Florida reading about Tiananmen Square staying
with a friend of mine, (a retired IBM executive who was going blind – probably from cathrode ray tubes on the old computers back then). On the day that the front page of the Sun Sentinel, (Florida newspaper), showed the tanks and a small Chinese student standing in front of them I saw on my friend’s PC, (486 DX in those days was quite the computer), a pink rose with a dew drop sparkling in mid air.

This was the first “computer generated graphic image” that
I had ever seen. Computer’s in those days were dull screens with little green letters, (never had I or the world seen pictures on a computer). From that day, I became hooked to the media and have continued with it ever since, thus this web site simplycondos.com.

In 1991 we designed and produced our first Interactive Multimedia CR-ROM profiling Toronto area top end residences, (with Harvey Kalles Real Estate), and luxury condos with sophisticated interactive mapping and video visits to condos and various condo areas of the city. At the time there was no Internet or Windows operating system thus we had no predecessor to copy.