Located right in the middle of Western Canada’s most important wine growing region and outdoor recreation capital, its potential was unmistakable.

The land had quite a history to it, including multiple lawsuits and business partners who stole from one another, hated each other, only communicated with one another through lawyers, which is an expensive and unproductive conversation. The land was locked in legal limbo for a decade-and-a-half until my business partners and I found a solution that broke the deadlock. It was better to sell to us than die from old age without a resolution

More frustration was soon to come. Having raised the necessary funds, just as we were about to launch construction in early 2020, the COVID 19 pandemic hit. Businesses shut down, construction halted, and investors panicked. Those who withdrew missed a generational opportunity, because just 12 months later we broke ground and the and was suddenly worth a whole lot more because of all the real estate speculation that took place during lockdown. 
 
Those who thought rationally knew the world wasn’t ending and reaped the rewards by doing nothing. Those who responded with raw emotion, withdrew their investment cash, and were left on the sidelines. 
 
The best time to invest is when the world is panicked and running for the hills. When the inexperienced head for the exits en masse, serious investors move in with their flatbed trucks and load up on assets at irrationally low prices. It’s hard to convince most people of this.  If they feel pessimistic about life and the world, they don’t invest. But when prices are high and they feel more optimistic in outlook, they are ready to join the herd, forgetting that the most important way to make money is through the price you pay for an asset. Buy low, sell high. Put your emotions on a leash and lock them away in a dark cupboard.

Right now, it’s a buyer’s market. But, of course, it’s also the hardest market to raise cash in because investors are downcast and reluctant.
 
Irrational!

The Most Common Investor Questions 
The most common questions I’m asked by investors about development projects are, when will I get my money (when everything we’ve built has sold or when construction financing comes in if it’s a rental building); how much ROIs are an educated guess because no-one can accurately foretell the future), and what could go wrong? (Anything you or AI can think of.)
 
In my experience, the most risky real estate developments are those that promise short timelines (one year) and dividend payments to investors along the way. Add to that the role of inexperienced/novice developers who have caught the hubris bug (“you can do anything you put your mind to”) from social media and investors can entrust their money to promoters who have self-promotion skills and not much else.
 
It takes 5-7 years to develop land on big project. 
I don’t make cash payments along the way because that money has to come from somewhere. I need every penny to hire architects, engineers, concrete formers, framers, drywallers, etc., and deal with the unwieldy mechanism that is local government.
 
Planning departments are frustrating beasts to work with because they interpret rules in ways that make builders go crazy. Elected councilors like to make a name for themselves too and often interfere in development projects for populist reasons, rejecting designs that have already been approved by planning departments. 
 
For example, a BC project know of had water rights to build a jetty as part of their lakefront development. Zoning rules explicitly permitted a jetty. But councilors objected for personal reasons – boats were considered environmentally unsound – and so the application to build one was rejected and the bylaw retroactively changed to prevent anyone building a jetty again without explicit council approval. You can’t plan for this stuff. Land development is a lottery.

​Back to dividends. I don’t pay them because that would require me to borrow more than I need and to hold on to a cash pile (dead money) so that investors can have a feel-good moment when a trickle of cash comes back to them monthly or quarterly. 100% of borrowed cash should go into the project. If an investor needs regular cash payments to live on, they should not invest in long-term real estate developments. They need a GIC.
 
 Investment cash is money you don’t expect to need for the duration of the project. If you do, you are overinvested.
 
Thanks to all those who invested in Lakehouse. We got through the pandemic on time and on-schedule. What we couldn’t foresee was the current down real estate market, which is a reaction to the go-go years of COVID 19. Remember Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion. It’s the third one we should focus on in this case – for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – although all of them are applicable to markets in one form or another.

NEWTON'S SECOND LAW: FORCE
The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied.
His second law defines a force to be equal to change in momentum (mass times velocity) per change in time. Momentum is defined to be the mass m of an object times its velocity V.

The unit whose finishes are shown below is a half-duplex at 3180 Landry Crescent, Summerland,  British Columbia with 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and a total of ​2,306 sq. ft. of floor space.

Kitchen

This is my backyard at my summer home in Penticton B.C. I don’t have many human neighbours because the house is perched on the side of a mountain overlooking Okanagan Lake. But I do have quite a few animal neighbours, and let’s just say they make their presence known. Each spring, Buddy the Black Bear emerges from hibernation with a hunger for chaos—and garbage. He’s fond of rummaging through my bins and playing soccer with my solar-powered driveway lights. A real menace with paws.

​Going for a Night Walk
​On a post-prandial night walk, a visitor from Vancouver didn’t believe me that rattlesnakes emerge at night to 'sunbathe'. They lounge on the warm tarmac of rural roads, soaking up the summer heat that spools up from the ground after dark. My friend chose to walk barefoot on our night walk. Sure enough, while we were out, I spotted a moving shadow in the gloom. 

 They will stay frozen in a group, staring sullenly as you walk by. Get too close though and they flee like startled cats. But nothing compares to the bighorn sheep Bad Boy Gang (below) that took over the road at the bottom of my driveway. They hung out. They lounged. They intimidated. Because knew who was in charge.

BANG, BANG, BANG.
My Airbnb guests, whose bedroom is right beside that door, were now very much awake.
BANG, BANG, BANG.
CRAAAAAASSSHH!
I jumped out of bed, assuming a drink guest must have lost his key and was drunkenly opening the back door with his skull. Having run down a flight of stairs, I arrived just in time to see my glass door shatter beneath the delinquent sheep’s horns. 

For those unfamiliar with repairs and construction, it might appear from this image that a whole new door were required. But the glass lights in these kinds of doors are screw-in and thus repairable. A visit to the local Windsor Plywood store saw me $230 lighter in the wallet, but I was also given an unexpected upgrade on the new door light. The company’s inventory system said they had new lights just like mine in stock. But after some rooting around in the storage area, they could locate only more expensive models with internal venetian blinds inside. Lucky me, I got the venetian model for the price of one without.
​
So, if you ever find yourself living in the South Okanagan, remember: be careful who you let into the neighbourhood. There’s something to be said for not riling up the locals.

My daughter played her first season of professional soccer in Spain’s 3rd division last season (2024/25) and had an excellent time. She didn’t speak a lick of Spanish when she arrived, so the first six months were hard. Plus, she did not get along with the coach. He was a shouter and socially awkward, two things a group of driven young women don’t deal with well. 
 
The team had players from Paraguay, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, Holland, and Spain. Only the Dutch girl spoke some English. She would help explain things to my daughter, who would also hang back at training when drills were held because she needed to watch a few repetitions first to figure out what was required.
 
Nonetheless, the team bonded well in an us-versus-the-coach scenario and they set all kinds of records by winning the league championship with a record number of points and goals scored.

Spanish players are well-versed in the theatrical side of the game. Flopping, rolling, and screaming on contact is practically a skill set, and unfortunately, with inconsistent officiating, it often worked.
My daughter, being Canadian, has a different threshold—she’ll only go down if her leg has been reduced to a stump hanging by a thread. By the end of the season, she’d learned to flop as well, but never got a free kick for it. She was simply too bad of an actor. Opponents however knew they could drape themselves all over her and kick her shins to pieces without consequences.

My daughter is a striker and racked up goals (18 for the season) so the local media noticed her. She appeared in news reports and the club made her and a Brazilian teammate the models on the club’s merchandise web page.

I took a sabbatical from my university to join my daughter in Spain for the last five games of the season. That also meant joining in the post-season civic celebrations, where sponsors, politicians, and community leaders honoured the team’s accomplishments—which included a special church mass where we received commemorative programs and images of the Virgin Mary.