ROD STEWART, ROCK SINGER, BRIT, WANNABE SCOTSMAN
Stewart’s house looks like no other building I’m aware of in the city. It’s designed as a replica French chateau containing elaborately patterned marble floors, crystal chandeliers, rich fabrics, intricate wood paneling, lashings of molding across the ceilings and walls, Corinthian columns, and manicured grounds. "A return to maximalism", so the selling realtor says.Wood-panelled libraryFormal dining room with patterned marble floorThe great room, with a piano on a raised platform areaKitchenLiving room with terracePrivate bar with wood panelling & patterned marble floorThe presentational fountain in the front driveway is quite something too.
In addition to the main house, the property also features two gyms and a three-storey guesthouse. Records show that Stewart bought the property for $12.08M in 1991. He has listed it for $70M in 2023. If you’re too young to know who Rod Stewart is, look on YouTube for his hits Maggie May (a creepy but catchy song about underage sex – you could get away with that in the 1970s), Hot Legs (just what you’d expect) and Do Ya Think I’m Sexy? (no further comment needed.) Rod Stewart is 78 and loves to claim he’s Scottish despite being born in London and rarely travelling north beyond Hadrian’s Wall. Records show he also owns a home in Palm Beach, Florida. As opulent as the house is, the asking price of $77M is unlikely to be reached. Mark Wahlberg lived in the same area and, after listing his stunning home this year for $87.5M, he ended up selling for $55M. Again, if you’re young, Mark Walhberg (actor) and 90s hip-hop artist Marky Mark (& the Funky Bunch) are one and the same person. Google it!
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We all make significant decisions daily as real estate investors. To maximize the impact of those decision, investors need a solid grasp of business, economic and political fundamentals. Sadly, many do not. And when we don't have a deep understanding of why we make the decisions we do, we stop being an investors. We become speculators. Speculators gamble because they don't understand the game they are playing. Sometimes they win. Often not. It's dumb luck. Real estate gamblers have minimal control over the outcome. Investors think in terms of odds – the statistical likelihood an outcome will come true. You don’t always win, but because you make informed decisions, the odds you will succeed over the long term is guaranteed. Not due to chance. But because the odds make it so. You must stay disciplined though and always make evidence-backed choices. What Canadian Think of Interest rates and Inflation - a survey by Abacus Data, August 2023 A recent survey of 2,500 Canadians by Abacus Data revealed that we are not well-versed as citizens (and investors) for the big issues that affect our lives. https://abacusdata.ca/what-canadians-think-about-interest-rates-and-inflation/ We have permission to disagree with our political and financial leaders because we live in a safe, progressive, parliamentary democracy. But if we don't reciprocate by understanding how the political and economic systems of Canada work, we will end up inflicting some pretty major economic self-harm upon ourselves and those around us. In that vein, here are some of the findings of the nationwide Abacus survey. WHO DO YOU BELIEVE SETS THE INTEREST RATES IN CANADA? 36% of those surveyed believe the Bank of Canada does so with direction from the federal government. WRONG 5% said the federal government alone. WRONG 18% didn’t know. Real Answer: The Bank of Canada independently, which only 41% of respondents got correct. The separation of powers between the central bank and the government prevents political meddling in economic policy. This separation exists in the United States too, although it was put sorely to test by Donald Trump when he was president. Politicians often lose power when the economy is bad, so you can understand their desire to tamper with interests rates to artificially juice the economy and improve their ratings. But this is terrible economic policy and it's the reason why politically-mature countries keep the fingers of government away from the interest rates lever. ARE INTEREST RATE INCREASE NECESSARY TO REDUCE INFLATION 23% said Probably Not. 21% said Definitely Not. 15% said I don’t know. REAL ANSWER: Raising and reducing interest rates are established ways to speed up and slow down economic growth. The Bank of Canada has a mandate to manage interest rates so that we achieve stable annual inflation of 2%. If the prime minister, or any other government official were to give the Bank of Canada orders, it would spark controversy. It takes a while for the impact of higher interest rates to seep through the system. Excess existing cash needs to be soaked up, and consumer demand to buy things needs to be squeezed out. When debt costs more, consumers and businesses take on less off it. It’s never a straight line though and sometimes interest rate changes don’t work at all. Look at Japan’s last three decades after its real estate bubble burst. Low and negative interest rates should see a glut of borrowers and lots of increased productivity through consumer buying and R&D investment by businesses. Not in Japan. Only now is it making small steps toward economic growth after all those excesses of the 1980’s. Without growth, economists call these Japan’s lost decades. They are cautionary take for all central bankers and economics students who believe interest rates are all-powerful. Back to Canada. If 44% of our populace doesn't understand how monetary policy works (interest rate fluctuations) this will influence political dissatisfaction. We could elect/remove a government based on a faulty understanding of how the economy works. No Canadian government gets to dictate how high or low interests are. Period! TO WHAT EXTENT DO YOU THINK THE FEDERAL CARBON TAX HAS AN IMPACT ON INFLATION IN CANADA The carbon tax is a political wedge issue. Conservatives hate it – not because it doesn't work, but because Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party introduced it. The carbon tax is not really a tax at all because it’s designed to be revenue neutral. Money comes out of one hand when we fill up at a gas station and goes back into the other hand by different means. The dreaded T-word shouldn’t even be used because the Carbon Tax is a smoke-and-mirrors mind-game. Yes, it gets added to gas prices when we fill up our vehicles. We pay a charge. BUT the money gets returned later-on in a tax rebate. So why have it? Basic economics. If you want less of something, tax it. (eg. Carbon pollution from cars, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption.) If you want more of something, offer discounts. (e.g. No GST on most fresh food, unlike less healthy snack foods and processed foods.) It’s carrots and sticks. Behavioral economics 101. Taxes are a nudge to make us do fewer damaging things and more of the good things that benefit our health and society in general. The carbon tax is a classic economic nudge. You pay up front. You feel the pain. So economic theory says we will do whatever we can to minimize that pain and so use less gas. But most of the tax comes right back to users in the form of federal tax credits – the ones in the small print we never read when filing our taxes. The amount of real money paid is small, but we human beings don’t respond well to delayed gratification and so adjust our behaviour at the gas pump when we see the higher price. This results in changes to driving habits and reduced consumption of climate-damaging fossil fuels. So the theory goes…and it works. Evidence to date indicates that Carbon Taxes encourages people to use less fossil fuel. DO YOU THINK INFLATION IS HIGHER IN CANADA THAN IN SIMILAR COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD 52% said inflation was higher in Canada. WRONG 35% said inflation in Canada was about the same as in similar countries around the world. WRONG REAL ANSWER: Canada has the lowest inflation rate of the G7 countries. It was 2.8% when the survey was taken. Only five countries in the 38-nation Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development have interest rates lower than that of Canada. All in all, the results of this survey are discouraging. Access to information has never been easier. Unfortunately, though, the sources most people use to understand the world around them are notoriously unreliable. Social media is not a safe place to inform ourselves because anyone with any degree of (or lack of) expertise can amplify their voice there. Yet social media is what so many people turn to. It is better to seek out acknowledged experts in different fields and listen to them directly. Selectively choosing media outlets that have a record of unbiased reporting is important too. Sadly, there are far fewer of these than there should be. Demagogues, politicians and influencers depend on it. They know that pablum from Tik Tok and elsewhere is easier to swallow than a nuanced interpretation of facts. BACKGROUND Canada’s federal government is currently led by prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. The Liberals have a minority government and are propped up by the New Democrats. Polling suggests the Conservative Party has a lead over the Liberals and could form the next Canadian government. The Abacus survey data from August 2023 on which this post is based can be found here: https://abacusdata.ca/what-canadians-think-about-interest-rates-and-inflation/ I’m not sure if raising houses happens elsewhere, but the first time I saw a house raised to allow the creation of a full-height ground floor was in 2000 in Vancouver. Vancouver houses built in the early 1900s had basement areas with dirt floors and low ceilings. They weren’t intended to be habitable spaces. But as home prices went through the roof and Lower Mainland housing got tight, people poured thin slabs (about two inches thick), slapped up walls, and created basement rental suites. One of the first houses I bought in Canada was exactly like this: a tumble-down heritage house. City records showed its first water connection occurred in 1908. Two sets of tenants lived in the gloomy basement area with its 6-feet high ceilings. The landlord had installed smoke detectors that dangled freestyle from wires that hung down from between the exposed joists. No drywall, no electrical box. The tenant had placed his toaster directly beneath the smoke detector - about 12 inches away - so he’d permanently unscrewed one of the pigtail wires to prevent the detector from going off. Upstairs, tenant #3 had plenty of light and a real kitchen, but she had sponge-painted the interior walls with pastel-yellow and aqua-blue and stenciled them with inspiring slogans using permanent marker pen. The house was not quite the worst on the street – that title went to the drug addicts renting across the street – but it was a major fixer upper. There is money in mess though. You just need to see past the mess and look for the property’s intrinsic value. Building a Liveable Ground Floor UnitAfter the deal closed, I got to work on the basement. To create an attractive ground floor suite, a proper ceiling height was needed. That meant two options: up or down. Most people dig, but that would have put some of the suite below grade. So, I lifted. Nickell Brothers (https://www.nickelbros.com) will cut your wood frame home from its foundation and drive it away on a wide-bed truck to its storage facility. Or they will drive it/barge it to a new piece of land miles away. This is an environmentally-friendly way to re-use underappreciated, older B.C. homes. Instead of bulldozing the, and destroying all that first-growth timber and stained glass, they can have a new life on someone else’s land. Zebiak just lifts. House up. Rest it on stacked blocks of wood like stilts. Bold a new ground floor underneath. A month later, plop the house back down again. This is the route I chose. First, I stripped the basement back to the studs. Then Zebiak came in and stacked 8x8 lumber to create multiple 6-feet tall, Lego-like towers across the basement. Zebeck workers unloading 40' long wooden beams to balance the house on 40 feet long 14"x8" beams were then pushed through the ceiling of the basement from one end of the house to the other. These beams were balanced on top of the 4’x4’ stacked-wood towers and ran at right angles to the main floor’s floor joists. The beams were then connected to a hydraulic lift inside the Zebeck truck and simultaneously lifted, inch by inch, taking the entire house up with them. The chimney was buttressed and much if it went up as well. The towers get some new lumber added to them and then the house was lowered so that it balanced on top of them. A bonus was that the mice that lived in the building all departed on the day of the lift. It must have felt like an earthquake to them. When you walked upstairs, the building actually wobbled a bit with the wind and each footstep. A bobcat digger gingerly rolled beneath the house with about four inches to spare on top and hauled out the busted up slab for disposal Using a circular saw, I cut off the original ground floor walls – which were dangling in the air – flush with the first-floor sill plate. The house looked like it was floating. The stump of the green-painted chimney sat broken between the boulders and rubble. It would have to be rebuilt with new masonry. The basement demolition revealed a surprise. The house had received an addition in the 1930s and the builders couldn’t be bothered moving some boulders, so they simply built cabinetry around them, enclosing the rocks completely. Out of sight, out of mind. I wondered why the 15-feet run of floor-to-ceiling basement cupboards had a four feet high inaccessible area at the bottom without doors. Boulders. Big ones. Lined up in a row. They had to come out. So, the mini-Bobcat driver and I manhandled them to the edge of the house’s footprint, very carefully avoiding the loosely stacked towers of lumber holding up the house above us. Rear view: Floating on stacked up piles of logs. Long story short, the renovation project was a success. We formed and poured a new foundation wall, framed a wooden pony wall along the top of the foundation, and then lowered the house on to the pony wall, and nailed the whole thing together. We still own this property. It has nine feet high ceilings and sunshine streams in from every angle. The ground floor suite is new-construction. The main and upstairs area retained all of their original character, while getting a massive modernization. I’ve not seen house-raising like this done anywhere else in the world.
I was reminded of it the other day while on a walk when I stumbled across a house that was balancing on stilts while the basement slab was being removed. The sign on the construction fence said Zebiak, the same company I used all those years ago. ASH CARTER |
Fun fact: Titanic and Avatar movie direct James Cameron is also a farmer in Saskatchewan. Wikipedia says he was born in Kapuskasing, ON, which I can’t independently verify. I do know however that he is a passionate environmentalist and owns 10,000 acres of Saskatchewan farmland where his staff are developing new types of legumes (fava beans) as an alternative to meat as a human protein source. |
Cameron owns land across the world, including 5,000 acres in New Zealand which is where he and his family spend much of their time. He wanted to walk the walk on sustainability though, so has placed his 100-acre California property, located on the Gaviota coast of Santa Barbara county, on the market.
Records show he and his wife Suzy Amis Cameron bought the property for $4.375M in the late 1990s. It has been listed for $33M, an excellent capital gain if all goes according to plan. The cherry on top is that this is where he wrote the screenplays for both Avatar films.
The land is located in a gated community known as Hollister Ranch, so you can’t just drive by for a look. The community’s rules limit housing development to leave space for wildlife and grazing animals, a big draw for the Camerons who wanted to leave Malibu in the 90’s for a spot that was more rural.
Records show he and his wife Suzy Amis Cameron bought the property for $4.375M in the late 1990s. It has been listed for $33M, an excellent capital gain if all goes according to plan. The cherry on top is that this is where he wrote the screenplays for both Avatar films.
The land is located in a gated community known as Hollister Ranch, so you can’t just drive by for a look. The community’s rules limit housing development to leave space for wildlife and grazing animals, a big draw for the Camerons who wanted to leave Malibu in the 90’s for a spot that was more rural.
They ripped out a lot of marble from the previous owner and made the house feel more earthy and connected to the land. Hence all the stone with its earthy tones and textures that you see in the photos
The beach is about a quarter mile away.
The Hollister Ranch area is controversial because non-owners say it prevents people from having access to the beach, limiting nature to the rich few.
The beach is about a quarter mile away.
The Hollister Ranch area is controversial because non-owners say it prevents people from having access to the beach, limiting nature to the rich few.
The Camerons are reportedly selling the ranch because they feel too spread out between their properties in Canada, New Zealand and the US.
Hopefully you see something in the images that inspires your own design taste for future projects.
Best
Cameron
Hopefully you see something in the images that inspires your own design taste for future projects.
Best
Cameron
GISELLE BÜNDCHEN, MODEL
I’m a New England Patriots and Tom Brady fan .
So, when TB12 and his Brazilian model wife Giselle Bündchen split in 2022 after 12 years of marriage, both needed new homes.
There wasn’t too much I found interesting in their first new home choices, but I very much like Ms. Bündchen’s recent house purchase in South Florida.
So, when TB12 and his Brazilian model wife Giselle Bündchen split in 2022 after 12 years of marriage, both needed new homes.
There wasn’t too much I found interesting in their first new home choices, but I very much like Ms. Bündchen’s recent house purchase in South Florida.
It is a 7.5-acre estate about 50 km from Miami with a full-sized soccer pitch and two equestrian rings. The area is known for its horse ranches and premier horse riding. If you’ve ever been involved with horses you’ll know they are an expensive and time-consuming hobby.
The house is lovely, and quite tasteful considering how close it is to Miami and all the garish opulence that that city possesses. The house was built in the 1970s but has been extensively renovated.
There are two structures on the land: the main home and a 10-stall horse barn with attached guest quarters. There are nine bedrooms between the main residence and the guest space. The property also has an infinity pool, outdoor kitchen, and fish pond.
I'd never thought of Florida as having architecture made of brick, let alone the dark earthy coloured brick facade that you see here, but it creates a muscular and sturdy architectural presence that appeals.
The house is lovely, and quite tasteful considering how close it is to Miami and all the garish opulence that that city possesses. The house was built in the 1970s but has been extensively renovated.
There are two structures on the land: the main home and a 10-stall horse barn with attached guest quarters. There are nine bedrooms between the main residence and the guest space. The property also has an infinity pool, outdoor kitchen, and fish pond.
I'd never thought of Florida as having architecture made of brick, let alone the dark earthy coloured brick facade that you see here, but it creates a muscular and sturdy architectural presence that appeals.
The house is a modern building with a colourful, stripped down but tasteful design aesthetic that softens some of the coolness modern, quadratic, straight-line architecture possesses. It feels too big and barn-like to be intimate, but it will certainly offer lots of room for growing kids to run and play, inside and out, and that I'm sure is what Ms Bündchen is looking for - plus, outside, the rural, animals-running-free-in-a-relaxed-garden atmosphere.
Every part of the house is wide, spacious, and open. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the living areas. Space everywhere. It's a hike to navigate the home, which gives it a bit of a modern museum quality. Gorgeous, but not quite intimate. Maybe a bit like the Brady-Bündchen marriage at the end.
I’m fascinated by the houses celebrities buy.
Not because I aspire to live in the kind of luxury they can afford. I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, a mega celebrity location, and while the city of angels has its upsides, it’s not a town I would want to call home.
Rather, celebrities usually have a lot of money and that can lead to creative partnerships with designers who create unique architecture, colour palettes, landscaping, furniture, and so on.
Being famous and wealthy don’t guarantee good taste. In fact, the opposite is frequently true.
But when talented people in the arts collaborate –many celebrities have achieved their paparazzi status due to their artistry – superlative results can ensue.
For me, as a real estate entrepreneur, this leads to design ideas I can copy/modify and incorporate into my own projects.
This will be the first of several posts about celebrity estates that I hope will prove educational to those of us who not only wish to provide our tenants with lovely homes, but with a living space that also incorporates tasteful design on a budget.
Best,
Cameron
Not because I aspire to live in the kind of luxury they can afford. I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, a mega celebrity location, and while the city of angels has its upsides, it’s not a town I would want to call home.
Rather, celebrities usually have a lot of money and that can lead to creative partnerships with designers who create unique architecture, colour palettes, landscaping, furniture, and so on.
Being famous and wealthy don’t guarantee good taste. In fact, the opposite is frequently true.
But when talented people in the arts collaborate –many celebrities have achieved their paparazzi status due to their artistry – superlative results can ensue.
For me, as a real estate entrepreneur, this leads to design ideas I can copy/modify and incorporate into my own projects.
This will be the first of several posts about celebrity estates that I hope will prove educational to those of us who not only wish to provide our tenants with lovely homes, but with a living space that also incorporates tasteful design on a budget.
Best,
Cameron
Cameron Morrell
Business Educator
Real Estate Developer
Social Impact-Entrepreneur
Venture Capitalist
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