‘Where we want to go with our family, both my direct family and my global family, does dictate a change of role’ for Avtar Bains. CREDIT: Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun   Avtar Bains, 48, stands among some West Hastings office buildings he sold, loved the business culture from the day he entered at 23. CREDIT: Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun

Avtar Bains makes it look easy. It’s not, of course, but that’s part of the trick. He’s friendly, easygoing, and his elegant suits hang well on him. If you run into him on the street, he gives the impression of having time to stop and chat, even if he’s on his way to a meeting where millions of dollars are on the table.

Part of it has to do with his work schedule. At 48, he still starts his day at 6 a.m., Monday through Saturday, at the Granville Square offices of commercial real estate consultants Colliers International, where he’s senior vice-president. He’s there until 6 p.m. weekdays, and his concession to the weekend is to knock off around noon Saturday.

“There are very few guys who work as hard as he does,” says Jim Szabo, vice-president of investment properties at CB Richard Ellis and one of the handful of commercial realtors who handle most of the big deals in the Lower Mainland.

“He logs a lot of hours. There’s a few of us in this business who do, and he’s one of them.”

Bains‘ 16th-floor office — far from palatial, but favoured with a strategic view of many of the city’s office buildings — reveals his priorities. On its cluttered walls, dozen of plaques for top sales in commercial real estate vie for space with artwork created by his thee young children.

On his desk, an open daybook reveals neat columns of tight handwriting, each of the dozen-or-so lines a task to be accomplished that day. With a slight air of embarrassment, he admits to having “a number of lists going at the same time.”

For two decades, he has been the king of commercial real estate in this market; his personal lifetime sales topped $4.5 billion last fall.

Now he wants do something different.

Bains started on this path when he was 23 years old, studying economics and arts at UBC. When he walked into Colliers’ predecessor, Macaulay Nicolls Maitland, the city’s oldest real estate firm, something clicked.

“I got a summer job here on May 21, and I knew on May 23 that I was going to try to find a way to stay with Colliers and not go back to university,” he recalls. “I came in here and I loved the company, I loved the culture, I loved the asset class, I liked the people we dealt with outside the office. I had a very warm and cosy feeling for the environment.”

If he was ready for commercial real estate, commercial real estate was also ready for him. Macaulay Nicolls Maitland had been around since 1898, but the business of buying and selling commercial real estate had been primarily an adjunct to the legal profession: when the lawyers completed property deals for their clients, the real estate pros took care of the details.

However, as Bains was beginning to get a handle on the business, events far beyond his reach were starting to reshape Vancouver. With Expo 86 approaching, money was appearing from all over the world, and commercial real estate brokers were turning into deal-makers, cultivating clients and properties and putting them together.

“The first big change that happened in Vancouver was an influx of non-Canadian capital to invest in Canada,” says Bains.

“There were different motivations for that in the early ’80s than the motivation for those same people today. In those years, there was political instability in parts of the world, so part of it was just preserving capital — let’s get capital to Canada, Canada‘s where we want our children and grandchildren to be raised.”

The Asian money came mostly from Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, with Hong Kong the dominant force in light of southern China‘s long association with the West Coast and the impending return of the Crown colony to Beijing.

But Europeans were also well-represented, even if they did not stand out as much in the crowd.

“If you looked at the Europeans that invested, they invested in Canada for different reasons. Canada is what Europe used to be — clean air, you could go to the Interior and have hunting and ranching and all the things that were [once] provided in Europe.”

Bains learned the proclivities of his clients: the English were more institutionally based, the Germans went for private equity and office buildings, the Asians preferred retail properties in growing areas like Richmond. The Japanese, with their powerhouse economy still ascending, leaned toward the hospitality industry, particularly hotels.

But by the early 1990s, things had changed. The reverberations of Tiananmen Square were dying away, the idea of the handover of Hong Kong to China was largely accepted, Japan‘s real-estate bubble had burst, and the Europeans had diversified their assets to a satisfactory level. The money began to flow out again, looking for new opportunities.

The pull of the international financial tides made it clear how much Canada depends on foreign capital.

“It’s always been difficult for Canadians to finance what we have to finance to live the way we want from internal sources,” Bains says. “So on the one side of the coin, there’s resentment when foreign capital comes in; on the other side of the coin, if that foreign capital didn’t come in — and I’m not just talking about real estate, I’m talking about governments financing themselves and their activities — if it wasn’t for that foreign investment coming in, we could not live in the lifestyle and the standard of living that we enjoy, and demand.

“So sometimes the very people that criticize offshore investment are the ones that may in fact benefit the most.”

His own history is inextricably tied to the growth of the province. His parents were both born in India, and emigrated to Canada, settling in Victoria. Kuldeep Bains opened a travel agency in Victoria in 1952; in 2002, he received an award from the City of Victoria for being active in business for 50 years. Today, at 83, he remains in touch with the family enterprise, which is run by one of Avtar’s cousins.

But Kuldeep Bains did more than sell travel packages from behind the Tweed Curtain: he was deeply involved in the Indo-Canadian community, a much smaller and less-influential group then than it is today.

“Dad was one of the key Indian leaders in Victoria when we were growing up,” Bains remembers. “He was the president of our temple in Victoria for six or seven or eight years consecutively, so he had a lot to do with the growth of the Indo-Canadian community in British Columbia and, indeed, Canada.

“He went to Ottawa with a delegation in 1947 to fight for Indo-Canadians’ right to vote in Canada.”

Asians and Indo-Canadians were finally allowed to vote in 1948, 30 years after women won their fight, and 12 years ahead of first nations.

As the middle child between two sisters, Bains felt perfectly at home in Victoria.

“I don’t think, growing up, that we had to prove something,” he says, “but with most Indian families, the children are raised in a culture that encourages you to try to do something, and maybe that’s the difference.

“Did I feel when I entered downtown Vancouver that I had to prove something to third parties? I don’t think I did. I think if I had pressure, it was a pressure that I had put on myself to prove something to myself.

“Plus, in ethnic families — in all families, but particularly in ethnic families — one goes out of their way to make the family proud. One typically goes out of their way not to embarrass the family or community and that was definitely the spirit in the Indo-Canadian community for decades and decades and decades.

“We wanted to participate in Canadian life, we wanted to maintain our own culture we wanted to be part of the fabric of Canada to the point where, if Indo-Canadians do something, it’s not regarded as special because they’re Indo-Canadian. That’s something I don’t think about, at all, and quite frankly, I don’t want my kids to think that way.”

As the tide of offshore money receded, institutional investors filled the gap. Large pension plans for teachers and municipal employees suddenly became landlords to Canadian business. Today, their concentration in the market has eased somewhat, and Bains sees every kind of commercial investor — foreign, private, and institutional all at once.

“The last trend has been the emancipation of the private investor. They are now allowed to compete at every level — interest rates are low on a real-cost basis — and they can, in some cases,compete more aggressively for product, even out-competing against institutions.

“The last five years have really allowed the individual to come back into the he marketplace and it’s much more of a level playing field.”

He feels the local economy is performing relatively well, but is concerned that real estate is outperforming the economy as a whole.

“Where we have to pay attention is the B.C. economy as it stands on its own two feet in a competitive playing field against other provinces in Canada, against the American marketplace that we compete with, and now new competition in almost every asset class that we’re in,” he says.

After a quarter century of operating intimately within the local business community and developing a good working knowledge of regional economies across the country and even further afield, he worries that B.C. has a conflicted relationship with its own businesses.

“We haven’t done a good job of celebrating people that have accomplished a lot. I think we should do more of that in the marketplace and look at the things they’re providing and doing for society, not just because they’re trying to build a bigger personal net worth. That’s a real problem, we can’t get over that.

“It’s almost as if you do something well in B.C., you get slapped on the wrist and other markets or other cultures in North America and around the world encourage it better than we do. I wish I knew why there is less middle ground in this province from an attitudinal perspective.”

Today, Bains can easily reach into a file cabinet in his office and check to see exactly how much commercial real estate he has sold since the day he started, but he still professes a certain degree of wonder at how it has all turned out. He credits a certain degree of creativity for staying ahead of the pack.

“The cookie cutter always has to change, because if you don’t change your cookie cutter, someone else is going to make advancements. I’ve done my level best to stay at the highest end of the market with as much market share as I can in the last 20 years.”

He’s not stopping yet, but candidly says he will not be doing this five years from now. He married former VJ and CityTV news anchor Monika Deol when he was 40, and he has, he says, “the best natural motivation and incentive in the world to keep moving forward in my business life, and those three incentives are a seven-year-old, a six-year-old and a four-year-old.

“Every family has different goals, and where we want to go with our family, both my direct family and my global family, does dictate a change of role for me in the next five years.”

He may stay at Colliers, but says he won’t grinding out the big sales numbers. Instead, he sees an increase in community work: his family already supports cancer care at Vancouver General Hospital and heart surgery at St. Paul’s out of gratitude for the care received by family members, and he looks forward to increasing that kind of work.

“We certainly would like to be involved in more community activities, and that’s a role we get satisfaction out of because the community’s been good to us, as individuals and as families, and the more we give back, the more it’s a win-win situation.”

But from a business perspective, he expects to remain involved in commercial real estate in some capacity.

“The wonderful thing for me now in this part of my business is I’ve got some exceptional relationships in the marketplace, and it doesn’t matter what you’re selling or producing, the strength of your relationship may have as much bearing as the service you are providing.

“That is something that is traditionally underestimated in business, in life, in sport — I don’t care what area of life. Creating and maintaining trusting relationships is such a key to your inner contentment, to your self-esteem, to how you deal with others, how you make others feel — these relationships are key.

“It’s not that I was born knowing this; I have made so many mistakes and done so many things in my life that it has taken me at least 45 years to understand that if I treated my relationships as I wanted to be treated myself, I’d be even happier than I innately am.”

Profile of and interview with Avtar Bains.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004