By Ben Lipowitz, copresident Kolostat & Krome

Kolostat was at the Vancouver Real Estate Forum on April 5th at the Vancouver Convention Centre. We had the opportunity to connect with over 1200 CEOs, CFOs, COOs, private and institutional investors, portfolio and investment managers, owners, developers, and other real estate professionals. The Forum provided us with valuable insight into the Western Canadian real estate market.

Our key takeaways are:

• For the first time in many conferences, it felt like the general uncertainty regarding interest rates, labour shortage, municipal bureaucracy, office occupancy and overall recession conversation started to affect the usually cheerful real estate conference.

• The bright spot for the real estate industry is the immense immigration wave that Canada experiencing. This huge economical engine comes with its own set of challenges yet set the stage for a very long resilient residential market segment.

• The unfortunate outcomes of the sluggish industry spirit is the abandoning or delaying by some groups of the highly important ESG initiatives that were center-stage in the last few forums.

• Some of the more forward-thinking real estate leaders that could differentiate between a temporary economical downturn and acute environmental needs, are still committed to the reduction of their portfolio Carbon footprint, and see the decarbonization investment as a value-add investment for present and future asset value preservation.

Thank you to the organization team, for one more perfectly organized event, full of valuable conversations and information exchange.