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Don ’ s Contribution
I have been asked to present a few comments about my experience in the industry over the last 30 some odd years and my vision of the industry ’ s future. I personally think that my most important contribution to condo management has been my two daughters, Heather and Jennifer, who are both involved in the London & Area Chapter of CCI. Jennifer is also active at the national level. But I guess with over 30 years in the business, I might have had some small impact through serving on the local CCI Board and I certainly gained a great deal of experience, some hilarious, some rewarding and some just plain unexplainable. Who hasn ’ t had owners call at 2 am demanding that they personally remove a car parked in their space or drive 20 miles to remove a neighbour ’ s cat from their car hood. The justification being that that owner pays your salary that you do nothing to earn. The list is endless. That being said, I want to give you a bit of my background in hopes of giving my comments some relevance. I studied law from 1979 to 1982 and was called to the Ontario Bar in 1984. After articling with the law firm Ivey & Dowler here in London, I was hired by a property management firm called Carlton Group that owned and managed residential and commercial properties. I handled their rental evictions and managed their numerous commercial properties. You would be right to ask what any of this had to do with my knowledge of condominiums and my answer would be nothing. During my 3 years in law school, the word condominium was never mentioned. In my Bar admission materials there was one paragraph dealing with condominiums and it was only a general description of what they were. There was no reference to case law because there wasn ’ t any. They were never referred to in law school lectures or the bar ads even though they had been around since the late 1960’ s. I became a property manager literally overnight when Connie and Fraser Grant turned their condominium portfolio in Cardinal Property Management over to Carlton Group. I had a meeting with my first client within 24 hours of them coming on board. Like all condo managers at that time, it was sink or swim. We were all learning as we went. The same condominium was ironically, my first client when I started my own management company some years later. These were relatively primitive times in condo management. I used a computer with a 5.25” floppy drive and a monochrome screen. There was no property management software program or a hard drive to hold it. My employer had a mainframe computer sitting in its own little environmentally controlled room but I did not have access to it and it only provided accounting information through a dot matrix printer. My computer fed back to me the information that I fed into it and was primarily a primitive word processor and adding machine. There was no internet to access information on condominium precedents or best practices. Although the first condominium was sold in Ontario in 1967, all I knew about them was that they were the first item of real estate to drop in value in tough times and rise the least in value during good times. It was a scary time to be a condo manager because you had nowhere to turn on a daily basis for direction or confirmation that the way you were handing matters was correct. We were re - inventing the wheel daily. Companies like Thorne, Arnsby, Parkside and Range had been dealing with condos for quite a while by then but I had no idea how they were doing it.
Thank heavens for people like the Sizes and Grants who were generous with their knowledge and experience. I am sure that I had Barry Scott on speed dial as well back then.
Legal advice often started with … “ there is no precedent but I think that a judge would interpret the Condo Act section this way ” or “ I think that a judge would agree that the most reasonable solution would be to deal with the matter this way ”. None of these answers were definitive and I knew that none of these lawyers were taught any more about condo law than I was in law school. They were speaking from experience which I lacked and from discussions with their cohorts. My experience with rentals did little to give me confidence when dealing with directors who refused to have a reserve fund study done because in their opinion “ all they did was result in higher condo fees paying for the replacement of items that current owners had already paid for. Let the next owner pay for their replacement after I sell. I ’ m going to
CCI Review 2022/2023 - 2 November 2022 Page 12
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