BBH: We hear that you manage to play hockey every week? How do you fit it in?
BF: It’s all late-nights, usually ten o’clock or later, and that’s when I’m awake anyway; I’m not a morning person. And it’s therapeutic. If I’m not playing hockey then I’m trying to get some sort of exercise, I’d just prefer to play hockey rather than ride a bike for an hour.
BBH: Toronto has a new mayor. Do you expect any significant changes?
BF: Well, I think it’ll take a bit of time for any notable adjustments. His ideas for transit were fairly aggressive and I think those will get somewhat watered down in reality. The unfortunate part is that a plan of action had been set and that will, of course, be delayed. Basically, whatever happens will just happen slower than it was supposed to.
With the rest of the stuff, again, he has some fairly radical ideas and I think some things are going to be tempered by reality. You just can’t be a bull in a china shop all the time.
BBH: We interviewed Hugh [Hugh Heron, Founder of Heathwood Homes] a few months back, and had a great chat. He was talking about the Mikey Network and Two Men and a Truck. Can you tell us a bit about these ventures?
BF: After Mike [Mike Salem, former partner in Heathwood] passed away I read an article one day about a kid who had passed away and whose parents were donating a defibrillator in his name, and so I brought it up [as an idea to honour Mike].
We now have over 1,000 defibrillators out there in the community: in trains, high schools, play stations. Actually, we just had a save the other day – a kid in a high school. Before the ambulance got there he was already back sitting up.
In regard to Two Men and a Truck, the housing industry is up and down and so we always look for opportunities to get a more steady stream of business that might go up or down by, say, 5-10% but not by 50-60%, which it can do in this industry.
Two Men and a Truck is a moving business. Six or seven years ago we said it sounded like a perfect fit. We have a franchise expert who works for us and he loved it, so we bought the Canadian rights and I think we’ve now got 14 or 15 franchises now. We hope to expand to 20 in Ontario and 35 across Canada in the next 3 or 4 years.
Soon we’ll be covered from Hamilton to Oshawa and Barrie and then that gives us sort of critical mass. The worst thing you can do in a service business is say you can’t provide the service because you’re too busy. Now a franchise owner can phone a neighbouring franchise and say “Look, I can’t move the Fredrick’s on Friday, can you?” The money goes to whoever does the work and the business as a whole gets the new customer.
But again, it’s the same set of rules we run all our companies by: The customer is always right, so do a good job and they’ll come back and buy or move with us again.
BBH: Tim Horton’s or Starbucks?
BF: Starbucks, I guess. I just can’t stand Tim Horton’s coffee. I’d rather have Nescafe. Actually, I worked for Country Style about 20 years ago and until then didn’t drink coffee at all.
BBH: Can you tell us what’s new at Heathwood Homes?
BF: We’ve had a very busy year. We sold about 300-400 homes in the last twelve months. In Milton, we have a 600-unit development called Traditions where we’re down to about our last 50-60 homes. We’ll have one small phase after that.
In Brampton we’ve got a project called Terracotta with only 8 homes left. We’ll offer those as finished homes in the spring. We’ve got another phase coming in May, I hope, and that will be another 50 units.
A couple of interesting things are happening up in Richmond Hill: We’re opening a green demonstration home in late January or early February.
We built two identical homes there, one is called is the Green Home and it’s Energy Star Plus and includes features like insulation in the basement floor; greywater recovery systems; solar panels on the roof for both hot water and electricity; and a monitoring system on the electrical, gas, and hot and cold water, so that we can monitor usage by appliance, with real-time displays in the wall.
BBH: Are the houses to be sold?
BF: They’re for both demonstration and sale. We’ve hired an engineering grad student at Ryerson to oversee the monitoring system and to track everything.
We’ve built the one so far, and we’re in the process of building the other which is just Energy Star.
The second one is already sold and a family will be moving in. This one we’ll also monitor from day one as an occupied house. So one will be monitored as a real home, and the other as a sales office. When we sell the sales office, we’ll monitor it too as an occupied home so that we’ll be able to compare A, B, and C.
So now we’ll spend a few years monitoring everything and ultimately it’ll be a good education not only for ourselves but for others who will benefit from the published work done by the students.
BBH: Is 2011 a good year for people to buy a home?
BF: I’ll quote Hugh and say that any year is a good year to buy a home as long as you make sure you can afford it.
The key points are to make sure you’re not unduly strapping yourself financially and that the home fits your lifestyle. There are still some good deals out there; the best place to buy in the city value-wise is in the east end. The equivalent house in Whitby is $150,000 cheaper than in Mississauga!
Many thanks to Bob for taking the time to chat with us. For more information on Heathwood’s current projects, click here.
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Rashmi Nathwani
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Rashmi Nathwani
