In her 60 years in the real estate and development business, Martha Zenker, owner of Lisgar Commercial Real Estate in Oakville, Ont., has witnessed her share of trends in the market. But when it comes to commercial real estate, it’s the shift in the direction of commuters that really stands out for the 94-year-old.
Today’s workers are transforming the workplace to better suit their needs – and it’s those needs that have completely changed.
“People want to move back into the city [Toronto], whereas before they wanted to be closer to their homes, which were not downtown,” explains the president and founder of Lisgar Development, the construction company Ms. Zenker started in the 1950s.
Since the early 1990s, businesses seeking large space started to make their way out of Toronto’s stuffed office towers and crowded parking lots to the suburbs such as Mississauga and Oakville. This was the age of the baby boomer exodus from the urban core, explains Ms. Zenker.
“At that time there was a trend that employers wanted to have their businesses close to where they [and their employees] lived,” she says.
Nowadays, she says, the inclination has completely shifted and her clients are looking to travel back into the city centre as many of their Generation X and millennial employees are now choosing to raise families and live longer in this more urban environment, instead of heading for the outskirts for larger lawns and bigger homes.
Today’s commercial space selection is also fuelled by the inclination to leave the car at home and avoid the sometimes hours-long commute, Ms. Zenker contends. Where businesses want commercial space “now depends on public transit, so people no longer have to drive long distances into the city,” she says.
It all started with one building
Her real estate expertise has spanned decades, but it wasn’t always in the commercial side of the business, as her early career was dominated by construction and residential work.
Ms. Zenker’s first commercial purchase, the Emerald Business Centre in Mississauga, was bought through power of sale when the previous owner went bankrupt “after they had started a significant expansion without enough money to finance it,” she recalls.
“I had to deal with the contractors who had done the work, but hadn’t been paid.”
Managing commercial property was not something Ms. Zenker had considered in the past, but a push from her family to decrease her workload helped bolster the move.
And it turns out, she had the Midas touch in that area as well.
Despite the glaring recession of the early 1990s, in which a lot of commercial space remained empty throughout the 1990s, the Emerald Building thrived. Ms. Zenker equates this success to her continued personal relationships with the tenants – a quality she brought over from her years in the residential market.
“I had personal contact with every tenant, which is not a very common thing in the commercial side,” she recalls. “I knew their names and they knew mine.”
Before commercial, there was construction
Her first move into the market was Lisgar Development, the construction company she founded, along with her sister and brother-in-law, back in 1956.
Being an entrepreneur gave her some scheduling flexibility and “allowed me to raise my family, but still have money coming in,” Ms. Zenker says.
It was a boom time, according to Ms. Zenker, and she knew an opportunity when she saw it. The new Ford Motor Co. of Canada assembly plant opened in Oakville in 1953 and with this came a wave of newly employed car industry workers looking for new homes, many of whom came to Ms. Zenker.
“It was a crazy time and we were so busy,” recalls Ms. Zenker. Despite the pace, Ms. Zenker maintained the personal relationships she built with her homeowners. “They knew me and I knew them and that’s how I wanted it to be.”
This personal touch was solidified by Ms. Zenker’s decision not to use a real estate agent when selling her constructed properties to families – instead the transactions were direct, in order to keep that connection between her and the buyer. She is also famous for never having a building code violation, which made her a sought-after builder.
The size of the homes is the main difference between then and now, admits Ms. Zenker. “Back then people knew what they could afford,” she says. “Now everybody wants a big house now, but it’s over their heads because they rarely stick to what they can afford.”
Back on the commercial side, Lisgar Development’s Oakville properties continue to do well despite not having the downtown Toronto location, but their locations next door in Mississauga are struggling.
The reason for this is simple: Despite the overall shift back toward Toronto, Oakville, with its waterfront location and large homes, houses a lot of chief executive officers who wish to remain close to home. “There will always be that group of people that will want to work close to home no matter what,” explains Ms. Zenker.
It’s true that as a young architecture student in her home country of Germany, Ms. Zenker never imagined her lifetime career would be in Canadian real estate, but once she had a taste of the industry she says she never looked back.
“I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
