Working Capital Commercial Real Estate Co-Working Real Estate with Kane Willmott | EP175
Kane Willmott is the Co-Founder and CEO of iQ Offices, a luxury coworking company with locations in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal. Kane has over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, assisting in the startup of multiple real estate brokerages as well as a public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
In this episode, we talked about:
- Kane’s Background & First Steps in Real Estate
- Co-Working Workspace Evolution
- Enterprise Co-Working
- Co-Working vs Sublease/Lease
- Office Market Overview
- Resources
Useful links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kane-willmott/?originalSubdomain=ca
Transcriptions:
Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name's Jessica Galley And. on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. ladies and gentlemen, my name's Jesse Ali, and you're listening to Working Capital. The Real Estate Podcast. My guest today is Kane Willmott. Kain is the co-founder and CEO of iQ Offices, a luxury coworking company with locations in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Montreal Kane, how you doing?
Kane (37s): I'm good, Jesse. How are you doing?
Jesse (39s): Doing great today. So for, you know, for those that don't know, iQ Offices the largest Canadian node coworking operator with eight locations in downtown Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Montreal. And I think I've got e everyone there. Is that right? Kane? You
Kane (52s): Got it. Perfect.
Jesse (54s): So, Kane, for those that you know, for those that don't know who you are, are iQ, Offices. What we'd like to do with most guests is basically have a little bit of a backgrounder on how you got into the real estate space, and then maybe we could talk a little bit of about iQ and how you got into that world after.
Kane (1m 10s): Great. Yeah, well, I'll try and make it a short story because I've been in the, in the business quite a while, but I started at a university at Pricewaterhouse, large accounting firm, and I found out very early on that that, that, that really wasn't for me in terms of the job and what I was doing every single day. And, but it, it taught me a lot about, about what I wanted to do really with the rest of my career. And I moved to Toronto that I, I went to school in Waterloo, moved to Toronto, and got into brokerage in 1998 and had the great fortune of working for Craig Smith and Brian Murphy.
Craig Smith started Asher Urban Realty. And I went over and started that with him about a year into my career. So I had the opportunity to really go through, starting up a business very early on in my career, in a fairly low risk way from an opportunity cost perspective. And, and I had a lot of great mentorship and guidance from Craig Smith. So from there started another brokerage with another partner, ultimately took a company public, and then started a company called Spire Commercial Realty, another brokerage with Alex Sharp, who's my business partner now in iQ Offices.
So we started Spire in 2009, focused on investment sales, and then in 2012 we got into iQ. So that's like the, the short genealogy of, of how we got to where we are now. But I can say in terms of why we started iQ, I started in office leasing in 98. And what I found in 2011 when we started looking at this as a business model, is that office space was transacting in t