The plan was ambitious. What was built exceeded all expectations.
In 2015, one person had an idea. In 2016, a small group sat down for dinner in Vancouver to continue the conversation. The decision to create a brand new real estate company had been made. But the name, the structure, the team, the offices, and the systems: all of it was still to come.
“Sometimes the only way you get started on something is if you don’t know the ending,” says Remco Daal, Chief Operating Officer, one of those present that evening. “If you told us everything that was going to happen over the next few years, I don’t know that we would have quite the same courage.”
Collaboration and vision defined QuadReal that first year. Ten years later, they still do.
Built from Scratch
The idea originated with Gordon Fyfe, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of BCI. Gordon had spent several years systematically internalizing asset management across BCI’s portfolio. Real estate was the final piece. “We were paying others to manage it for us,” he says. “I saw the numbers and I was convinced we could do it ourselves.”
What followed was months of planning to work out what a vertically integrated real estate business would require. As the company structure began to form, and a group of leaders arrived, what they decided on was deliberately ambitious: not just internalized management, but a fully integrated real estate investment, development, and operating company. A company that invests in equity and debt in the public and private markets. What they started was a journey to redefine institutional investing in global real estate.
But the company still needed a name. Remco proposed “QuadReal”: four companies coming together, four asset classes, four corners of the world. It was the brand’s beginning, and it was registered that same day.
How QuadReal hired, integrated, and defined its values all at once
Right out of the gate, QuadReal took responsibility for $18 billion in assets. “We had to hire 1,200 people. It was drinking water from a fire hose,” says Dennis Lopez, CEO of QuadReal Property Group. “And at the end of the year, we had done it.”
At the same time, Tamara Lawson, Chief Financial Officer, was overseeing the financial integration that would make the new company operationally real: becoming the book of record for BCI’s real estate program, then pulling the entire domestic and international portfolio into a single financial structure. “The project was bringing the whole real estate program together,” she says. “It really created the ability to finance in a more cost-effective and strategic way and manage the program overall.”
Most importantly however, the operational build also had a counterpart: equally deliberate work on the organization itself. Diane MacDiarmid, Chief Talent Officer, recalls being brought into a branding session that opened not with a logo brief but a premise.
“You can’t have a brand without knowing what you stand for. So the first thing we did was get clear on our values, and that turned out to be the pivotal, foundational thing we did. We still live by them today.” The conversation that followed about what QuadReal should be, and equally what it should not be, produced a set of values that still hold strong.
The mindset that still defines QuadReal
What the ten years since have established is the founding pace and innovative methods were not a phase. The preference for creating over maintaining, for finding a better approach rather than protecting an existing one, stayed.
“The concrete’s not dry,” Remco says. “There’s nothing locked in stone as the QuadReal way, other than our culture and our approach to working with one another. The minute we lose that, we’re like everybody else.”
It took a special group to create QuadReal. Such outstanding collaboration calls for a moment of recognition. “Stop, take a look at what you’ve done. It’s a lot. And it’ll energize you to keep going” says Dennis. “I’m very proud of the company we’ve built in the last 10 years and we built it together.”
Comparing QuadReal today to what he first imagined in 2015, Gordon reflects: “There is no relationship between the two. And that’s the people. I had an idea. But the people that came in took that and built something extraordinary out of it.”
That’s our story: not one vision, but many people building toward something none of them could have created alone. Built Together traces that journey from the very beginning to where we’re headed next.
