If you have stayed at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel or browsed Ottawa’s Bayshore Shopping Centre, you’ve been in one of the many properties owned by Toronto-based KingSett Capital private equity real estate investment firm.
KingSett’s executive chair Jon Love founded the firm in 2002, but his involvement with real estate goes back to the family business.
Oxford Properties Group was founded by his father G. Donald Love in Edmonton in 1960. Love had the experience of working in both public and private businesses, as Oxford became public in 1995, then was sold to OMERS in 2001.
KingSett is a private company that creates private investment vehicles to co-invest with institutional and ultra-high-net-worth clients and now manages about $18 billion in assets.
The firm manages risks and creates diversification through various strategies within the sector, with uncorrelated funds ranging from short-duration to income, urban infill, affordable housing and hotels, and high-yield and senior mortgage credit funds, among others.
Love uses his family office Jona Capital for diversification from real estate through public and private markets investing in other asset classes, such as energy and technology.
He recently moved from the CEO to the executive chair position and talks about succession planning, private real estate investment and the company’s secret to success.
How did KingSett come to be?
I founded KingSett in 2002 after being involved for years with Oxford Properties, which my father founded in 1960. I joined Oxford in 1980 and within a decade became its president and then chief executive officer.
Oxford went public in 1995, experienced rapid growth through some $7 billion of acquisitions with partners leading to its privatization by OMERS in 2001. After the sale was completed, I left Oxford, took six months off and then started KingSett.
What do ultra-high-net-worth and family office investors look for in real estate investments? What should they be looking for?
With sophisticated investors, it’s important to underwrite the people with whom you are co-investing.
What do you mean by “underwrite the people”?
It means looking at their track record, the relationship between their performance as real estate investors and people’s values.
It also means looking at the depth and breadth of their platform across real estate asset classes and the quality of their relationships in the communities in which they operate. You’re looking at their leadership and at reliable indicators, such as their performance over a longer period.
Enterprising families are often challenged by succession planning. Is your own succession planning at KingSett important?
Succession requires four things.
The second thing you have to do is make sure you were pushing decision making away from the founder. That’s because decision making is a muscle that has to be continually built over time.
Third, you need to share the economics — the details of the business. I have been pretty aggressive about doing this.
The fourth is often the hardest thing for founders to do — migrate key business relationships to the next leaders in the firm.
Why is migrating these business relationships difficult?
There are always new people coming in to do business with us and they often want to build a relationship with me. That’s fine, but I often suggest they focus building their relationship with a younger person on our team, because that’s the future.
It takes time to put all these four factors together and to do the coaching and the training that’s necessary. But that’s the key to having succession as evolution, rather than an unstable succession revolution.
You have experience in both publicly-held and private business. Is managing succession easier or more important in a private company?
Good CEOs should always be thinking about their successors. If you own the business and you’re planning for a successor, there’s a heightened responsibility to make sure you leave a high-quality team because without them, you can’t extract yourself so easily.
I can’t just walk away from our investors, and that includes my own family who are invested in the business. I have to have a leadership team that’s ready, that’s on message, that is committed to maintaining our culture and values, and has the skills that are needed to be successful as I transition to a less active role.
Is there a secret to KingSett’s success?
Success in real estate, unlike many other businesses, is not based on IP [intellectual property]. There are no trade secrets. Success in real estate is all about culture, values and relationships.
That’s where basic core values come in — transparency, respect and integrity. I think adhering to those values are what has made us successful.
KingSett has put a lot of effort into ESG (environmental, social and governance) practices. There’s sometimes a backlash among investors who don’t think there’s sufficient return on investment from ESG. How do you respond?
The focus of our strategy on the “E” [environmental] side is that we need to be making investments that are economically constructive.
Our zero carbon strategy is important, but the key is to have a solid economical foundation. If you cannot generate a current return on capital invested in a zero carbon initiative, it is not something you can scale and it is unlikely to deliver value over the longer term.
Our environmental sustainability strategy for the Royal York Hotel offers a great example. This capital investment made sense because there’s a strong business model behind it. [The $65 million project, now completed, will reduce more than 80 per cent of the hotel’s annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of taking 1,558 cars off the road.] It’s investment that both builds short-term returns and long-term risk mitigation.
Does Canada rely too much on real estate for wealth creation?
No. Wealth creation in any country is created in only a few ways — taking advantage of natural resources, manufacturing and intellectual property, creating ideas. Real estate simply houses all of these businesses — and the people who work in them.
Any comments on the current real estate environment or the economy?
It is a challenging environment to operate in at the moment. We are seeing heightened uncertainty and pressure from elevated interest rates. But with the benefit of age and experience, I can take a longer-term view for real estate. Real estate goes through cycles. Over extended periods of time, good assets in the hands of good managers have delivered solid long-term results.
Any long-term advice?
A constructive investment strategy has to be dynamic. Every economic situation, good or bad, presents both opportunities and challenges; a thoughtful strategy will deal with both.
Any real estate investment strategy should have a long-term focus. We all have to do quarterly reports, but it’s important to look at the long-term. First class commercial properties are a long-term asset class, most suitable for institutions and large families and family offices that have the ability to dedicate capital over time.
Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Please visit here to see information about our standards of journalistic excellence.