Michael Cooper, President and Chief Responsible Officer of Dream Unlimited, sits down with us today at the Toronto Real Estate Forum. Dream has a presence in Canada, the US, and Europe, investing both publicly and privately.
Michael talks about how Dream has influenced affordable housing in Canada, and why 2020 was an inflection point for these kinds of initiatives. Later, he comments on the challenges that office is experiencing, plus the fundamentals that keep Canada positioned as a great place to buy real estate.
Topics covered include:
- How Dream decides which assets they should invest in.
- Being involved with both public and private investing.
- Why the level of interest in retail surprises Michael.
- Targeting tenants that contribute to the communities they rent in.
- Why e-commerce isn’t taking over as much as people expected.
- The organizational structure of Dream and why Michael pushes people to learn quickly.
- When Michael realized that net zero emissions is so important.
- Thinking about how real estate contributed to issues that arose in 2020.
- Affordable housing projects that Dream has been involved with.
- The creation of MLI Select.
- Office going through challenges that it has never seen before.
- Strong fundamentals that remain in industrial.
- Who taught Michael everything he knows about real estate.
- Michael’s opinion that rents are at a fair level when compared to February 2020.
- The two asset classes Dream is focusing on, along with green projects.
- The biggest risk that Michael sees in real estate investment.
More about our guest…
Michael Cooper is the Founder of the Dream Group of Companies. He is the President & Chief Responsible Officer of Dream Unlimited (TSX: DRM), the Chair & Chief Executive Officer of Dream Office REIT (TSX: D.un) and the Portfolio Manager for Dream Impact Trust (TSX: MPCT.un), one of the world’s first publicly traded impact investing vehicles. Under his leadership, Dream has grown to approximately $10B of commercial real estate and residential development assets under management across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. The concept of building better communities to improve the lives of residents, customers and stakeholders has been engrained in Dream’s extensive history as a developer, owner and asset manager. Through the Dream Impact Trust and Dream Impact Fund, an open-ended private fund dedicated to impact investing, Dream has over $700M in assets under management in this field.
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