Glenview Homes co-founder and executive director Jake Shabinsky told OBJ Wednesday his firm has hired veteran Houston-based developer Blake Roberts to head a new subsidiary in Texas’s largest city.
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Houston, we have a business proposition.
One of the best-known families in Ottawa real estate is expanding its homebuilding enterprise to Texas in a push to diversify its operations that could eventually see it move into other markets in Canada.
Glenview Homes co-founder and executive director Jake Shabinsky told OBJ Wednesday his firm has hired veteran Houston-based developer Blake Roberts to head a new subsidiary in Texas’s largest city.
The Lone Star State is familiar territory for the Shabinsky clan.
Jake earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration and accounting from the University of Texas in Austin, and then spent several years working for KPMG in the state capital before returning to his hometown in 2011 to help launch Glenview Homes with his father Mark and uncle Ian.
“We have some ties and some familiarity (with Texas),” said Shabinsky, who has two sisters who live in the greater Houston area. “The draw, more than anything, is this an opportunity to expand to a much larger market and diversify and grow our business.”
One of the region’s largest firms in its industry with about 40 employees, Glenview Homes now builds about 120-130 homes a year. After years of “steady growth” in Ottawa, Glenview was ready to venture out of its comfort zone, Shabinsky said.
“We felt like our Ottawa organization had matured to a stage where we could take this kind of a calculated risk,” he said. “This is really about growth and feeling like we had the stability and confidence in our local team to do something like this.”
Houston is one of the largest housing markets in the U.S., issuing close to 50,000 single-family building permits every year.
To spearhead the expansion effort, the Shabinskys have turned to a veteran real estate executive whose roots in the city run deep. Roberts was most recently CEO of two Houston-based firms – including Legend Homes, one of the country’s largest homebuilders with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.
“There's a lot of similarities (between) what he has done and what we are trying to do,” Shabinsky said, adding Glenview hopes to start breaking ground on its first homes south of the border within the next six to 12 months.
“This is really day one,” he added. “We’re going to take it one employee at a time, build our team one home at a time. But I think once we have a proof of concept, it would be great to get a division up to a similar scale to what we have here. If we could get it up to 100 or 200 homes a year in Houston, I think we would be very happy with that.”
The expansion into Texas marks the Shabinskys’ first foray beyond the National Capital Region. Shabinsky said Glenview is eyeing a move into other Canadian cities as well as potential expansion to other major population centres in Texas such as Dallas, San Antonio and Austin.
But the family-run firm remains firmly planted in the National Capital Region. The Shabinskys have been a driving force in the Ottawa real estate industry since the mid-1960s, when Jake’s grandfather Sol, who’d been a mortgage broker for leading local firms such as Minto and Campeau, decided to start a real estate business of his own.
Founded in 1966, Glenview Corp. grew into one of the city’s largest private commercial landlords with more than two million square feet of office space under lease by the mid-1990s.
Sol’s sons Mark and Ian later followed their father into the business. The company, whose signature developments include the Carling Executive Park, continues to own and manage commercial real estate today.
Sol, who died last November at age 93, was a passionate community booster who founded the Ottawa Athletic Club, one of the city’s first full-service fitness clubs, in 1976 and later owned a piece of the Ottawa Rough Riders.
While Jake Shabinsky acknowledges affordability is a major concern for Ottawa homebuyers, he said he’s seeing signs of progress.
New measures aimed at cutting red tape at City Hall and accelerating the approval process for new housing projects are making it easier for developers to launch new builds, he says.
He also has high hopes for other changes aimed at making new homes more affordable, such as the federal and provincial governments’ pledge to eliminate the HST on new house purchases and a push to cut development charges at the municipal level.
“I feel pretty optimistic about the boost that this HST measure is going to provide and some of the announcements with respect to development charge relief that we’ll hopefully see in Ottawa,” Shabinsky said.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of concern with various wars, geopolitics, job cuts in the civil service, those all being headwinds. Long term, Ottawa really is a great place to live, a great place to do business.”
