making deals with the devil

I have scoffed at Bob Rennie in the past, and even got creative with his name. I never saw him as the anti-christ, or such, but his marketing stance always irked me. I feel better that he is Vancouver's "Condo King", and Brad Lamb, Toronto's "Condo King", is not, after I read this article at the Glum and Malcontent. What a piece of work this guy seems to be. I am going to give some exerpts below from the article.

When Brad Lamb was 10, he used to steal the small national flags that adorned military graves in a cemetery near his house and sell them to neighbouring kids.

The celebrity condo salesman, developer and aspiring reality-TV star tells the story without a hint of shame. “I would gather them up and sell them for five cents outside my house,” he says in an interview. “It always amazed me that the kids didn't realize where they came from.”

Not a hint of shame... Stealing flags from military graves and selling them. I began to despise him right away. Too bad there is a statute of limitations. The little bugger should have been to reform school.

He and a childhood friend would put on summer fairs in Beaconsfield, Que.,...“Kids were bored,” he recalls. “The same suckers would come very time.”

Now he sells condos to the same type of suckers...

Now, at 48, he's a multimillionaire whose Toronto real estate brokerage has sold $2-billion worth of condos since 1988

And that's the problem - scumbags selling inferior (or stolen) product to suckers. Is this the mind-set that you would buy property from? No wonder real estate agents and developers are often seen as sleazy, when guys like this trumpet their sleaze in national newspapers, and are proud of it.

From the tax man's point of view, someone who buys and sells a lot of properties in a year is a real estate trader and subject to the full force of income tax...

But those seen by Revenue Canada as investors will pay only capital-gains taxes...

“People overthink it. But there's a lot of dumb people making a lot of money in real estate.”

True enough.

Mr. Lamb has a personality made for TV: he's...vain (he always wears a crisp suit and gives away his shoes after wearing them for two months).

La-de-da. I like what Aesop said - 'clothes don't make the man, his talk dives him away'.

He's given to colourful rants on unexpected topics, like coffee.

On the show, he blasts a couple of sales associates who want to pick up some java, saying coffee is “for the weak.”

His irritation is directed at the inordinate power of one little bean, he explains in the interview.

Is this guy scared of beans? especially little ones?

“It bugs me that somehow this one bean has a monopoly on the world's morning beverage market. It bothers me that it's got such a hold on our cultural life. . . . People think they're more productive on it but they're not. They're dreaming of the next cup.”

I guess he might want to monopolize that. Maybe he can just steal kool-aid from the kiddies, market it, and change his shoes every month - instead of every two.

His friendships, he notes, are based on getting rich together.

Who are his friends? Satan's Choice MC? The Diablos?

If you're one of the 50 or so people he knows as friends or regular investors, you'll get the chance to pay the lowest prices and have the best selection of suites in the roughly 40 condo projects in which he's currently involved, either as exclusive broker or as co-developer.

By the time suites are offered to the public through official launches, two groups of people will have had a chance to buy at more favourable prices — the regular investors he knows, followed by real estate brokers and their preferred clients.

There you go. The public gets the dregs at inflated prices, and if you are "in the loop" you get filthy rich. That's part of why I call them CON-do's. What blows me away is that this guy is so in-your-face about the fact that we are all chumps. Good grief. You can bet your last dollar that a lot of those friends are politicians. Hey, isn't Gordo a developer? Was Jean Chretien not involved with some real estate deals?

Go and read the whole article. It is quite outrageous.

Addendum - I forgot to add this little nugget from VHB's place -

alpha bear said at vhb

I hear many youth refer to "appearing successful", and spending money they don't have on expensive clothes and flashy cars. Whatever

happened to BEING successful? Perhaps the latest RE boom has been all about inflating egos?

Well put alpha. This wolf in Lamb's clothing is successful, but he has no shame. I'd rather wear rags and walk, than be a scammer.