Feature Stories
The Secret Passion of Bob Rennie
By Matt O'Grady published Apr 1, 2008
Most people know him as a fixer and a condo marketer extraordinaire, but Bob Rennie’s heart belongs to a warehouse full of art
The third-floor penthouse (five penthouses, in fact, combined into 4,600 square feet) that Bob Rennie has called home for the past 11 years sits on a grim patch of Burrard Slopes, overlooking the Molson Brewery parking lot. The man who sells—by the thousands of units each year—the bottled Vancouver dream of ocean breezes and mountain vistas has neither. From his 3,000-square-foot rooftop terrace, you can barely make out False Creek between bridge spans and low-rises. The North Shore mountains are a faded brushstroke in the background; the stale smell of hops wafts through the air.
This is the house he waited three years, and paid $2.1 million, to build? “You know, I think because I’m satisfied being in those other environments all the time, I wanted something that was a little bit anonymous,” says the impish 51-year-old realtor. “It’s almost like having your own Jeff Wall to look out to. Everyone said, ‘Oh, you should be out on Point Grey Road.’ But as you go through life, you try to pick the things not anybody can do.”
In a career that spans 33 years, Rennie has proven that not anybody can do what he does. Of the handful of condo marketers who prosper in this city, none has developed the brand recognition of the ubiquitous Rennie Marketing Systems.
Nobody—outside of industry geeks, and friends and family—knows who Jason Craik (MAC Marketing Solutions) is, or what George Wong (Platinum Project Marketing) looks like. Everybody knows Bob Rennie. “When I’m going up in an elevator with him and there’s six other people in that elevator, not one has a fucking clue who I am,” says Ian Gillespie, the developer of the Rennie-branded Woodward’s, Shangri-La, and Fairmont Pacific Rim projects, a twinge of disgust in his voice. “But you can see them all whispering and looking at each other and going, ‘That’s Bob Rennie.’ It’s like you’re in an elevator with Trevor Linden or something.”
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