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The Secret
Passion of Bob Rennie
Most people know him as a fixer and a
condo marketer extraordinaire, but Bob Rennie’s
heart belongs to a warehouse full of art
By Matt O'Grady
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.”
Despite his ubiquity, his material success, and what
one competitor calls his “shameless self-promotion,”
Rennie has managed to create an aura of humbleness:
rare is the media story that doesn’t mention his
working-class East Side roots, his aw-shucks demeanour,
or his Clintonesque charm (used to especially brilliant
effect on reporters). This, while using the obligatory—and,
for Rennie, irritating—descriptor “Condo
King.” First used in the Province in 1994, it’s
since made its way into almost 80 local and national
newspaper articles that cite Rennie by name; his Midas
touch can now be felt in Seattle, Toronto, and Dallas.
As Rennie’s successes mounted in the 1990s, he
expanded his job description—from realtor to marketer
to developer’s consultant to city builder. Where
he once just sold what developers gave him, he now tells
these developers what to build—redrawing floor
plans, for instance, for the $28.3-million Ritz-Carlton
penthouse. (“For that price, people want more
room, not more rooms,” Rennie instructed designers
MCM, “and a separate entrance for the nanny suite.”)
He also coaches his clients—more comfortable in
the black-and-white environs of bankers’ boardrooms
and construction sites—on how to manage the nuanced
realpolitik of Vancouver’s planning department.
Rennie’s political access, and his ability to
influence policy, are without equal in the city. Larry
Beasley, Vancouver’s former director of planning,
met Rennie at a business-improvement breakfast over
15 years ago; the two became fast friends and have gone
for walks around the city most Sundays since. When he’s
in town, former mayor, now senator Larry Campbell regularly
noshes with him. And before Carole Taylor made her decision
not to run for mayor, she too had coffee with Rennie.
Only in a town obsessed with real estate could a condo
salesman be seen as the most influential citizen. And
it’s not just a matter of quietly offering counsel,
or being called in as the local market expert by media
from The Bill Good Show to the New York Times. It’s
his ability to effect change. When the Woodward’s
project ran into a funding bump, it was Rennie who made
the call to Rich Coleman, B.C.’s minister of housing,
asking for “a resolve.” When the design
for the Olympic Village at Southeast False Creek got
panned, it was Rennie who had the New York architect,
Robert Stern, fired and replaced by Arthur Erickson,
a friend. Beasley calls Rennie a societal broker. “In
Vancouver, this merging of the public and private sector
to do things is so much more advanced than in many cities.
And he’s one of the most important players.”
With great success comes great wealth, which carries
its own clout. Rennie Marketing Systems—which
last year generated over $1.5 billion in sales, in Canada
and the U.S.—is one of the city’s biggest
advertisers, buying more than 200 pages of ads annually
in the Vancouver Sun alone, at $35,000 a page (as well
as many pages each year in magazines like this one).
Rennie also regularly buys full-page ads for political
candidates and issues he supports—including a
whopping 16 in both the Sun and Province for the yes
side in the 2003 Olympics referendum.
In direct political contributions, he gave Vision Vancouver
$75,000 for the 2005 civic election and the NPA $10,000.
He’s also a major benefactor for various charities,
schools, and arts institutions throughout town. No wonder
that, in this magazine’s annual Power 50 rankings,
a condo marketer is neck and neck with the most influential
business leaders and politicians in the city.
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