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The Secret Passion of Bob Rennie —
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Rennie heads down from his rooftop terrace, past the
glowing black-neon Glenn Ligon installation that reads
“America” above the master bed. (He recently
bought a second Ligon, with the text “Negro Sunshine.”)
Down the steel-and-glass staircase, to the landing.
Painted in black on the facing white wall is Detumescence,
a three-by-four-metre text-based work by Dan Graham—detailing,
in graphic terms, the physiological and emotional response
to losing an erection (“…continued shrinkage
takes place…Sensations of orgasm or desire are
extinguished; emotions recede; and ego is again bounded…”).
About 60 people are gathered on the main floor, munching
canapés and sipping wine served by liveried waiters.
There are no developers or marketers here, no city planners,
no politicians. Instead, the Vancouver arts cognoscenti
are crammed between cutting-edge works by Robert Beck
and Glenn Brown, and an imposing installation of stacked
wood palettes by Brian Jungen: icons such as Ian Wallace
and Rodney Graham, gallery directors such as Catriona
Jeffries and Christina Ritchie, and a retinue of up-and-coming
artists. They’ve gathered to celebrate the opening
of an exhibit at Ritchie’s Contemporary Art Gallery
by Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson, also in attendance.
The Håkansson installation consists of 10 35mm
projectors, each showing the filmed slow-motion flight
patterns of a bunch of wasps. It was purchased, sight
unseen, in 2003 from an Italian dealer, and is one of
an estimated 1,000 works that compose the Rennie Collection
Canada—said to be the country’s third-largest
private art collection. The man who changed the way
Vancouverites live—who made new urbanism “socially
acceptable,” as Larry Beasley says—is now
changing the way the art world looks at Vancouver. This
side of his life he conducts quietly. No spotlight shines
on his collection; there’s no lineup snaking around
the block for a sneak preview; and nobody—owner
included—knows what it will look like when it’s
done.
Rennie’s interests in art and in real estate both
go back to his teenage years. In the 820-square-foot,
two-bedroom bungalow at Fifth and Nanaimo where he and
his older sister Patti grew up, “We had some Robert
Wood paintings from Simpson’s or Sears,”
he recalls, “but that was about it.” His
mother, Margaret, was a homemaker until he was 10, then
waitressed at nearby Mario’s and the Eldorado
Motor Hotel (which Rennie client Simon Lim is now redeveloping)
to help make ends meet. “We all lived off quarters,”
he says. “Her tips.”
Bob Sr., who was called Robo, drove a truck for Carling
Brewery until 1989; in his 49th year with the company,
he retired. From his False Creek condo, Rennie now looks
down on the Molson trucks as they enter and exit the
brewery loading dock. (“I always tell people that
they may not like the smell of hops,” he says,
“but it reminds me of my dad.”) Robo worked
for Carling from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and then three or
four nights a week he’d work for the Canucks or
Lions, or at the PNE, running the press box. Still the
family struggled. “We were always living just
a little beyond our means.”
Which is not to say the family was poor, exactly. “I
had a mother who liked to spend,” says Rennie
with a laugh. At 12, Rennie was taking trips downtown
to help pick out pieces for a new kitchen; he insisted
it had to be a Poggenpohl kitchen with Sub-Zero fridge.
(“We were, I believe, the only people in East
Van with a Poggenpohl kitchen.”) Accompanying
him on his shopping expeditions to Poggenpohl or New
Look Interiors (right behind Woodward’s) was his
childhood friend, and future wife, Mieko Izumi.
Around the same time, Rennie started to take control
of household finances, making sure the bills got paid.
With his parents fighting constantly, Rennie was thrust
into the role he would come to perfect: that of the
conciliator, the broker. “When my parents argued,
I was a big part of picking up the pieces,” he
says. “My thing is always getting the other party
to mend fences: if you’ve got one of them onside,
go get the other one to swallow their pride a bit.”
He adds: “I think there was a bit of ‘Let’s
keep Bobby happy,’ too. Whoever spends the most
time communicating gets seen as the favourite.”
Rennie began to entertain notions of entering real estate
after his mother “phoned this guy from Block Brothers
to come and appraise the house—probably because
she was going to leave my father. I watched what he
did: he came in, my mother made him coffee, and he walks
around the house. He tells her what other houses are
selling for, tells her the value of hers—how he’s
now her ‘partner,’ taking all this money
to sell it. That sat with me.” He was 17.
After that, the Rennie bio is well documented: bored
at Vancouver Tech, he quit Grade 12 three months before
graduation, sent away for his real-estate licence, and—after
a brief sojourn in California—started selling
East Side homes at the age of 19. (He received his Grade
12 in 2006.) His path to success was “domino sales:”
buying 60-foot lots, selling them to a developer who’d
build two 30-foot-lot homes that Rennie would also sell—and
then helping those buyers sell their own homes. To increase
efficiency, he delivered offers at 11 p.m. (with the
buyer in the car, in case there was a counter-offer),
and placed Sold and For Sale signs on darkened lawns
between midnight and 2 a.m. By his early twenties, he
was a wealthy man; in his early thirties, working for
United Realty and selling a home a day, he was Burnaby’s
top realtor.
Like just about everyone else, Rennie had trouble escaping
the early ’80s unscathed: as interest rates zoomed
past 21 percent, Mieko and Bob (who’d married
in 1977) were forced to sell their house on Glenn Abbey
Drive to stay afloat. They rented between 1982 and 1987,
during which time their three kids were born: Kris (25,
who now works with his father), Katie (22, who’s
studying to be a dietitian at UBC), and Steph (20, a
film and communications major at USC in L.A.). Meanwhile,
Rennie slowly rebuilt his finances and his business,
striking out on his own with Rennie and Associates in
1988.
Just as sales were taking off again, Rennie’s
world was shaken. In 1990, less than a month after retiring,
his father died. Then his marriage started to unravel:
by February of 1991, he had moved out of the 6,000-square-foot
Government Street home he and Mieko had recently built.
He eventually moved downtown, into the Waterfront Hotel.
There he would remain—in a one-bedroom, 600-square-foot
suite—for two years. He’s reluctant to talk
openly about this time in his life, or his coming-out
process (“I guess I’m working through my
shit with the art”), but it was one low from which
the professionally chipper Rennie almost didn’t
bounce back: “I was so depressed for six months,”
he says, “that I never left the hotel.”
He removed the bar fridge and took down the hotel art,
replacing it with his own. It was his first taste of
small-space living.
Not long before, Rennie had been introduced to Dan Ulinder,
a business professor at UBC. Ulinder was well connected
in the development industry and wanted Rennie’s
help in converting a condo near Burnaby Mountain. “I
said, ‘I don’t sell condominiums. If it
doesn’t have land under it, I don’t sell
it.’ ” He’d never heard of this thing
called “price per square foot.” But he agreed
to talk to Ulinder, sharing what he knew about local
house prices, and in 1992 they started working together.
Two years later, the pair formed Ulinder Rennie Project
Marketing to target the burgeoning downtown condo market.
Back then, condo living was a relatively risky proposition.
B.C. had allowed strata-title ownership since 1966,
but there was still a certain stigma attached; for a
generation raised in the suburbs, moving downtown was,
as Beasley puts it, a sign you “hadn’t quite
made it.” In the early 1990s, when Beasley started
proselytizing for the “Living First” doctrine
(central to which was a massive rezoning of commercial
space for residential development), condos were about
20 percent of new housing stock in Vancouver. By 2001,
that figure was 35 percent; by 2011, it’s expected
to have reached an astounding 75 percent.
While all the conditions were in place—available
downtown land, an accommodating city plan, a flood of
Hong Kong buyers—developers were still wary. The
salve, as it turned out, lay in “presales,”
an idea imported from Hong Kong by Terry Hui and David
Li of Concord Pacific in the late 1980s. By selling
from plans, rather than showing built suites, developers
could mitigate risk, launching construction only when
sales had reached a comfortable level (typically 60
or 70 percent of units). Ulinder Rennie, aggressively
using lifestyle advertising, made small-space living
seem sexy. Innovatively creating photo-ready lineups—having
prospects queue outside a sales office rather than making
appointments—they presented a picture of insatiable
demand and a market gone wild.
Ulinder Rennie’s first attention-grabbing sellout
came in November 1992, with 1188 Howe: 189 suites disappeared
in about four hours, at what was then considered a “pricey”
$265 a square foot. It was followed by the Residences
on Georgia, in April 1996: 300 units sold in one Sunday,
a North American record. In 1997, Rennie—now a
rising media star—bought Ulinder out and, under
the rebranded Rennie Marketing Systems, began an unrelenting
assault on Vancouver’s skyline that now includes
most of its tallest buildings: the Wall Centre (2001),
Shaw Tower (2004), and soon-to-be-completed Shangri-La.
“Everything this city has evolved into over the
last 20 years,” says Larry Campbell, “has
Larry Beasley and Bob Rennie written all over it.”
Not everybody thinks that’s a good thing—though
few critics will go on the record to say so. Even competing
developers, not known for being media-shy, cloak their
gentle criticism in anonymity. “I like Bob a great
deal,” says one. “And hats off to the guy:
he makes more money than most of the developers he works
for. But I’d prefer to invest my money into the
building and build my own brand, not his.” Said
another real-estate marketer: “The problem you
are no doubt facing is that Bob is very powerful and
all-pervasive, and in many respects created the market
that we are all using to support ourselves.” Another
put it this way: “It’s Bob’s world—we
all just live in it.”
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