New condo marks developer's 50th anniversary
[attach]3332[/attach]His father got into the development business by accident but ended up pioneering the condominium concept in the GTA.
Over 50 years later, Jack Winberg’s Don Mills-based building company, The Rockport Group, is returning to its roots — in a way — poised to break ground on its first York Mills-area condo project. It’s the company’s first City of Toronto condo development.
The new development, Twenty One Clairtrell at Bayview and Sheppard avenues, is a seven-storey condo unit that should go into construction by March 2011.
The new property is literally in his York Mills backyard, the area he’s lived in his whole life, Winberg says.
“It’s exciting to be building in the neighbourhood,” Winberg says. Though the company has built in Don Mills before, Winberg says many of the company’s projects have been in York Region.
“We’re looking for more infill developments in the city,” he says.
This is the first time, Winberg says, that people can’t afford townhomes, so the timing was apt for such a project.
In a way the new development is a nod to the company’s roots and to Winberg’s father, Rockport Group founder Burton Winberg, who registered Toronto’s first condominium in the late 1960s as a result of the new Condominium Act that allowed properties to be subdivided.
The senior Winberg got into the building business after his own father died in the 1950s, leaving him the sole provider for his family of four.
Although he continued to operate the family’s rubber boot and moccasin business, he also lent money to a builder who was working on a Scarborough housing development. When the builder’s finances tanked, his father took over the project, Winberg says.
The shoe business continued for some time – according to Winberg there was a discount store named Cleo’s in Bayview Village Shopping Centre when it was an outdoor mall – but the real estate business evolved to include mid- and high-rise condos, retail, commercial, industrial, self storage, residential rental and golf course estate communities, and retirement home properties.
It’s that diversification that’s proved so vital to the company’s success, Winberg says.
“If the condo business dies we have other things to keep the light on.”
Heading up strategic development for most of the 22 years he’s been with Rockport, Winberg cut his teeth as a land problems specialist lawyer for 12 years before partnering with his father.
But it was never a fait accompli that he would work for his dad, nor did he get special privileges when he did.
“I was never the boss’s son,” he says.
Winberg’s father, 86, alternates between Toronto and Florida but is still involved in the business on an advisory basis.
“He’s there for the tough jobs.”
And on the subject of tough, Winberg says the most important thing he’s learned from his dad is that staying in business is tough.
“There were times when we didn’t think we’d make it.”
One of the most challenging aspects of the biz, he says, is identifying too late that they’ve made a mistake with a project – in other words, after investing the time and money in a development, the market just doesn’t respond.
“I’m more experienced in that than I’d like to admit.”
And, there’s a lot of pressure in his job, he says.
“I have a lot of people who rely on me.”