Russell Westcott
Investor. Developer. Consultant. Coach.
26 years. Every asset class. Still building. Consultant to professional real estate firms. Co-author of two bestselling Canadian real estate books.
Inspire others. Leave people feeling encouraged. Do everything from a place of love. That is the whole job.
You are going to make mistakes in this business. That part is not optional.
What is optional is whether you pay full price for every single one of them.
I have paid full price for a lot of them.
Twenty-six years, hundreds of transactions, and a stack of expensive lessons I am happy to hand over so you do not have to buy your own copy.
It started with a fast car.
White Ford Mustang Cobra convertible. Top down, absolutely convinced I had it going on.
I was turning 30. Renting a basement suite with a roommate. Going backwards financially at highway speed.
No portfolio. No plan. A growing suspicion I had built my life in the wrong order.
That was the starting line. Twenty-six years ago.
What the twenty-six years bought
Condos. Townhomes. Single family. Multi-residential apartment buildings. Infill development. New construction. New subdivisions.
Owned it, built it, financed it, broken it, or coached somebody else through all of it.
My first property lost me money. Up/down duplex in Edmonton, sold 171 days later for MORE than I paid, and I was still down about $4,500. Full autopsy here, down to the dollar.
Thirteen years on the executive team at the Real Estate Investment Network, finishing as Vice President. Two bestselling Canadian real estate books. Hundreds of transactions.
None of that is the interesting part…
What I am building right now
Infill development, new construction, and new subdivisions.
Land assembly. CMHC construction financing. Suite mix decisions that look small on paper and decide the whole project. Builder partnerships. The unglamorous operating work that starts the day the ribbon gets cut and never really stops.
I still underwrite my own deals. I still walk my own sites.
Where I think this is heading
I will say this plainly, because I would rather be wrong out loud than vague in public.
The next decade in Canadian real estate belongs to the people who build, not the people who bid.
Buying finished product and hoping the market carries you is a strategy that worked beautifully for twenty years and is running out of road. You cannot pay retail for a completed building and manufacture a return out of optimism.
Density on land you already control is a different game entirely. So is purpose-built rental, where the financing available right now is unlike anything I have seen in twenty-six years of doing this.
And it is regional. Always. Nobody lives in the national average. The headline number tells you almost nothing about what is happening on one specific street in one specific city, which is where every deal actually gets decided.
That is the direction I am pointed, and I am putting my own money there.
The part that matters to you
Plenty of people can teach this. A much smaller group is still doing it.
Almost nobody is doing both AND willing to walk you through the deals that went sideways.
That is the whole offer. Twenty-six years of scar tissue, a point of view about where this is going, and no interest at all in pretending it was clean getting here.
Who I work with
Four kinds of people. The work looks different for each one.
You are buying your first property
You do not need hand-holding. You need a clear path, an honest read on the deal actually in front of you, and permission to move before you research it to death. I have watched more people lose money to three years of hesitation than to one bad property.
You are growing and scaling
Three doors toward fifteen. This is where it gets genuinely hard. Financing changes shape. Management stops being theoretical. Mistakes stop being cheap and start compounding. What got you here will not get you there, and most people find that out the expensive way.
You are going big
Development, construction financing, joint venture structure, institutional-grade capital. Bigger builds, bigger partners, bigger consequences. The spreadsheet gets easier at this level and the people get harder.
You are a professional real estate firm
I consult. Underwriting, deal positioning, capital strategy, and an outside set of eyes that has seen this cycle before and is not paid to agree with you.
All four get the same respect. None of them get talked down to.
If you want somebody to tell you this is easy, I am the wrong guy.
If you want somebody who has already paid for the lesson you are about to learn, let’s talk.
Where I’ve Been
Where I Am Now
For the first fifteen years I chased other people’s stages. Get on the panel. Get in the magazine. Get the logo for the website.
Then I worked something out. A borrowed stage is a stage somebody else can take back.
So I built my own.
Published Books
Amazing Children
Years In
Transactions
My Passion:
Communicate, Entertain & Educate
I am a shy introvert who talks for a living. Both of those are true, and it took me a long time to stop treating one of them as a problem.
Once you find your real voice, you stop performing. And when you stop performing, people finally believe you.
What Fires Me Up
Watching somebody stop researching and finally go do the thing. That moment never gets old.
What fires me up in the other direction: comfortable lies. “The market is too hot.” “I’ll start when rates come down.” “I just need one more course.” I have said all three of those out loud. They cost me years.
A Day in my Life
Underwriting. Site walks. Coaching calls. Consulting calls. Writing.
Most days involve a spreadsheet saying one thing and my gut saying another, and the actual work is figuring out which one is lying.
Some mornings it is somebody buying their very first property. Some afternoons it is a firm putting together a project worth more than everything I owned at forty. The questions are far more similar than you would think. The stakes change. The three things that decide whether a deal works do not.
I am on a job site more than I am on a stage now. That is the biggest change of the last decade and it is the one I am happiest about.
Weekends
Books. Movies. Writing, when it is flowing.
And dreaming of going back to Maui. Corinne and I got married there and we go back whenever we can. It is where I do my best thinking and my worst golfing.
Me in 3 Words
Driven. Caring. Stubborn.
My 3 Truths
1) Be aligned, top to bottom, with what you are actually here to do.
2) Encourage people. Out loud. On purpose.
3) Do all of it from a place of love.
My Top 3 Movies
Shawshank Redemption. It’s a Wonderful Life. Forrest Gump. All three are about a guy who keeps going long after a reasonable person would have quit. I did not notice the pattern until somebody pointed it out to me.
Inspire, Encourage, Love
Three words on my signature. They are not a slogan.
Inspire. Go first. Show the receipts, including the ugly ones.
Encourage. Most people are one conversation away from moving. Be the conversation.
Love. Do the work from that place or do not bother. It shows either way.
I am an optimist about this country, this industry, and about you. Not because it is easy. Because I have watched too many ordinary people build extraordinary things to believe the story that it cannot be done.
My Core Values
Twenty-five of them. That is too many and I know it.
I wrote the list in 2017 and I have never cut it down, because every time I sit down to trim it I find the one I was about to delete is the one I broke that week.
Three of them do the heavy lifting. Accept responsibility. No excuses. Do the work. The other twenty-two are how I try to behave while I am doing those three.
It is easy to make the list. It is easy to make the pretty infographic. Living them on a Tuesday when a deal is going sideways and nobody is watching, that is where the actual work starts.
Russell Westcott
#Inspire #Encourage #Love
Real Estate Joint Ventures: The Canadian Investor’s Guide to Raising Money and Getting Deals Done
I wrote this because I kept watching good investors run out of their own money at exactly the moment the deals got good.
Money is not the constraint people think it is. Trust is. This is how you build it, structure it, and keep it after the deal closes.
97 Tips for Canadian Real Estate Investors
A collaboration. Multiple Canadian investors, each handing over something they learned the expensive way. I co-authored and helped pull it together.
Which is the right way to build a book about real estate, because it is the right way to build real estate. Nobody does this alone. Anybody telling you they did is leaving people out of the story.
Ready to move?
LET’S TALK
Here is what a call with me is not. It is not a pitch, and it is not thirty minutes of me finding out whether you can afford me.
Here is what it is. You tell me where you are stuck. I tell you what I would do. If I am the right person to help, we talk about that. If I am not, I will tell you who is.
That is the whole thing.
You have probably been researching this for longer than you would like to admit. I did too. It cost me years.
