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July 27, 2025 13 mins

Marc Koran is based in Montreal, Quebec which is the headquarters of Campus Habitations. The first of several projects is in Mont Tremblant, a ski resort just North of Montreal. On today's show we are talking about the benefits of renting apartments to corporate clients and not just individual tenants. To connect with Marc and to learn more, visit https://www.campushabitations.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-koran/

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Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Welcome. To the real estate espresso.
Podcast your morning shot of what's new in the world of real
estate investing. I'm your host, Victor Minash.
This is the Weekend edition where we interview notable
people from the world of real estate investing.
Today is no exception. We have a great guest all the
way from Montreal. Welcome to the show, Mark Koran.
Hi, thanks. Happy to be here.
Oh Mark, great to have you here.Now you and I are working
together on. Bunch of different.

(00:24):
Things, but we're working together on a project.
At Mont Tromblas ski Resort. About an hour and a bit north Of
Montreal, and what I thought would be interesting for the
listeners is to understand the difference.
Between what we're doing on thisproject versus just a plain
apartment building, but maybe. Before we do, perhaps give a
little bit of your back story and how you got to this point in

(00:44):
your journey. Oh, well, my back story is that
goes back about 25 years or almost 30 years when I graduated
as a computer engineer from McGill University, had a whole
bunch of startups earning some good money in IT.
And all of a sudden, 2008, I sawthe stock market take a huge
crash. And I said, hold on a second.
I'm making all this money on this side and I'm losing it on
that side. There's got to be a better way.

(01:06):
So I went off and started buyinghouses, Join a couple of
networking groups and, you know,would buy houses and put some
suited basements in there. And all of a sudden I was making
18% on on my money. So I said, oh, that's an
interesting model. But 18%, a $100,000, it's a good
percentage, but wasn't that great of a return on my time.
So I decided to upgrade a littlebit and start buying strip malls

(01:28):
and, and hotels and that kind ofstuff.
But for that, you know, you needa $5,000,000 down, you need a
$5,000,000 purchase, you might need $1.8 million of down
payment. I didn't have that kind of
liquidity lying around. So all of a sudden I needed to
start raising from, from other investors and so on other
people's money. So I backed into, should I call
it a syndication where all of a sudden I'm starting to manage

(01:51):
investors and their monies, accredited investors and so on.
So then all the sudden, you know, I was buying $510,000,000
strip malls and, and commercial and then I got into a hotel and
also in the portfolio grew to such a size that I simply didn't
need to work as a computer engineer anymore.
Now, I took, you know, over a decade to do that, but
eventually the the size, the assets were big enough for that

(02:15):
to happen. Fast forward to where, you know,
you and I started working together.
You know, I'm working at the hotel here.
I'm not working at the hotel. I'm the asset manager of the
hotel or the owner representative.
And my general manager is telling me, look, I can't hire
any employees. I can't hire an employee.
And why can't you hire employees?
Well, Airbnb in this tourist town called Mont Trembla, I've
taken all the spots. So I've taken all the

(02:36):
residential areas. We decided to work on a project
where we would be able to give some employee housing and meet
the employee need up in the Laurentians in the Montreal
Blunt area. And that's where we get up until
this point where, you know, my journey takes us to campus
habitations where you and I are working together.
Victor absolutely now. One of the things that's

(02:57):
different about. Workforce housing in this kind
of a setting is that, yes, you can build something that is
physically the right product, meaning it's got the right
number of bedrooms and bathroomsand the right amount of common
space and amenities and so on. And that's just building design
on one level. But then there's the economic

(03:17):
model, which is I think the moreinteresting part because you
can. Go out.
Into the marketplace and you canplace the ads perhaps on the MLS
system with a broker and get leases that way, but this is a
little. Bit different.
Because we're solving a need, not just for the folks.
That need to work in the area, but we're.
Actually solving a problem for the employers.

(03:37):
Because they can't attract people if there's nowhere to
live. Well, that's a really good
point. I mean this business is a
residential, multi residential, fully furnished, 1 bathroom per
bedroom. So if you have three people
sharing an apartment, you'll each of them will have their own
private bathroom. And but our market really is the
B to B market. We're talking to businesses,

(03:57):
some hotels at the base of the mountain.
This is a ski resort after all. And one of the hotels wants to
take 17 units, which out of 102 units and they don't even know
who's going to be living in there yet.
And they're looking at giving usa lease for five years or
negotiating a lease with us for five years.
So we find ourselves in a very interesting hybrid world where
we have what seems like a consumer product but is going to

(04:21):
the B to B world. And we're not saying we're not
going to take any B to C You know, we are going to be
definitely taking consumers in the area because politically
that one looked very good for usand we wouldn't want to anyways.
We want to have a good mix between the two.
But the the interesting part, you know, I come from commercial
leasing and strip malls and so on and you know, I like
corporate tenants, corporate tenants pay, they don't

(04:41):
complain, they don't do anythinglike that.
So if if we can have our of our 102 units, 60 or 70% of them by
corporate tenants, another 30% by by consumers, I think we've
got a rather unique mix in the market.
The beauty of that of. Course is that there's a time
period from completion of construction to stabilization

(05:01):
and. That time period can vary
depending on how quickly you lease up, but when you've got
corporate tenants, especially ifthey're credit.
Tenants, then the. Risk transfers.
From you to. Them because they're
guaranteeing the rent for. Let's say 5.
Years for that number of units that.
They've reserved. And that gets you much higher in
your at least your economic occupancy, even if.

(05:23):
Those. Units aren't occupied.
Day one gets you much higher in economic occupancy, much faster.
Brings more. Predictability to the overall
financial model for the project.I'd argue it's, it's an
advantage if they keep an apartment empty for five years,
for example, to use the extreme one, it's pristine by the end.
So our replacement reserve doesn't get used the the the

(05:44):
beds don't get used and and thatkind of stuff.
So these commercial tenants would need to make sure that
they're always full to get the best bang for their buck.
But you also have to remember that this is a ski town and you
know, they're not busy 100% of the year.
We have a hotel up there and we know our hotel is busier during
the summer and during the winter, but there's two months

(06:05):
on either side, four months of the year where they're not busy.
We're also negotiating with somespas in the area and they're
saying we'd like at least for only 5 months of the year, we
only need to bring in massage therapists or whatever from
Montreal five months of the year.
Of course, we're not going to becharging the same monthly rate
on a 5 month as a 12 month, so they're willing to pay that

(06:25):
premium to not have to pay for 12 months.
Oh, we meet them halfway, let's say.
So what was interesting in thosemodels is if you can have
tenants that will take 5 months in the winter, five months in
the summer, that's ten months. And we've done our math so that
those ten months will give us our full gross potential income.
And if we can rent those four months in between, that's

(06:46):
becomes bonus as well. Now in any seasonable seasonal
product like a resort, like you said, there's a high season,
there's a low season, a couple of shoulder seasons.
Most of the maintenance for the resort happens in the offseason.
So for example, there's a coupleof months, a year right at the
end of ski season before mountain biking starts where if
there's maintenance to be done on the lifts, that's when it's

(07:08):
going to happen. If there's maintenance to be
done on the swimming pools, it'sgoing to happen in the that
month of low season. You're going to have to bring
people up to the resort. They don't need to be there year
round. And for them to spend the
nightly rate in a hotel doesn't make sense.
So if these properties need thatspace for maintenance staff
during those shoulder and off seasons, that's an opportunity

(07:29):
as well. Absolutely.
It would be great to to see themcome and stay in our places.
I, you know, it's, there's an important thing to note here is
that Airbnb or short term leasesare not, are not legal in the
area. You can't have any leases under
30 days. So for these corporate tenants
that keep things the entire yearround, they have the ability to
bring tenants in and out. We know of 1 restaurant chain

(07:51):
that exists in Montreal and throughout Quebec and they have
trouble getting employees up north in in Mont Trembla.
Well, you know, they were staying at our hotel $200 a
night for some certain weekends and we'd have 15 or 20 of them.
And, and this particular tenant is very, very happy to have a
few apartments with us, you know, maybe 9 or 10 beds.

(08:13):
And remember, each bed, as I stated, is, is its own, its own
little ecosystem. We call it a hotel room with an
apartment. You walk into the apartment,
you're in the kitchen, living room, and then you walk into
your bedroom and you know, you've got a little mini fridge
in there and your own bathroom and your own desk and your own
TV. So in theory, these tenants
don't really even need to. If you're sharing a three

(08:34):
bedroom, you don't really need to to talk to the other tenants
necessarily. Yeah.
So it's more almost like a student housing model in that
sense because yes, you might have a roommate, but you might
not necessarily be the best of friends or even in the same.
Program for that matter. In a student housing context, so
the physical orientation of thatis is such that it can be

(08:54):
similar, but you also have one bedroom units as well.
We have one bedroom units, 2 bedroom units, and and and three
bedroom units. What's interesting is that the
two one bedroom units seem to have the exact same rent per
square foot or gross rent as a three bedroom unit and the
two-bedroom unit doesn't. So there's some interesting math
between the two. You know, a 2 bedroom unit is

(09:15):
beautiful, beautifully set up for somebody who, who wants to
do some working from home, you know, computer jockeys and that
kind of stuff. Because we are in a beautiful
setting with lots of amenities. There's a, there's a ski
mountain nearby that the site itself is called the campus.
And that's because we have amenities on campus.
We did not want to be that like a lot of the apartments you see

(09:36):
in in Quebec, which is a an apartment building with parking
lot on either side and you got to walk way down the street to
do that. So we have a basketball court,
we have a tennis court, we have a dog walk.
We even have access to the river, to the lazy river to do
some fishing and so on on that particular site.
So when we say campus, we don't really mean student.

(09:57):
We mean it's a campus where people can all get along and
have a social event quite often.When I was first designing this
project, I pictured my daughter who was 1819 years old, the time
going up to work in Tremblant orthe weekend, sorry for, for the
entire summer. And I said, how can she be safe
and how can she have a summer that she's going to remember?
And how can she have a summer that she can remember that she

(10:19):
can tell other people, hey, it was great to live in that spot
as opposed to somewhere down thestreet.
We also put concrete. We do a concrete bill, which has
a couple of reasons behind it, but you can't hear your
neighbors. You can't even hear the person
next to you. Even between the buildings
itself, we have a very good acoustic rating between rooms
itself. And when you compare it a bit to
student housing, I cringe a little bit because we don't have

(10:42):
7 students sharing 1 bathroom orone kitchen or anything like
that. And we don't.
And they can't hear each other from every single room.
So this is a new product or the new generation that insists on
all these amenities? All right.
So we've talked about Mont Tromblan, but there's other
projects. Already under.
Construction and other. Locations both around.

(11:03):
Around Canada and North America,what's What's next?
Oh, that's right. I mean, when my partner and I
were looking at doing this project, he said why don't we do
employee housing for Tromblan? And I said no, I don't want to
do it for Tromblan. I said I want to do it for
multiple sites. I mean, I've come from computer
engineering where everything wasrepeatable, scalable.
And, and then, you know, I endedup with what I call the 7 little

(11:23):
dwarves of real estate, which I,you know, under My Portfolio and
asset management, I have all these different projects that
are very different. And I didn't want to have that.
So I wanted to have something repeatable, scalable.
So we're going to go, we're doing Mont Tremblant.
We're about to have some sites up and running in September.
We already put a shovel in the ground in August, back in
August, sorry, back in June for Santa Gathe, MO, which is

(11:46):
another 82 units. We have the land identified and
we're rezoning it in Ontario, inElizabethtown, Brockville, we
have a 30 acre site there. We'll have up to 450 units and
we also have a land identified for starting our campus urban
over in Edmonton. You may ask why Edmonton?
I've already, you know, got somepartners in investments out

(12:08):
there where our goal is to do 25sites across the the country,
make that model perfect. And every single time we do it,
it gets better and better and better.
And then, you know, get a billion dollars worth of real
estate is the goal within Canada.
So we have a long runway ahead of us.
We're building the team and we're having a lot of fun.
Love it. Well, Mark, if folks want to

(12:30):
connect, if they want to learn. More, what's the best way?
Well, you can always go to the website campushabitations.com
and see there you can hit me up on the LinkedIn mark with AC
Koran, Koran, I'm there lots of people hit me up for all kinds
of stuff throughout my businesses.
I've got lots and lots of partners and ready to add on
more anytime. Well, Mark, great to have you

(12:53):
back on the show and for the listeners at home, definitely
connect with Mark Koran a campushabitations.com or on LinkedIn.
The links will be. In the show notes, and in the
meantime, have an awesome rest of your weekend.
Go make some great things happen.
And we'll talk to you again tomorrow.
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