AHK
Senior Member
When Pinnacle first arrived in Toronto, which I believe was for the condominium development on the north side of Harbour Street, between Bay and Yonge Streets, construction was started without pre-sales. The sales suite for the four tower project was set up while the first building was under construction, many years ago. The fourth only information on the UT database is that the fourth tower (they were built successively) was completed in 2011. I wandered into the sales centre shortly after it opened, and asked about Pinnacle having started construction without needing pre-sales. The answer was that Pinnacle had very deep pockets, and could finance the project themselves.The way it works is a lot of developers will either bring in equity partners on a project by project basis, or raise a fund of money from investors that they will use across multiple projects. But that accounts for only a small portion of the total cost of a project -- probably less than 20 percent. The rest of a project is funded by buyer deposits and a construction loan from a schedule A bank or another private lender (such as a PE fund like Kingsett Capital, Hazelview Investments etc. or pension fund like Otera Capital).
It's possible that Pinnacle funds the required equity component by itself -- without contribution from any outside investors. However outside of that, they would almost certainly be funding the rest with loans from a variety of lenders.
Funding a project with all equity wouldn't make sense for a number of reasons. It would require an exorbitant amount of capital... and would place a huge amount of risk on that money by concentrating it in a handful of projects. And, it would also result in a smaller return than you would get by using leverage.
At the time, I did not know enough about the industry's financial practices to ask whether Pinnacle had co-investors or joint venture partners, but my understanding at the time was than Pinnacle had the financial depth that most other Toronto based developers did not have at their disposal.
As a corollary, Menkes is proceeding with the 4800 Yonge project with its ultimate outcome, condominium or rental, has to my knowledge, still not been publicly stated. If it is to be a condominium, obviously Menkes has the financial depth to be able to proceed with construction without needing pre-sales.