René Lépine (1952-present)
René G. Lépine, Sr. is a Canadian real estate tycoon, developer, businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder of Groupe Lépine, a privately owned real estate company headquartered in Montreal, Canada, he is currently the Chairman and President.
He has been compared many times by the media as being "Montreal's or Canada's Donald Trump", and is one of the all-time largest and most influential real estate developers in Quebec. He has developed over time, more than 25,000 residential units, mainly houses and condominiums, valued at adjusted inflation, at more than $5 billion.
He is the owner and operator of numerous rental buildings and towers in Downtown Montreal. In the early 1970s, he and partner Lorne Webster bought the Le Cartier building on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal through a leveraged buyout, and built the Peel Plaza building right next to it, soon after.
Since the 1960s, he has built more than 1,200 houses in Montreal's Hampstead, Westmount and Côte Saint-Luc areas, as well as over 10,000 apartment and condo units across Canada and the United States.
Lépine has built many iconic buildings and landmarks in Montreal, including the Olympic Village and the world renown Sanctuaire du Mont-Royal complex which won many local, national and international awards.
Lépine grew up in Verdun, a working-class neighborhood of Montreal, in a family of 10 children. At age 14, he had to drop out of high school to make money for the family after his father became ill. He worked moving bags of rice for 4 years, and later used the saved money to build a split-level house in Côte Saint-Luc, which was immediately sold by chance to a wealthy bystander. Lépine quickly doubled his money, and started building homes, and eventually incorporated Groupe Lépine in 1952.
In 1974, he, Joseph Zappia, Gerald Robinson and Andrew Gaty, were directly appointed by the then mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau to build the Olympic Village for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.
In 1999, he bought the old YMCA building in Downtown Montreal and replaced it by building two 50-floor towers originally called Les Tours Lépine. This project was made in accordance with the YMCA, as they were going to renovate their aging complex. The towers were later renamed Le 1200 Ouest after they were purchased during development in 2005 by the Israel-based company El-Ad Group/Delek Group for much more than their assessed value.
In 2001, he received the UDI Quebec Award for Excellence in Real Estate for the redevelopment of the Downtown Montreal YMCA project. His ultra-luxorious projects, such as the Sir George Simpson and the Sir Robert Peel are exclusively represented by Sotheby's International Realty.
He was the Chairman of Real Estate Investments for the Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA) for 19 years and bought over $1 billion worth of properties for the association's real estate fund during his time as chairman.
In 1991, Lépine was doing business in Moscow, attempting to expand his business operations to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was planning to build two projects valued then at $775 million, being one of the first Western companies to develop real estate in Moscow since the Cold War. He was asked by the Government of Canada to build the Canadian embassy in Moscow. He was also asked by the Canadian Government to give a personal tour of Montreal to Yury Luzhkov, the former Mayor of Moscow during his official visit. He also met Mikhail Gorbachev, the then-President of the Soviet Union, during this time in Montreal.
In 1999, one of Lépine's companies purchased land from the Canada Lands Company, a federal crown corporation reporting to Public Works Minister Alfonso Gagliano, for $4 million, less than half its assessed value of $9 million. The terms of the acquisition also required that a large abandoned historical historical building encumbering the center of the site be renovated and preserved at Lépine's company's expense.
