How Institutional Capital Thinks About Real Estate Development Risk
Jeff Thomas
is the Group Head, Development at KingSett Capital. Jeff is responsible for the vision and execution of the firm’s development business and serves as Fund Manager for KingSett Affordable Housing LP and Residential Development LP. Prior to joining KingSett, Jeff was the Managing Partner at Ashlar Urban, a commercial real estate brokerage firm that was acquired by Cushman & Wakefield in 2017. In his 15-year career as a broker, Jeff was active in office leasing, investment sales and infill land development in downtown Toronto.
In this episode, Jeff Thomas, Group Head of Development at KingSett Capital, explains how the Canadian private equity firm invests in Canadian commercial real estate through development, joint ventures, and lending. He describes transitioning from brokerage (co-founding and selling Ashler Urban to Cushman & Wakefield) to development, emphasizing that long-term relationships, trust, transparency, and early delivery of bad news are critical to managing risk across KingSett’s roughly 55 projects with a small internal team. Thomas discusses “premium risk-weighted returns” as achieving strong returns relative to managed, less volatile risk. He details Toronto’s 50 Wilson Heights affordable-housing project (about 750 units in phase one, half affordable) on a prepaid ground lease, involving over 50 initial agreements, CMHC financing, and geothermal sustainability, and notes construction is in early structural work. He says Toronto condos are “dead” due to a large gap between resale and new-launch pricing, with development charges and HST seen as key barriers. He advises smaller builders to get close to customers and highlights modular/precast delivery at West Square as a path to speed, standardization, and affordability, while wishing policymakers would truly prioritize housing.
- From Brokerage to KingSett
- Relationships and Trust
- Picking Deals and Pricing Risk
- Transparency Builds Trust
- Risk-Weighted Returns Explained
- Inside 50 Wilson Heights
- Lessons From 50 Agreements
- Condo Market Reality Check
- Midrise Developer Playbook
- Know Your Customer First
- Modular Project Deep Dive
#RealEstateDevelopment #PurposeBuiltRental #DevelopmentRisk #AffordableHousing #TorontoRealEstate
Construction Innovation Checklist
This document is a supplementary resource to
episode #24 of the Real Estate Development
Insights Podcast in which Payam Noursalehi shares a practical framework for evaluating and selecting the most suitable innovative systems for your next project.
