Dana Friesen Smith | Whistler Real Estate Investing

I am Matt Parker, your host of the House Rich Homeowner podcast. Managing your home finances is hard. After many years in the mortgage industry, I've decided to combine my knowledge, resources and connections and turn them over to you. Each week I'll be featuring different home finance experts or my own personal insight to help you achieve financial peace at home. Let's Parker here. So excited. Very grateful to have Dana Friesen Smith with me today. Thank you for joining me today, Dana.

Thanks. Yeah, it's great to be here.

Now I wanted to introduce you. You are the owner of the Whistler Still Haven office and I believe you're in the works of opening a Squamish location as well.

Correct.

Did you want to give us a little bit of insight into the Still Haven company and just sort of where you came from, the origination of it and what your, what your values and your goals are going forward?

You bet. So Still Haven headquarters started in Vancouver and it started with five very, very successful and amazing teams. They decided that they just wanted to do something a bit different and create the real estate model that they were personally looking for and couldn't find in other brokerages. So they started the Vancouver branch as well as North Vancouver and then started looking up the sea to sky because they wanted a full kind of west coast brand that really had the same intentions and goals and came up to me and decided that we were a part of that brand and fit their desires. And the main goals of Still Haven is to have high performing agents that you can expect the same service and skill amongst all of us as well as high ethics, high morals, which is a huge, huge, fundamental part of what we want real estate to be and what our clients can expect and then to have a lot of fun because real estate doesn't have to be boring and we've got a lot of amazing agents. So when I decided to join forces with Still Haven and open the Whistler branch, I did that with my Whistler partners as well. So Hannah Garc and Sarah Murphy are my Whistler partners and my team joined. So Kristen Dillon, who works with me in Squamish specifically, and I cover Whistler and Pemberton and now we are actively working on opening up the Squamish office, which we're really excited about.

Oh, very cool. Thanks for that. No, I know just having worked closely with a handful of agents from the Still Haven brand, definitely a different approach and it's not maybe when I think of other brokerages might be more let everyone in. Where I think Still Haven focuses A lot more on the right people that bring those, the values that align with the company.

Yeah, yeah, we talk about a lot of brokerages concept is people in seats. So they don't really seem to care about who the person is or what kind of business they're doing. It's just get them in the door and get them paying fees. And it's the complete opposite. At Still Haven we really do demand high quality. And so there's a certain threshold that you need to be doing in terms of volume of business and then more importantly than that is the actual service you're providing. So we want to be able to stand behind all of our agents and really believe that they are the best agents and they're providing the best quality service to our clients and then doing it in a high, high ethical and moral way. And that's not always found in our industry, unfortunately. And it's something that a lot of us have struggled with in dealing with a lot of interesting behaviors out there. So we kind of want to cut that out of our industry. And the only way we know how to do that is by doing it ourselves and setting the example and setting the standard.

You know, I always like to say that the barrier to entry into our industries is quite low. So yeah, you do attract some people that might not have the same level of, I think, professionalism for doing what's best for the client, which is what we like to stand for as well. So I know you're a top producing real estate expert in Whistler and also down the coast as well, a lot of investors that we work with in the Vancouver area or Greater Vancouver with the, especially in the, in the strata properties or the condo units, they're having challenges implementing or taking advantage of the rental pools like Airbnb or the nightly rental ability. Now I believe, and I'm not quite sure, so I'd love you to touch on this. Is that different in Whistler depending on the zoning?

Big time. So we're very fortunate that kind of. The founders of Whistler, way back when, about 30ish years ago, came up with the concept that we personally in Whistler needed flexible zoning. And the concept at that time was that we actually couldn't afford to build enough hotels for our visitors in the winter. And they also weren't lucrative enough because we were very winter specific, specific tourism and didn't have much going on in the spring, summer and fall. Which obviously, as most people know that's different now. But at that time they created this zoning called Phase one. And what that Means is you not only can live in it full time like a regular residential property, like everywhere else in Canada, but you also can legally rent that property out nightly. And so it basically beat the Airbnb model. We like to say that we created it before Airbnb and VRBO and all those other concepts came to be. And so thus you don't have those issues of trying to either do nightly rental without having the legal, legitimate aspect behind you. You know that you 100% can do it, it's encouraged, it will never be taken away from you. And I know that in all municipalities other than Whistler, unfortunately don't have that type of zoning. So you're either dealing with specific stratas who have a lot of control as to whether you can or cannot nightly rent, or the actual municipality can impose whether you can or cannot. And Whistler isn't like that because we're very, very clear. So if you have that phase one zoning, you can nightly rent as much as you want. And if you don't in Whistler, because we can have regular residential zoning as well, you cannot. So it's a very clear understanding and it's an amazing place to invest because of that. Because our tourism is wild in the winter, almost equal in the summer, and we barely have off seasons now. So all my clients in the nightly rental game are doing really well on their ROIs and having a lot of fun doing it, whether personally or having a rental property manager. Well, as they're using the property quite a bit as well, which is fun because who doesn't want to come to Whistler.

Exactly. And I think that's the nice thing about it is you can block off times that you want to use it and then. And then rent it out times that you won't be there, or something around that nature. I know I had a client and someone I know well that had a property in downtown Vancouver that he was using as a nightly rental for years. And all of a sudden they started to crack down on that and now he can't do it. And they're very strict on it. And he's gone from doing very cash flow positive to the opposite. So it's definitely been a big shift in the market. So I think there's a good opportunity up there. I'm imagining a lot of your clients are able to cash flow very well based on the amount they can get per night versus per month or a different structure.

Absolutely. As well as we're seeing a lot of those Vancouver clients who just like your client were doing exactly what they were doing then they were forced to not do that anymore. And so a lot of them have sold that property or been able to shift their situation and be able to buy up in Whistler and do that same mold that they were so successful in Vancouver with, but now up in Whistler with the security that they're not going to lose that ability to do that.

Awesome. Awesome. Now I know that as an owner of the Stillhaven Whistler office, you also have your own team in the Whistler market as well. Do you want to talk a little bit about your business philosophy, how you serve clients and those sorts of things?

Sure, yeah. So I've been an agent for eight years and, you know, top 10% as of kind of my first year. So really, really successful. Luckily, and got way too busy about four years into it, so luckily acquired my first assistant, who is Kristin Dillon, and she now is our agent in Squamish. She was with me for three years as my assistant, so probably learned a few things while she was doing that job and then decided to become an agent. She is now an amazing agent in Squamish. I like to take some of the credit, but a lot of it is her own. And yeah, between the two of us, I service Whistler and Pemberton. She services Squamish fully. And then we've got another assistant, Danielle, who takes care of all the back end. And for us, it's really amazing because it's hard out there as a single agent to not only do everything that's needed to be successful, because we wear probably 2,000 hats and have a million jobs to do and kind of need to be everywhere and anywhere, but also just to have that camaraderie and collaboration, having somebody to take care of something that you maybe don't have time for, or maybe you're stumped and you can't figure out a creative solution for one of your clients and you've got that teammate who you can call and bounce ideas off of and come up with really good, good game plans as to what the best situation is going forward. So, yeah, I feel very fortunate. We're called the dream team and yeah, we make dreams happen.

I love that. That's very cool. Any areas in Whistler that might be not as well known to just sort of the average Vancouverite in terms of an investment opportunity or just as potentially a second home or recreational property that. That you find to be very, very good option?

Sure. So the Village, if you know Whistler or Benchlands, which are basically the two closest areas to both the Whistler Gondola and both of the gondolas that go to Blackcomb. That's your bread and butter for your phase one nightly rental. It's where most of anybody coming to Whistler wants to be. They want to be walkable to the village. They understand those areas and all the amenities close to that. But one special pocket is Creekside, which most people don't know unless you understand Whistler is not only the original Whistler, that's where Whistler Mountain began. That gondola was the first way to get up to Whistler and was how Whistler started, but also it has an amazing village. It has grocery stores and liquor stores and restaurants and dusties and it's just, it's a really thriving hub and you can invest and purchase at a lower price point than you would have to invest to be in the village or Benchlands. And the nightly numbers are coming up really strong. So you still have a huge ROI potential. And because of that lower buy in price point, the numbers, even though your nightly rental rates are a bit lower, it really matches and evens out. So I highly encourage people to consider Creekside when they're thinking about their investment property because it's not only up and coming, but it has the most area to grow. So in capital, your actual investment could increase significantly as that continues to grow.

And would that be well suited for someone who prefers not as busy or loud of a sort of not necessarily party atmosphere, but more of that louder atmosphere?

Yeah, there's no nightclubs in Creekside. Very family friendly. There's playgrounds in the summer you can walk to three lakes as conveniently as possible, whereas technically in the village you can only walk to one. So yeah, very, very popular for families. The other thing that Creekside just started is you're now being able to mountain bike for from Whistler Mountain down to Creekside and upload from there as well. That just began. So that's a huge benefit as well because now you've got more people coming to visit who are there just for mountain biking and they can access the mountain via Creekside as well. So yeah, lots of opportunity in Creekside as well as all the classic village benchland properties.

Yeah, no, I would encourage anyone to reach out to Dana that is looking for in that property in Whist and down to Squamish and beyond. Dana, where is the best spot for people to find you, to connect with you and to start a conversation?

You bet. So our website is probably easiest and that is sea to skydreamteam.com so if you know how Sea to Sky is spelled S E A instead of sea, you're good to go. And then the other place is still haven.com so you'll not only get access to myself and all of our agents all throughout the Sea to Sky and Vancouver, but there's lots of resources on there as well as our website. And still haven't a bit of a weird one. So some people say Stillhaven, it does have more Scandinavian roots. It actually means still waters.

Oh, okay.

And that one's a weird one, but it's spelled S T I L H A V N so no e in there. And stillhaven.com is a great place to find all of us.

Wonderful. Well, I'm so grateful to have you. I really appreciate all the insight and the expertise and your openness. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me and I look forward to doing more business.

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