Dr. Greg Appelt on building a medical real estate empire

Growing up in rural Manitoba, Greg Appelt’s father was tired of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur.

He cautioned him to not follow in these footsteps. Instead, he should become a doctor, one of the most esteemed professions in their town. Appelt listened (sort of). While he went on to become a doctor he’s also built one of the nation’s largest medical and mixed-use real estate empires.

Prior to starting medical school, he’d already had an entrepreneurial itch, running two businesses.

“But with 12 years of education for medicine, that gets put on ice,” he said.

He eventually became a specialist in pediatrics and then allergies, moved to Kelowna and settled into starting his own practice in a rented building. As his practice and other specialists in the office experienced growth, more space was needed. He wanted a building that was his. So he struck a deal with the other physicians to capitalize the project and developed a small medical office.

“That fired up the entrepreneurial engine in me once again,” said Appelt.

Things snowballed. He developed more and more medical buildings, all with a similar delivery model where the physicians moving in were brought in as investors. 

“At one point it felt like I was doing full-time medicine and full time development. I began to wind down my time spent in the clinic and increase time spent on real estate,” he said. “I retired. I hung up my stethoscope and picked up a shovel. It’s my true calling. It’s in my soul. When I got back into business, it was like a fish coming back to water.”

Today, Appelt specializes in mixed-use residential and healthcare properties across Canada. From its Toronto headquarters and Kelowna office, the firm has developed and acquired over one million square feet of space and built a reputation as one of the country’s leading private owners and developers of medical office and multi-family rental real estate, overseeing the full lifecycle from site acquisition and design through development, construction, and property management via its affiliated company, Appelt Management.

“We are the largest private medical landlord in the country,” said Appelt, whose team currently has over 700 housing units under construction. 

As the company has grown, Appelt’s experience as a medical doctor have helped shape its approach. 

“I know intimately what it is like for a physician to be in different types of real estate,” he said. “There are nuances tied to physicians, there’s nuances tied to the patients and the interactions behind the various disciplines in these medical buildings, it’s all an ecosystem and those interactions are unique. You need to have a deep understanding of that to run medical buildings effectively.”

To operate well and co-exists with other types of building types, special consideration must be made to accessibility, parking, HVAC, and more. It’s approach that Appelt has been able to download to his entire team. 

The pinnacle of Appelt’s vision is Atlas, a 41-storey mixed-use tower with medical spaces and 463 units of housing. Crews recently broke ground at the site, which sits across the street from Surrey Memorial Hospital, home to North America’s second busiest emergency room. 

“A lot of developers don’t like to do mixed-use because ultimately they are selling condos and then they get stuck with a retail or office component. But for us, we like medicine, and we get some economic synergy,” said Appelt, who noted that the biggest consideration is ensuring that those two different experiences, patient and resident, remain separate. 

For Appelt, Atlas isn’t just another project. It’s his way of combining his two passions, medicine and entrepreneurship, in a way that helps solve some of Canada’s biggest challenges/ 

“We’ve gone from a housing crisis to a healthcare crisis,” he explained. “Two million people in Ontario are without a family doctor. The province has allocated 1.8 billion to help solve the family physician crisis” 

The population is also getting older. He noted that someone over the age of 65 consumes four times as many health care dollars. As more of the population pushes into that demographic, they will continue to consume a greater portion of healthcare budgets. And it’s not a new issue. Provincial healthcare spending has been consuming an increasing percentage of the GDP since the 1970s. That combined with an influx of immigration has provinces looking to make the system more efficient, so they can deliver the same level of care, 

“One way to do that is to push services into communities and off of hospital campuses, as seeing patients on those campuses is very expensive,” said Appelt. “Seeing them in the community is a lot less costly. And as technology is advancing, it’s paving the way for that to occur.”

This is good news for Canadians. 15 to 20 years ago, a hip replacement surgery was a five day hospital stay. Now it can be performed as an outpatient procedure in the morning and the patient is home in the afternoon. 

“That applies to cancer treatment and 100 other things,” said Appelt.

This isn’t just good news for him as a medical real estate provider and manager, it means he gets to help.      

“It’s the best thing ever,” said Appelt. “I was a physician. I really enjoyed that. And now those two things in my life have merged. I can still indirectly facilitate the care of patients and scratch my entrepreneurial itch. It’s perfect. I can’t even believe it. I’m so lucky.”