Politics of big landlording

   Mehrzad Peyrow, a local landlord with a ton of apartment buildings around town, isn't thrilled that he got snubbed by the city but he might be cracking a little smile knowing that a rival recently lost a $14 million lawsuit.
   Peyrow is a well-known mega-landlord but has only made the dailies once, when the bid he made on two downtown buildings was snubbed by the SHDL in favour of a lower bid.

1850 Lincoln hotly-disputed property

   I had Peyrow briefly as a landlord on Colonial in the early 90s and he seemed fine, although it was no great bargain and not everybody else admires him, including Sergey Nizenko, who was recently awarded $3,000 of Peyrow's cash after complaining of cockroaches and mould.    
   Peyrow was irked in 2007 when the city auctioned off two large apartment buildings, a 110-unit building at 1225 Sussex St., near Boozkimo Park and a 67-apartment building at 1850 Lincoln Ave. (the same building that Wayne "The Vampire Killer" Boden claimed his third victim).

  Peyrow bid $11.2 million for the two buildings, which comes out to about $62,000 per door, a pretty generous offer.

  The buildings had been appraised at $11.11 million by a private appraiser.

  Peyrow's bid was the highest, but the auctioneers, the SHDM (a new-and-not-improved private body created by an ill-conceived merger with the Société de développement de Montréal in January 2007) still chose a lower bid from someone who had previously donated to the mayor's party. 

1225 Sussex 

   The SHDM owned the two buildings because they bought them in 1991 for $4.4 million and then polished them up to turn into public housing but no do-gooder housing group could make the numbers work, so the city put them up for auction in Oct. 2007. 

   The SHDM snubbed Peyrow's bid in favour of one from Lieberman Realties, controled by Lorne Lieberman, a regular Tremblay party financial contributor. 

   The SHDM evaluated the bids by analyzing three criteria: the amount offered, the bidder's track record as a landlord and the bidder's financing plan. 

   Peyrow was considered to be highly-leveraged, but so too was Lieberman, who only put 20 percent cash down. 

   Lieberman apparently has more apartments in Montreal than Peyrow, another factor in the decision.

   Lorne Lieberman's family controled the Lamour needletrade shop, which opened here in the mid-50s and more recently swallowed up Terramar. 

   In a seperate case and fascinating (ie: boring) case, Lieberman and partners were ordered to pay up $14 million last August in a legal dispute over six apartments on Willowdale, Ridgewood and Ste-Famille. The court ordered Lieberman's group to go through with a real estate sale that Lieberman's gang apparently didn't want to go through with.
   Some of the rules have changed since this controversial auction took place, for example the maximum contribution to a political party has been reduced to pocket lint. But I'd be curious to know how the authorities would evaluate the qualities of a landlord because if that's a criteria, perhaps there's a better way to evaluate than just by counting the number of apartment units they already own.