Asked about his reputation for plain speaking and forthright dealing, the new president of the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB) says it was founded in the bedrock of his upbringing in the B.C. Interior.
“I shoot straight from the hip,” said Gopal Sahota. “I’m not going to go out there and be a spin doctor. And that comes from my roots and my value system where we grew up.”
Sahota was born in 1968, and moved from India with his family to Canada when he was just over a year old. The family settled in Kamloops, an area known for its no-nonsense, hard-working spirit.
As the real estate board’s new president, one of Sahota’s tasks is talking to the press about a frenetic real estate market south of the Fraser River, and he said his upbringing in Kamloops taught him to be up front, honest and “accountable” above all else.
Last year, the FVREB smashed sales records dating back to 1921 when the board was first created. Sales then cooled substantially over the summer. Early in 2017 sales returned to normal historical averages before a listings shortage surfaced in April. Sahota has been characteristically frank about the region, saying the Fraser Valley townhouse market is anything but relaxed, and is highly competitive. In May he said the conditions were “less than ideal for both buyers and sellers,” and that the Fraser Valley needed more product immediately to quench demand from buyers looking to get into the market.
His straight-shooting assessment of the market is just who he is,” he said. “I’m not going to be anything but myself.”
Sahota graduated from North Kamloops Secondary School in 1986 and headed off to the University College of the Cariboo (now called Thompson Rivers University). Sahota worked as both a labourer and a retail salesman to help pay for schooling, and in 1988 he transferred to Simon Fraser University, making the move south to the Lower Mainland. Sahota graduated with a bachelor of arts in 1991, majoring in economics. He said holding jobs throughout university also played an essential role in developing his outlook on life.
“It gave me an opportunity to learn what working values were,” he said. “I’ve been working since graduating high school. It was a great character builder. And seeing smiles on people’s faces was always fun. I always remember this quote: ‘No one wants to be sold to, but everyone wants to buy.’”
Sahota said he majored in economics for his post-secondary education because he’s fascinated by the “mathematical side of things.”
“I don’t move until I see numbers,” he said. “The numbers have to pop up and grab me. The graphs have to pop up.”
In 1993, Sahota enrolled at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and a year later he obtained his fourth-class power engineer certificate.
In 1995, he started a company in Surrey called Digital Reign Communications. The business sold communications equipment and did small-business consultations. However, Sahota said, it might have been a few years ahead of its time.
“It didn’t have a storefront, [but] that wasn’t its downfall,” he said, noting the company ran for eight years. “However, a lot of what is being done right now in that market is being done online. So it was a predecessor of [e-commerce].”
The same year that he founded his communications company, he was hired by the City of Vancouver as a systems controller, working on a first-of-its-kind project. He was one of five original operators hired to install an earthquake-proof firefighting system in downtown Vancouver. According to seismologists, the entire Pacific Northwest is due for a major earthquake. Using technology first implemented in San Francisco, the city’s system set in place a network of reinforced pipes that can pump sea water for firefighters during a natural disaster.
During a major earthquake, he explained, “along with the water mains underground, the gas mains break. So we trained firemen as well, and it’s a state-of-the-art system that is still there to this day.”
Sahota said sheer curiosity was the deciding factor in his getting involved in power engineering and in the fire safety project – “just understanding how the automation works.”
“Most people don’t know how these things happen. It opened up a different part of the brain for me. You see things differently and understand more of your surroundings.”
By the mid-2000s Sahota was ready for a career change, but he wasn’t sure what industry he should enter. So he made a list of all the jobs he’d thought about doing and then cut that list down by selecting the industries that had affected him on a personal level. He recalled the experience of buying a house in 1995, and how much he enjoyed working with his realtor to purchase the property.
“I remember the day that he gave me the key, I remember the overcast clouds and I can still smell the juniper bushes,” he said. “It was such a happy feeling, and that guy was a part of it, a major stepping-stone in my life.”
In 2007 Sahota got his real estate licence through the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, but it was far from an ideal time to get into the industry. By 2008 the United States economy had crashed under the weight of the subprime mortgage crisis, sending ripples throughout the Canadian housing industry.
“Looking back on it, [it was] not a smart move, but nobody could have seen it coming,” he said. “But I’ve got to tell you, everything is a blessing in disguise. You learn your craft and you learn your trade at those times. Someone who got into it and survived that, they really had to learn real estate.”
Sahota said that early in his career he also seemed to be a magnet for tough deals.
“In the first five or six months, I had every difficult transaction you could imagine. Nothing was a seamless transaction, but again it was a blessing in disguise because after a few months you become the specialist some of the veterans are asking for advice.”
Sahota has since sold on both the commercial and the residential sides, and has held his licence at Sutton Group-West Coast Realty since 2009. He was previously a director of the FVREB and the vice-president. He started his one-year term as president this March. His predecessor in the role, Charles Wiebe, said Sahota’s work volunteering in the community, which includes coaching sports teams from lower-income areas, speaks volumes about how he approaches life as a whole.
“I think it’s a testament to what a realtor and a person should be,” Wiebe said. “Not just out there selling homes or making money, but being a part of the community and learning about it and helping to build it as well.” •
