Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
For the third consecutive year, LandLord will be represented at Unpacking Multiplexes — Toronto’s dedicated event for the city’s growing community of multiplex developers, planners, and investors.
In 2024 and 2025, Brandon Sage joined the execution panel, speaking to what happens after a multiplex is built: the leasing process, the tenant profile, the management decisions that determine whether a new multi-unit building performs the way its owner hoped. Those conversations drew on what LandLord observes across hundreds of managed properties — what tenants actually value, what maintenance costs actually look like, what makes a unit lease quickly versus sit empty.
This year, Brandon moves to the planning panel.
Why the planning conversation is the right one to be in
The decisions that determine how a multiplex performs over its lifetime are made before construction begins. Materials, floor plans, unit configurations, acoustic separation, the relationship between the owner’s unit and the rental units — all of it is set at the design and planning stage. By the time a building is finished and tenanted, most of those decisions are permanent.
Property managers are rarely in the room when those decisions are made. Architects, planners, developers, and contractors are. The result, consistently, is buildings that are compliant, structurally sound, and often poorly suited to the realities of rental occupancy — layouts that don’t work for the tenants they’re designed to attract, materials that generate maintenance costs the pro forma didn’t account for, configurations that create friction between neighbours that no lease clause can resolve.
The case Brandon will be making at Unpacking Multiplexes is straightforward: the people who hear tenant complaints every day, who track maintenance costs across hundreds of units, who know which configurations produce stable tenancies and which produce constant turnover — those people should be involved in planning conversations, not just post-construction ones.
“The most expensive multiplex decisions are the ones made at the design stage without the perspective of the people who will be managing the building for the next thirty years.”
“We Build It. We Manage It.”
This is the argument behind Brandon’s panel, in one document: what changes when the same team designs, builds, and manages a multiplex for the long term.
About the event
Unpacking Multiplexes is produced by The Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast and brings together the practitioners, planners, and investors shaping Toronto’s multiplex development landscape. The 2025 edition ran on August 21. Details on the 2026 event — date, venue, and registration — will be available shortly.
→ landlord.net/design-build for LandLord’s multiplex design-build and management services
