READY for the next 25 YEARS
Finding a niche, then spreading its wings, Phoenix marks 25 years
Cuckoo Kochar will be forever grateful that the Ottawa housing market hit the skids in the 1990s. The president and chief executive officer of DCR/Phoenix Group of Companies, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, says that before the slide his company, established in 1988, was involved primarily in land development: the assembly, servicing and selling of building lots to smaller builders.
“Then the market halted and we took back the land because the builders got whacked. So then we started building houses on the land ourselves: What else were we going to do?”
Fast-forward to today, and the 140-employee company has built more than 4,500 homes in the Ottawa area, created a healthy commercial division that includes shopping-centre space, and is pushing into the potentially lucrative business of rental apartment construction and operation.
“It feels great to have survived the tough times in the 1990s and 2008. We’re hoping to continue and see the company flourish,” says Kochar as we sit in the living room of the whimsically retro-decorated Winchester, one of two new model homes at Phoenix’s Fernbank Crossing site in Stittsville.
The homes are the work of his son Rahul, who is vice-president of the company and being groomed to take it over. He runs the homes division.
Kochar senior, who recently celebrated his company’s achievements at a gala quarter-century birthday party, is 62 but not exactly retired or retiring. No sooner do we meet than he’s envisioning how the 800-plus acres of still mostly raw land surrounding the model homes — it’s owned by several builders including Cardel and Monarch, with Phoenix having enough for 800 to 900 units — will eventually look: “A community of 30,000 people!”