Article content continued

While it also owns apartments in B.C.’s Lower Mainland and Saskatoon, Sask., 50 per cent of Mainstreet’s apartments are located in Calgary and Edmonton. Dhillon said his company has benefitted from Alberta’s population growing 1.6 per cent between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019 and as a result, he’s been able to push Mainstreet’s vacancy rate in the province down to 7.2 per cent from 12.6 per cent.

“If somebody on Bay Street is saying Alberta is gone, they don’t understand math,” Dhillon said.

The Mainstreet CEO didn’t want to speak on behalf of investors, but he thinks of 2019 as the year where many of them finally woke up to his company. Over the past 19 years, Mainstreet has reported 16 per cent compound annual growth in revenue. Its stock price has seen 14 per cent compound annual growth but had remained range-bound between about $35 and $40 since 2014.

That all changed this year and Dhillon thinks that some investors took a page out of his book.

“People are beginning to realize that at least in the multi-family business, we’re at the bottom of the market and this guy is going to have a long runway,” he said.

According to Raymond James analyst Johann Rodrigues, the multi-family subset of Alberta’s real estate sector was pummelled between 2016 and 2018 and both property fundamentals and the real estate stocks with exposure in the province, along with the aforementioned migration and vacancies are finally bouncing off their bottoms.