How Israeli developer Gil Blutrich built his empire of vacation destinations for the yachting class in southern Ontario

By Leah McLaren

Gil Blutrich. (Image: Christopher Wahl)

Gil Blutrich believes in destiny. When he was a boy growing up in Ra’anana, a town north of Tel Aviv, he spent a lot of time fantasizing about what he wanted for his bar mitzvah. While most of the boys in his class opted for expensive stereo systems or family vacations in Europe, Blutrich chose to redecorate his room. It was the early ’70s, and photographic wallpaper murals were all the rage. Blutrich passed over the tropical beach scenes and snow-capped mountains for something different: a summer landscape with a lush green meadow and a reedy frog pond. It was, he now believes, a postcard of southern Ontario, cosmically mailed back in time by his future self. “I looked at that wallpaper every day until I was 18, and it’s only now I realize I was looking at Canada and thinking about Canada before I even knew it. If that’s not destiny, I don’t know what is.”

Blutrich tells me this story in a boardroom on an upper floor of the King Edward Hotel, a property he purchased last year for $48 million and is currently spending over $30 million to refurbish and partially convert into condos. Ostensibly we are meeting for breakfast, but Blutrich, who gets up at 5:30 most mornings to manage Mishorim, the publicly traded real estate company he runs in Israel, ate hours ago. So he’s sipping on a single espresso while I fumble with a plate of yogurt, fruit and granola. A trim, medium-height man of 45, he wears a dark tailored sports jacket, pressed jeans and leather dress shoes with stylized squared toes. His fingernails are filed trim and gleam under a coat of clear polish. When he speaks, his dark eyes take on an intense, kinetic charge, his palms open to cup the air as if he’s weighing up the empty space around him, and his accent, a hypnotic Israeli purr, makes everything he says sound both elegant and slightly ominous: “without” becomes “wizzout,” “something” is “somesing,” and a mutually beneficial business deal (a concept with which he is obsessed) is a “ween-ween scenario.” When Blutrich makes a joke, I find myself laughing whether it’s funny or not. (“Sleep?” he says at one point; “I sleep like a baby—I wake up crying every hour!”) It is, of course, the ineffable charisma of a salesman.

In Blutrich’s case, it’s difficult to argue with the results. Since immigrating to Toronto from Tel Aviv with his young family just 13 years ago, he has become one of the most aggressive and ambitious property developers in the city. His Canadian development company, Skyline International, started in hotels—building the Pantages and Cosmopolitan—and has since expanded into condos and recreational properties.

In 2005, Blutrich decided to think big. Why settle for buildings, he figured, when you could pretty much buy an entire town? That was the year he paid $8 million for the waterfront and marina of Port McNicoll, a depressed former industrial port on the shores of Georgian Bay, not far from Midland. Since then, he has snapped up two other major vacation properties: the Horseshoe Valley ski resort, which he purchased for $37 million as a winter-season complement to Port McNicoll, and the Deerhurst resort in Muskoka, which became Skyline’s for $26 million after a lengthy negotiation earlier this year.

Blutrich’s success has seemed to build on itself, creating a powerful momentum that sets him apart from struggling high-end city hoteliers and rural resort developers. The difference, of course, is timing—that, mixed with opportunism and good old-fashioned chutzpah. In simple economic terms, Blutrich was in a position to buy when others needed to sell—in some cases desperately.

Blutrich had a precocious, Duddy Kravitz–style start in the business world. When he was 16, he discovered there were no age requirements on motorcycle rentals in the Greek islands, and in order to exploit the market, he started a tour company arranging motorbike trips for Israeli teens. As a result, he became the youngest registered business owner in Israel at the time. He leveraged that early success into a business importing terrariums. He preferred a patchwork approach to deal making, roping in various partners and wholesalers from Amsterdam, the West Bank and Portugal to support his venture.

After high school, his entrepreneurial dreams were put on hold for a few years due to mandatory Israeli military service. Blutrich, whose father was a career naval officer (his mother taught kindergarten), entered the air force. In his first year, however, he was injured, and he spent the rest of his air force career as a reporter for an in-house military publication. When I ask him the nature of his injury, Blutrich waves his hand dismissively. “Never mind, leave it,” he says. I press further, and he suddenly goes very still and cold. Across the boardroom table, he fixes me with his eyes. “I said, leave it.” I see that beneath his affable, mildly corny exterior there is something much more flinty—a steely, hard-won will.

After the military, he enrolled in a hotel management program in Tel Aviv. His first internship was in housekeeping at the Sharon Hotel in Herzliya. Blutrich remembers vacuuming the general manager’s office, admiring the big polished wood desk and thinking, “Maybe that’ll be mine some day.” He was nothing if not a pragmatist, however, and he quickly realized there wasn’t much money in hotel management. He returned to Ra’anana and signed up as a real estate agent. Before long, he was the top seller in his hometown, a favourite destination of the wealthy Russian immigrants who poured into Israel in the ’90s. His simple strategy was refusing to take on too much at once. “I’m a believer in focusing on one thing at a time,” he explains. “I didn’t have too many clients, and that made me a closer.”

Blutrich moved into development gradually, by buying up cheap condos, renovating them and flipping them. As the Russian property boom swept Israel, Blutrich’s business grew, and he expanded across the Tel Aviv area, buying up hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial real estate. Today, Mishorim owns 14 commercial buildings in Tel Aviv, which provide a steady rental income.

Read more