Bar­bara Sil­ver­stein – Toronto Star

It’s hard to miss the new three-storey house loom­ing above the Edwar­dian and Geor­gian homes in the upscale Casa Loma neigh­bour­hood near Spad­ina and St. Clair.

The 5,000-square-foot lux­ury home took a year to com­plete – exactly the amount of time the builder said it would take from the demo­li­tion of the old house to the final car­pen­try and paint­ing. Pamela Sil­ver, 42, pres­i­dent of Intra­build Cus­tom Homes, proudly pulls out the detailed 10-page project sched­ule she devised weeks before con­struc­tion began.

“I hit every tar­get date on time. I was right on sched­ule every step of the entire project.”

Sil­ver is among a very small num­ber of female builders oper­at­ing in the Greater Toronto Area. Stephen Dupuis, CEO of the Build­ing Indus­try and Land Devel­op­ment Asso­ci­a­tion (BILD), which rep­re­sents 1,450 home­builders and devel­op­ers in the GTA, con­firms the fact.

Only three out of the 32-member BILD board of direc­tors are women, Dupuis says. “Our board typ­i­cally is made up of com­pany prin­ci­pals. Fewer prin­ci­pals are women.”

Dupuis sur­mises that the large cap­i­tal risk may deter women from becom­ing builders. “It prob­a­bly appears more intim­i­dat­ing than it is.”

Con­do­minium builder Julie Di Lorenzo insists that it’s not the finan­cial risk that keeps female entre­pre­neurs out of con­struc­tion. “They have avoided the build­ing indus­try because there’s a per­cep­tion that this indus­try is a man’s world.”

Di Lorenzo, 45, co-president of Dia­mante Devel­op­ment Corp., ven­tured into the busi­ness when, as a uni­ver­sity stu­dent in 1982, she teamed up with two male part­ners to start a con­crete form­ing com­pany. The con­crete work pro­vided cash flow for their early devel­op­ment projects.

Di Lorenzo says she’s been very com­fort­able work­ing in this male-dominated envi­ron­ment. “I appre­ci­ate the guys on the job and they respect me. They’ve watched me grow up in the busi­ness. They know I under­stand it from the bot­tom up.”

In 1992, Di Lorenzo and part­ners Joe Foti and Paolo Pala­mara founded Dia­mante with restau­ra­teur Franco Prevedello. The com­pany is known for such con­do­minium projects as 1 Bal­moral, at Yonge and St. Clair, and One City Hall, near Bay and Dundas.

Each part­ner has an area of exper­tise. Di Lorenzo is respon­si­ble for the finan­cial and devel­op­ment side of the busi­ness. She says as a woman she’s more on the look­out for obsta­cles than her male part­ners. “Antic­i­pat­ing prob­lems is char­ac­ter­is­tic of a woman’s think­ing,” she says.

Nev­er­the­less, Di Lorenzo is not fazed by the cur­rent down­turn in the sale of new homes. She’s pro­ceed­ing with con­struc­tion of the Flo­rian, a 21-storey lux­ury build­ing at Bay and Dav­en­port with units start­ing at $1 mil­lion. Hav­ing been through three reces­sions, Di Lorenzo says she’s ready to face the lat­est eco­nomic storm. “I’m an opti­mist,” she declares.

Di Lorenzo has weath­ered many chal­lenges, some by choice, she says. For instance, in 2005 she took on the pres­i­dency of BILD when she was eight months’ preg­nant. “Even with the baby, I never missed a meeting.”

The busi­ness gives her the flex­i­bil­ity she needs to raise a pre-schooler and tod­dler. She brings them to meet­ings and at home she’s never with­out her Black­Berry. “I live and breathe this busi­ness 24/7.”

Mary Law­son, vice-president and gen­eral man­ager of Dalerose Coun­try Homes, a cus­tom home-building com­pany in Orangeville, was also rais­ing young chil­dren when she started a ren­o­va­tion com­pany in the Kitchener-Waterloo area in the early ’70s.

Law­son, a 40-year indus­try vet­eran, has had a multi-faceted career in con­struc­tion. She’s been an inde­pen­dent and she’s held exec­u­tive posi­tions, work­ing on con­do­minium devel­op­ments and single-home sub­di­vi­sions in Alberta through­out the ’80s and in the GTA since 1991.

Women are well suited to run­ning con­struc­tion sites, Law­son observes. “Most women are born multi-taskers. They’re more orga­nized than men.”

Along with cus­tom work, Law­son is also over­see­ing a pro­duc­tion project of eight homes in the $650,000 range in Cale­don East. “I wish we were all sold out,” she laments. “But with the present eco­nomic uncer­tainty, con­sumers are reluc­tant to make major finan­cial deci­sions like buy­ing a new home.”

Law­son has been a trail­blazer in the res­i­den­tial con­struc­tion indus­try. She was the first woman to head a Cana­dian home­builders’ asso­ci­a­tion when she was elected pres­i­dent of the Cal­gary orga­ni­za­tion in 1988. She held the equiv­a­lent posi­tion in Toronto in 1998 and in 2004, she was the national pres­i­dent. But she recalls being excluded from asso­ci­a­tion meet­ings in the ’70s. “Women were wel­come only for ladies’ night.”

Still, she says she was always treated as an equal in West­ern Canada. “I think Toronto in the ’80s would have been a tougher go.”

Over­all, she has felt well respected by her male peers. “If you know what you’re talk­ing about, you don’t get too much flak.”

After 23 years in the build­ing and land devel­op­ment busi­ness, Lau­rie Gor­don, 46, pres­i­dent of Berk­shire Homes, is accus­tomed to being the sole woman on a build­ing site. She says peo­ple are often sur­prised when they meet her. “They say, ‘This is an unusual place for a woman.’”

But the com­ments don’t bother her. “You know your abil­ity to deliver because you under­stand the business.”

Gor­don stud­ied urban and regional plan­ning at uni­ver­sity in prepa­ra­tion for a career as a devel­oper. She started in land plan­ning ser­vic­ing sub­di­vi­sions with sew­ers and roads. She became a builder in 1997 when she estab­lished Berk­shire Homes with John Car­bone. “It was a nat­ural pro­gres­sion,” she says.

Berk­shire, BILD’s green builder of the year, just com­pleted a project of semi­cus­tom homes in the mid-$400,000 range on heav­ily treed lots near Bolton and Orangeville. “Envi­ron­men­tally sus­tain­able projects are the future of this busi­ness,” she says.

Like other com­pa­nies, Berk­shire has been hit by the eco­nomic down­turn, and while sales have slowed, Gor­don stresses she’s still on the look­out for devel­op­ment opportunities.

Sil­ver says that thanks to cus­tom work, she is not as finan­cially vul­ner­a­ble as peo­ple who build on spec. The Casa Loma home is her sixth major project since she started build­ing six years ago. She has a degree in inte­rior design and 13 years’ expe­ri­ence as a pro­fes­sional project manager.

“I was man­ag­ing multi-million dol­lar projects for a major tech­nol­ogy com­pany,” says Sil­ver, who is based in Toronto. “That’s a skill set that’s very adapt­able to building.”

Her foray into build­ing started with per­sonal projects. First she ren­o­vated her house. Then she hired a builder to con­struct a new fam­ily home. “When I saw what he did, I said to myself, ‘I can do this.’” So she sold that house and built another one on her own. Then she put up the Intra­build shingle.

Sil­ver is pleased about the pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship she has devel­oped with the male sub­con­trac­tors. “They like work­ing for me because I’m very orga­nized. I make their work eas­ier for them.”

She says a key skill she brings as a woman is her abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate effec­tively with the home­owner and the peo­ple in the trades. “I’m the liai­son between them. I’m try­ing to trans­late the client’s vision into an out­stand­ing fin­ished product.”

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