Chad Davidson is Traine’s Chief Operating Officer
KELOWNA – For many years, Traine built apartment buildings for clients. With their property management arm, Mainline Living, they’ve transitioned into building communities, and the future for both companies has never looked brighter.
Traine will celebrate its 25th anniversary in February by officially opening their new flagship community, a 187 suite rental apartment at the corner of Benvoulin Road and Copper Road in Kelowna, called Lavida.
“25 years is a huge milestone for us,” says Traine’s Chief Operating Officer Chad Davidson. “We started out as a construction company with a lot of resourcefulness, and we were known for building these communities faster than anybody. We’ve tried to maintain that identity all the way through, and we relay that resourcefulness into how we do business today, now also as a developer and property manager.”
Traine holds the majority of the rental communities they build in their own portfolio. They buy the land, develop the project, construct it, and own and manage it for the long-term.
They don’t refer to the apartments as units but as suites; occupants are referred to as residents, not tenants.
“We believe that our residents aren’t just looking for short term accommodation, but that they are looking to establish a home for themselves,” he adds. “We put on large-scale, monthly events in our common areas and provide different ways to introduce our residents to each other to foster that feeling of home. We survey our residents on a regular basis to see what’s important to them, as we’re trying to build a community for them.
“We want people to really enjoy where they live, and feel that connection with other residents. We have three core commitments: Quality, Customer Service and Connectedness. When we measure any new initiative or process, we look through this lens, and we view connectedness as an equal measure to customer service and quality.”
Traine is a family business owned by founders Matt and Lori Butler. Their original head office was in the Edmonton area, and they moved to Kelowna over a decade ago. Davidson joined the company in 2016 after working for many years in construction and development.
For many years, Traine was a construction company, working with developers to bring purpose built rental projects to market. In 2015 they transitioned to doing things on their own. Since then, Traine has been developing rental apartments all over Alberta and British Columbia for the past decade, and they’ve recently ventured in Ontario. They own assets in Brantford, Kitchener, Kamloops, Kelowna, the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island.
Davidson says the Kelowna flagship concept came about “because we wanted to establish a community that is close to our head office and use it as a new product testing ground and staff training centre, giving new team members a sense of what we do and how we do it.
“At Traine, all of our department heads meet at least once a week, and our teams work seamlessly together on solving problems. We don’t have the mindset of ‘my job’s done so here you go’ that often happens when third parties are involved.”
Lavida features 187 suites in Kelowna
Despite the many challenges of Covid, Davidson observes that the company has grown quickly in the last 3-5 years. They have anywhere from 800 to 1,200 suites under construction at any given time, and by the end of 2025, they will have just under 1,800 suites in their management portfolio.
“We really control every phase of a new rental community, from finding land that meets our criteria to developing communities with the latest features, to moving our eventual Residents into their homes” he states, adding that having everything done in-house helps make projects more affordable due to vertical integration and accompanying efficiencies. “We know what people are looking for, and what they do and don’t like. Because we control the design, we can make sure that those wants and needs are incorporated into everything we build.
“Once a project is completed and we turn it over to our internal management arm, it’s a seamless hand-off,” he adds. “Our property management team has already had a hand in helping design the product, so they have something they believe in as well.”