About Peter Freed

WHAT INTERESTS PETER FREED ABOUT DEVELOPMENT?
THE SHORT ANSWER IS: EVERYTHING.

Born and bred in Toronto, Peter is re-imagining the city with his own brand of design-based development. A self-made entrepreneur, one who is constantly inspired by what he calls an “obsession” with each and every detail of the design and building process, Peter started, literally, from the ground up.

In 1995, Peter founded his own construction company, Freed Development Corp., and started building custom homes. In 1997, with the help of an investor, Freed assembled a package of land in North York and began building town homes. And so it begins.

Fascinated by architecture, contemporary art, fashion and music and inspired by his travels, Peter imagines the possibilities of a site and its potential. In 2000, just as Toronto’s King Street West district began attracting creative agencies with its abandoned, brick-and-beam warehouses and the first signs of an entertainment district began to emerge, Peter immediately grasped its possibilities.

“Just like New York’s meatpacking district, it had all the elements that would attract the kind of people who are at one with everything the city has to offer,” says Peter. The ground was broken for 66 Portland, Peter’s first attempt at an “urban playground where people can live, work and play” in 2003. Since then, Peter has crafted a community of nine design-centric buildings, each with their own unique attitude, within nine city blocks of the district.

From a company of one, Peter now heads a vertically and horizontally integrated progressive lifestyle company with 650 employees over several divisions that is quickly approaching a billion dollars in development. He has won numerous design awards, been recognized nationally and was recently named CEO of the Year at the 2010 Design Exchange Awards. Peter has emerged as Canada’s premier lifestyle developer—a pioneer who bridges the gap between design, architecture and the experience he wants his buyers to have in the environments he creates. Explaining Freed Development’s success in the Toronto condo market, Peter says, “People are tired of the old commodity-type offering that’s prevailed for far too long.”

Whereas a traditional condo developer might consider his or her project a success, when, in Peter’s words, “the phone finally stopped ringing at the end of construction,” in the Freed vision, the relationship is turned on its head, so that his buyers become invested in a long-term relationship involving restaurants, retail and a concierge model, in which his buyers become the stakeholders.

Says Peter: “We want to overdeliver. We approach all our projects that way. At the end of the day, what is important is that we are creating something—one building at a time.”