Homegrown Success: In Conversation with George Carras, Founder of R-LABS

Born and raised in Toronto, George, the son of Greek immigrants, had strong values and entrepreneurial drive instilled in him early on.

“My parents had the courage to leave their home country and the grit to build a better future in a new country, Canada, that they saw being full of tremendous opportunity,” explains George. “They raised my sister and me with love and endless support to aspire, get a great education and use it to make an impact and give back.”

George studied civil engineering at University of Waterloo. “You couldn’t help but be empowered and inspired by technology at Waterloo, and the co-op program put that education to work in a range of areas in the industry to help you find your start.”

George 1.0 began his career in 1989, leveraging his civil engineering and co-op experience in real estate development and investment. “The timing was both terrible and great,” he reflects. “The real estate market had crashed, and the industry was being forced to restructure. I saw the problem as an opportunity, and I was in the right place at the right time to try something new to fix it.”

Real estate investments are about making decisions that involve big dollars and yet the industry had very little information infrastructure to support those decisions.

Finding the courage to leave his job and start RealNet, George 2.0, the first-time founder, was born. It was also the dawn of the internet era. “RealNet was founded in my belief that if you could better inform smart people, they would make better decisions. And if better decisions were made consistently over time, you could make better markets and better markets would fix everything,” he says.

RealNet grew over 20 years to become the go-to and official source of information for the commercial real estate and new home industry across Canada, improving the decisions of over 45,000 industry professionals.

“I found myself in a unique position,” says George. “Real estate and housing was headed into a massive undersupply crisis, the industry couldn’t make enough housing, and I could see through my briefings with industry and government stakeholders that no one was actually in charge to solve that problem. No matter how much better information could be created, no one was equipped to fix the big problems ahead.”

He sold RealNet in 2014 and set out to become George 3.0. With the freedom of time, he shuttled between Toronto and San Francisco. His daughters, also studying engineering at University of Waterloo, were co-oping in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “They would go to work, and I would go to school.” George enrolled in courses at UC Berkeley, and through a series of new relationships learned the power of venture building and the potential it had to create value and make an impact.

He knew that building a company to solve a big problem is a proven and powerful way to make an impact and create value. But what if you could co-found multiple companies, each solving a specific problem, each with a business model that would make money?

“The industry needed a platform to bring forward the game-changing innovation that was needed,” George says. “A place where innovative corporations, institutions and entrepreneurs could partner to do the things that could not be done before.”

R-LABS was founded in 2018 as the real estate industry venture builder with four partners. In the last six years R-LABS has grown to include 22 partners, 35 ventures, and five companies.

R-LABS is about partnering with innovative corporations and entrepreneurs and through enlightened self-interest create a return on investment and a return on society (R-LABS = ROI + ROS). Through R-LABS, game-changing companies – like Assembly, co-founded by R-LABS – industry entrepreneurs and innovators are finding new solutions to housing problems, creating new jobs and increasing Canadian productivity.

“Real estate and housing is something we are literally all in together: consumers, industry and government,” explains George.

According to UC Berkeley’s Jerry Engel (author of the book Global Clusters of Innovation), we are in the early stage formation of a global cluster of innovation in real estate and housing here in Toronto.

With the launch of the global first, Industry Innovation Agenda this year, George sees the Toronto Region (a manufacturing supercluster) becoming known less for its housing unaffordability and more as a place where real innovation happens and global game-changing companies in real estate and housing are created.

“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together,” George says. “We have far to go and this long-term journey is about winning and learning together.”