CALGARY

Bob Dhillon is one of Canada’s richest South Asian businessmen, his company Mainstreet Equity, has assets in excess of $1.2 billion consisting of 3,725 residential apartment units in Edmonton — 2,424 of them surrounding the Edmonton Arena District — making him the landlord to what he says calls a city benefiting from youth.
He was born in Japan and went to school for a few years in the Tallewal district of Barnala Punjab, India, before coming to Canada. His parents had a company that worked out of Liberia and when that country’s civil war left the family with nothing, he was forced to fend for himself.
While his mother worked night shifts for Canada Post, Dhillon paid his way through university buying, renovating and selling undervalued and foreclosed homes.
Mainstreet Equity, which went public in Canada in 2000, has been listed as the highest performing company on the Toronto Stock Exchange with overall returns of 1,270 percent over the last 10 years, Dhillon pointed out with a sense of pride.
Having visited India as part of the delegation of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and others in recent years, Dhillon says the new Narendra Modi government was making the right moves but a lot needed to be done.
“India needs trillions of dollars for infrastructure. Modi is making all the right moves but unfortunately execution goes at the state level.
“Black money is making the values artificially high. Real estate prices in India, based on world standards, are too high. It is artificial wealth. It’s beyond me why the Indian government won’t be wooing people like us to invest. Real estate market in India is neither free nor controlled market. You have to decide either way,” he said.
“For me, it has been an unbelievable journey. I never had an easy break, to be honest. Our Punjabi DNA is to own real estate. At least I am in the game. I am 100 percent self made.
“I have believed in diversification. I own an island in Belize, have a credit card processing company, merchant process companies and other businesses. These are pretty diverse things I do. But I have very strong roots with Punjab and India,” said Dhillon, who holds a MBA degree from Richard Ivey School of Business.
“I got into real estate and became a millionaire very early. I never had a job in my whole life. All I did was buy, develop, re-develop every type of real estate till I took my portfolio public,” said Dhillon, who studied in Shimla’s Bishop Cotton School from kindergarten till he was a teenager.
Dhillon, who has business interests in three continents, has written a book on Belize. “It’s a reference book on how (to) retire and do business in Belize,” he said. But Dhillon has no intention of retiring anytime soon. Despite owning an island and having the means to do so, he has miles to go before that happens.

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Bob Dhillon is a Punjabi Indian-Canadian Sikh, Multi-Millionaire real estate businessman and one of the richest Indians in Canada. His grandfather left for Hong Kong for business reasons and set-up the North China Shipping Company to carry back between Japan. He was born in Japan in 1965. As a small child he was sent back to India for his schooling, he was educated at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, he is a Punjabi speaker. After graduating from University, he went to complete his master degree (MBA) at Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario.
When he was doing his MBA at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, he was known among his classmates for his stated goal of becoming the world’s first Sikh billionaire.
His company, the publicly-listed Mainstreet, owns hundreds of apartment buildings in Calgary, Alberta; Surrey and Abbotsford, British Columbia, Toronto and elsewhere.
His assets are valued at over $650 million. He also owns a 2,700-acre island in Belize, where he is building what he calls an ‘architecturally-controlled oasis in the Caribbean’, with ‘resorts, condos, high-end houses, golf courses, residential lots’.