Pinnacle International

Pinnacle International is a developer founded in 1976, owned and led by Michael De Cotiis as president and chief executive. Over roughly fifty years it has delivered more than 7,000 residences.

The business spans acquisition, development, construction and management, which means Pinnacle handles a project from land purchase through to running the finished building rather than handing each stage to somebody else.

Master-planned communities: condominium residences at scale, usually alongside retail and commercial space, and in some cases hotels.

The distinguishing feature is size. Pinnacle tends not to build a single tower on a single lot. It assembles a site large enough for several towers and builds them out in phases over many years, with the amenity, retail and public realm planned across the whole thing.

Three markets: Toronto, Vancouver and San Diego. In Toronto its most visible work is on the downtown waterfront and at Yonge and Harbour, where its projects have added some of the taller residential towers in the city.

The Vancouver connection matters to how the company is often described. Pinnacle operates on both coasts, so a Toronto buyer is dealing with a national company rather than a purely local one.

It means the thing you are buying into is not finished when you move in, and will not be for years.

The upside is that later phases usually price higher than earlier ones, and the amenity and retail the whole community was planned around eventually arrives. The downside is that you live beside active construction in the meantime, and the views a phase one sales centre shows you may be built out by a later phase.

Neither is a reason to avoid a phased community. It is a reason to ask exactly what is approved for the rest of the site, and what height, before you sign.

Ask what else is approved on the site and at what height, and ask to see it on the approved plan rather than the marketing rendering.

Ask about the construction sequence: which phase you are in, what is being built next, and roughly when.

On a large condominium, ask how long registration took in their recent Toronto buildings and what maintenance fees have done since. On a building with hundreds of suites, the reserve fund study is worth reading properly.

Then the usual: deposit schedule, parking and locker, what is standard rather than an upgrade, and the interim occupancy terms.