Life
Wall was born to a German Mennonite family in Ukraine, and he spent his childhood in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria. In 1948, he moved to Canada with his mother and five siblings. The family settled in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Wall enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1958, where he studied chemistry but did not graduate. Given C$6,000 by his mother to build a house, he sold the finished product for $13,000 before she had moved in. He later claimed he "discovered right then how easy it was to make money in the real-estate business". Despite his early exit from academia, he donated $15 million to UBC in 1991, at the time the largest private donation it had received. The university used the gift to found the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1995, UBC awarded Wall an honorary doctorate. His degree citation credited him with "a creative and innovative mind which allows him to bring unconventional solutions to otherwise insoluble problems".
Wall has regularly been ranked as the highest-paid executive in Vancouver. In both 1998 and 1999, he earned $1.4 million, although in some years he has earned less, because his salary is linked to the firm's pre-tax profits. Frequently called "flamboyant", according to journalist Drew Hasselback, he is known for his "outspoken opinions, designer clothes, German accent, in-your-face enthusiasm and self-confessed love of spending money". In 2007, The Vancouver Sun interviewed Wall as he leant on the fender of a special-edition Bentley Turbo R sedan. He said that it cost "$300,000 or $320,000 but – what's it matter? – they're only worth a hundred, anyway". The newspaper dubbed him the "Condo King".
Wall's approach to business has sometimes caused conflict. He reportedly admitted, "I have been a bit impulsive at times and I do want to be more respectful of my fellow man". On occasion, he has been impulsively generous. According to an anecdote reported in The Vancouver Sun, in 2002 he gave a Rolls Royce convertible to a friend to save him from having to walk to a meeting.
Read more about this topic: Peter Wall (property Developer)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Thou art a toilsome mole, or less,
A moving mist;
But life is what none can express,
A quickness which my God hath kissed.”
—Thomas Stanley (1625–1678)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“The American father ... is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)