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:
“Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way as gives us breath:
Such a Truth as ends all strife:
Such a Life as killeth death.”
—George Hebert (1593–1633)
“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)