The Zen of Andrea Eng
A self-professed "deal junkie," Andrea Eng capitalized on her prowess of doing business in both Western and Eastern ways.
I am “omming” with Andrea Eng, who has invited me to join her at a busy Kitsilano yoga studio. While tackling the downward dog, fire hydrant and cobra poses, we are supposed to be seeking our “higher truths.” My mind, however, is madly wandering, for none of my research on Eng, with her reputation as the pin-up of Vancouver’s real estate boom during the post-stagflation era of the ’80s and early ’90s, could have prepared me for hearing her espouse yoga’s unmaterialistic, ego-free virtues.
Eng made her name as a commercial real estate broker at the epicentre of a city that, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, was being bought up by Hong Kong investors to the tune of $3 billion annually. A Chinese-Canadian born in Vancouver, she emerged as one of the city’s most significant cross-cultural connectors, capitalizing on a fluency in Cantonese and a deftness at both Western and Eastern ways of doing business.
“Few people really wanted to deal with these investors at the time because they couldn’t speak English and people thought they spoke as if they had marbles in their mouths,” the 53-year-old Eng says matter-of-factly. “But for me, it was easy: I spoke the language and understood the culture, so I was really keen. I became a kind of cultural translator to help them adapt. Here they were, wanting to invest in Vancouver, and they thought, ‘Hey, she’s one of us.’ ” Or as her friend Steve Wyatt (the playboy once romantically linked to Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and son of the oil tycoon, Oscar Wyatt) once told her: “You think like one of us, but you look like one of them!”
Eng’s signature deals were myriad in a city fast earning the moniker “Hongcouver” due to the mass immigration preceding the U.K.-to-China handover. Working for Colliers International Property Consultants Inc. from 1980 to 1993, she sold the Hotel Georgia three times, and sold some 50 highrise buildings in Vancouver’s West End (the equivalent of 70 per cent of total commercial sales in the area) – including marquee oceanfront properties such as Tudor Manor, Eugenia Place and Surfside. She was also a prolific networker and, undeniably, a canny self-promoter. “When our reporters and photographers came back from charitable, political and business events of any magnitude, there she would be – seemingly floating among the assembled heavy hitters,” recalls Malcolm Parry, former editor of Vancouver magazine. And she was always smiling, he notes – “Not the riveted-on beam of the national beauty queen we knew she’d been, but the half-surprised smile of someone who just found out that everyone else’s eyes were on her. You simply knew from her style and expression that here was someone who could set a goal, achieve it and then set a tougher one.” Yet Eng’s media reach extended beyond the society columns in Vancouver magazine, the Vancouver Sun and Hong Kong Tatler. Soon she was garnering widespread fame within the business press too, including a BCBusiness cover story in March 1988, which introduced her as a “high priestess of B.C.’s new religion – Asian investment”; and a June 1993 cover story in Financial Post Magazine, which branded her “broker to the billionaires.” (Though not everyone embraced her fame: she was often criticized for promoting herself rather than Colliers.)
Nineteen ninety-three was also the year the omnipresent broker faded from Vancouver’s radar. After more than a decade at the top of the local game, Eng decided to go international, spending the next 10 years working on and off in real estate, among other roles, in London, New York, Toronto, Singapore and Hong Kong. She wanted a change of scenery after the ending of her childless, six-year marriage to Vancouver labour lawyer Gabriel Somjen and moved to Hong Kong as global real estate fund manager for Pacific Century Group (PCG), the property arm of Richard Li. Li, the billionaire founder of STAR Group Ltd., the world’s first satellite television network, had heard about Eng’s reputation in Vancouver. His father Li Ka-shing, the renowned Hong Kong magnate and one of the world’s richest men, had purchased the Expo 86 site in 1988 for $277 million (the single largest land deal in Vancouver’s history). And it was in Hong Kong that Eng scouted her most significant property: Richard Li’s new home. She was originally looking at a house in the high-octane Shek O waterfront district for inclusion in the PCG portfolio, but the boss liked it so much he bought it for himself. “It has since become his signature property and my biggest coup as a deal-maker,” Eng says without hesitation.
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