“We design, build, and sell homes that people can afford,” Ian says. “We’re trying to make the dream of home ownership attainable for more people. That’s why we started the company. That’s why we do what we do.” Ian co-founded and operates the company with his wife Anne, who’s been a local realtor for the last decade. Prior to starting AIM, neither Ian nor Anne had backgrounds in construction – when they originally came over from South Africa, they were working in information technology. After arriving in Canada in the late 1990s, however, they looked around for housing and found that most of it was unaffordable. “We thought that there had to be a better way of getting into home ownership,” he recalls. “There also had to be a way to deliver better products than we were seeing at the time. So we took it from there.” From the beginning, Ian and Anne’s goal with AIM has been to create ‘attainable’ homes – they prefer the word ‘attainable’ to affordable, because as Ian says, “any home is affordable if you have the right amount of money.” “We focus on attainability. That means putting together homes for the average family with the average income.” To achieve that attainability, AIM focuses on infill projects, because they have found that the only way to create reasonably-priced land is to take lots that previously had single-family homes and convert them into lots with multiple units – typically by building duplexes, triplexes, or four-plexes. By doing that, DECEMBER 2022
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