Daniel Sax Sensi Properties
Tell us about Sensi Properties. What do you do? Sensi Properties was founded as the first cannabis real estate investment company in Canada. We focus on helping licensed producers (LPs) and other federally regulated players grow by freeing up the capital that’s trapped in their real estate. Sensi invests alongside the LPs in their real estate, providing a non-dilutive capital solution and allowing them to focus on an already complex and risky business. We allow them to take some of that risk off the table and grow without watering themselves down from an ownership perspective. The LPs become tenants and can invest that capital back into a business that will produce a much higher return than that of the real estate. I think it’s the fairest deal in the space, since none of the value for these companies comes from the ownership of the real estate, but rather the use of it. Sensi is active in the acquisition, development and financing of cannabis
10
PA P E R S
real estate across the value chain, from cultivation, manufacturing and distribution. Tell us your start-up story: when and how did you get into the cannabis sector? I began investing in the public space with a stockbroker who was really into it back in mid to late 2016, and later into some private companies. As an investor, I watched myself get diluted down as these companies raised equity capital to put it into real estate they didn’t need to own in the first place. This approach to capital, having spent my whole career in real estate investment and finance, made no sense to me, so out of frustration I launched Sensi Properties to try and fix what I saw as broken. In that way, it’s a typical entrepreneurial story. In the end I focused on an area that no one else was serving, and that I already had a deep expertise in. It was the marriage of two things I love, opportunistic real estate investing and cannabis.
