A message from our President

There has been a great deal of speculation about what the Volkswagen battery plant announcement means for St. Thomas and area.

With a projected 3,000 direct jobs at the facility and an estimated 30,000 additional indirect jobs in the supply area, there is no doubt that this will have a transformational impact upon our community, as well as the many other surrounding communities where people will choose to live, work, play and generally enjoy our wonderful quality of life.

Volkswagen officials have been very clear that our community trails, quality of housing and what our community has to offer were significant contributing factors in their choosing St. Thomas for this historic investment.

Certainly, as a homebuilder, such an unprecedented investment in our community will present challenges to both meet the demand and meet our expectations of performance. Here at DTL we are having regular quality control training meetings to ensure that the quality of our homes not only does not diminish, but that we continue on the path of continual improvement.

This is one of the reasons that I wrote my upcoming book “From Bleeding Edge to Leading Edge: A Builders Guide to Net Zero Homes”, because I recognized the need for a blueprint of how to build more sustainably. I was originally commissioned by Natural Resources Canada to write this guide back in 2019, so it’s with a great sense of accomplishment, and a little bit of impatience, that I work through the publisher’s edits so we can finally share the book with the builder community and industry stakeholders.

But this investment in our community represents another historic opportunity; a once in a lifetime chance to expand our community trail network along the east, north and central parts of St. Thomas. Two summers ago, during the height of covid, there were over 1 million users of the trail network within St. Thomas. These are trails that did not exist 10 years ago. This usage is a testament of the Field of Dreams concept “If you build it, they will come”.

At Doug Tarry Homes, we look forward to these opportunities and the challenges that they represent as we continue to build and develop housing and communities that people are proud to call home.