BC real estate and lending practice cut the admin drag and expanded its reach across the province
Flexible office space isn’t about cutting rent; it’s about buying back time, says BC lawyer Rocky Kim.
After years of grinding through one- to two-hour commutes into downtown Vancouver and leaving the office late, he realized he was doing everything a partner does without real control over how or where he worked. “You hit an inflection point in your career where you realize that you're doing everything, from the client consultation initially, all the way to the conclusion of the file,” he says. Once he had also learned the operational side of the business, hiring, managing and billing, staying inside someone else’s structure stopped making sense.
Kelowna offered a way out that was both personal and strategic. Kim had lived there before, had friends and a support system in place and kept finding reasons to stay longer each summer, until he and his wife decided to rent out their Lower Mainland home and make the move permanent. The draw was shorter commutes, lower housing costs and a business environment he believed he could grow into. “Kelowna is incredible. It's a four-season playground,” he says, adding that the city “punches above its weight” with strong business activity and modest traffic, and that the cost of living allowed him to buy “a much larger house because you can afford to buy a lot more house when the prices are a lot more modest.”
Leaving Vancouver’s downtown office towers did not mean shrinking his practice. Kim rebuilt his firm around lending and real estate work that can be delivered from anywhere, backed by a flexible-office model that treats space as a tool rather than a sunk cost. On the lending side, he acts for mortgage investment corporations and other funds as well as big banks, and that work, he notes, “can be done entirely from really anywhere” because the clients are institutional and instructions arrive by email or phone rather than in a boardroom.
The piece that still demands physical presence is residential real estate, which he has turned into an argument for flexibility rather than a constraint. Retail clients have nine-to-five jobs and limited time, and provincial rules still require many land title documents to be signed in person, so instead of forcing everyone into downtown Kelowna or Vancouver, Kim has built a signing network around the Regus system and mobile agents. “We offer all of our clients [who] need to sign in person remote signing opportunities, where we send a signing agent to either their home or a location nearby them,” he says, and when clients prefer not to invite a stranger into their house, they can meet at a nearby Regus office that is added to his membership.
What he refuses to do is push sensitive financial conversations into public spaces for convenience. Other firms, he observes, are happy to close matters in coffee shops, but when the work involves debt consolidation, refinances and other personal issues, confidentiality and dignity matter more than latte access. “I don't love the coffee shop idea,” he says, because even if signing agents are not giving legal advice, “there are some personal details, and… they want to chat about some things,” and that requires a private room, not a table beside the espresso machine.
Inside his main Kelowna site, privacy takes the form of locked offices within a larger, flexible-floor network, a crucial nuance for lawyers who might assume co-working means hot desks and exposed floors. Kim pays extra for an enclosed space across a cluster of rooms that only his team can access, with separate fobs for the building and each unit, a secure boardroom for client meetings and the ability to add more rooms as he grows. The contract is not a three-, five- or ten-year commercial lease; it is a short-term arrangement that can be expanded or reconfigured in months rather than years.
He now receives regular referrals from brokers and colleagues who need someone central in the Okanagan who can meet clients in places like Princeton and Lumby without forcing them to travel for hours to a larger centre. One Princeton client told him that after the lawyer who drove in every three weeks retired, the entire community had no lawyer, leaving residents struggling to refinance homes, commission affidavits, or sign basic documents.
By being in Kelowna several weeks a month, layering mobile signing agents on top of his own travel and anchoring the whole model in secure, flexible offices rather than scattered coffee shops, he positions the firm where traditional urban leases would never reach.
If there is a single misconception that he is eager to kill, it is the assumption that flexible space is a discount option. “I don't think you should approach it from the perspective that you'll be saving money,” he says, arguing that the real value is that “everything will be taken care of for you that you would find traditionally being taken care of by administrative staff at a big firm,” from internet and IT to photocopying and security, which all cost time to arrange. When he launched, he tracked his time “like I was in the military” and discovered he was burning 20 to 30 hours a week on administrative work, at which point he knew he was “probably running a business that's going to be run into the ground” unless he hired quickly and pushed that work down.
He has done exactly that, building a structure in which outsourced building services and in-house staff absorb the operational load, leaving him, as he puts it, focused on billable legal work, profitable from month one, and still expanding his lawyer base. “If I were to talk to another lawyer about thinking about going off on their own, I would say. It's all about efficiency, not necessarily about cost saving,” he says.
This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, which can also be found here:
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