Feature Article

VOS: A GENTLEMAN AND A SCHOLAR

Written By: Krista Goheen
Published By: Calgary Real Estate News
Article Used with permission of the Calgary Real Estate Board. © Copyright Calgary Real Estate News, 2007
2006-02-02

Henry (Hank) Vos is the consummate family man, citing his 11 children with his wife, Mary, as his proudest accomplishment. Now a grandfather to 46 energetic grandkids, it’s a pretty good bet his growing family is just as proud of their head-of-the-family as he is of them. Now retired, Hank fondly describes this period of his life as: “Rounds of hotdogs, hamburgers and ice cream- celebrating birthdays and events in [my grandchildren’s] Christian lives.” Now known primarily as granddad, Hank is also known to many in the Calgary area as a pioneer in the real estate business- a true Legend of Real Estate.

Although Hank’s academic background was in the arts, he began his career in the mortgage business in Edmonton with a little firm called Ferguson’s Supply. There for only a few months, an opportunity became available in the accounting department of Interprovincial Pipeline as a ledger clerk. Hank spent three years with the company after deciding it was either time to develop his skills in the business or get into something else entirely.

Opportunity knocked. A good friend of his was a salesman with Melton Real Estate and he told Hank of an opening within the firm’s finance department; it was forming a mortgage division to finance real estate with private capital in the suburbs of Edmonton.

“This was the evolution of mortgage brokerage because it was a non-entity back in the ‘50s and was just the finance department of a real estate firm,” Hank says.

“I hired on Friday and my first day of work was in the finance department of Melton Real Estate. My second day of work was on Monday with Trans Canada Mortgage Corporation. It was the same desk, the same office, but everything was under a new direction.”

With this job, Hank was able to train as an appraiser and learn salesmanship. After two years with the firm, they decreed to open a branch in Calgary in 1956, offering him the opportunity to transfer to a little office located on 8 Ave, in a building that still stands today.

It was upon his move to Calgary, with two sons already and a daughter on the way, that Hank vowed to no longer work evenings, “…because I was in the parenting business,” he says. “There were some exceptions to that, of course, but evening work was never a part of my career venture because my first role was as a parent. With 11 children born over the span of 13 years, it was a busy household.”

Hank’s first experience with the Calgary Real Estate Board was his office’s close proximity to it- right across the hall from the board- but “with the firm, of course, being connected with real estate, the obvious association was to become involved with the real estate industry and that’s when I first met the irrepressible Frank Johns.”

Hank’s involvement with Melton at this time mainly involved undertaking appraisals for the benefit of mortgage lending.

Melton’s Real Estate division (which had moved to Calgary a few years prior to the move of its mortgage division) eventually sold its real estate entity to Royal LePage. The company, now called Melcor, is involved in land development and house construction.

The end of their mortgage activity happened in the mid-60s, “And that was the time I was compelled to make my bid for independence. It came to the end of the road and the door was about to close.”

In 1968, he became an independent mortgage broker, or what he calls a “lone ranger,” and moved back into the same office space he had occupied 15 years before with the Melton group to form the Scholar Mortgage Corporation.

But, there’s still a large piece of the puzzle that is Hank’s life missing. Because this wouldn’t be the story of Hank Vos without the component of his life that is so critical to his being- his family.

Working independently gave him and his wife the opportunity to develop the singing and performance skills of their children. From 1968 to 1976 the clan toured as The Vos Family Singers, winning a handful of Kiwanis Festival competitions and singing hits ranging from Broadway to the movies. They even commissioned a choreographer who had worked with the Young Canadians of the Calgary Stampede to help polish their performances.

In 1974, The Vos Family Singers performed at the World’s Fair in Spokane and went to Montreal in ’76 to sing at the Olympics. Additionally, the provincial government transported them to Winnipeg for a television performance “relative to when lotteries were just beginning. And when lotteries were beginning there was a big production, there was entertainment associated with the lottery and we were a part of that package.”

One year during Stampede the group performed four times a day for 10 days straight.

During their singing career they also performed at Edmonton’s Klondike Days and did a 45-day tour of Great Britain, “which wet the appetite for our children’s later desire to globetrot,” he says.

Hank fondly recalls this time in his family’s life and says it was a great boon to his and Mary’s parenting roles.

“In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s we were going through the same struggles society is going through today- we had six teenagers at the time- and they were all being challenged with the challenges of drugs and alcohol and our involvement as a singing group kept us so darn busy that [the kids] didn’t get into trouble.”

Of this time, he says, “Certainly we didn’t become rich and I don’t know whether we ever became famous but we considered ourselves to be rich and famous. We were rich in many ways but not in bank numbers.”

But hard times were yet to come for Scholar Mortgage Corporation with the real estate situation of the 1980s.

“It took four days in order to incorporate the firm; it took four years to discontinue the operation because the reverses of real estate values happened in 1981,” Hank says. “In 1981 we had a struggle to survive because the values had dropped by a third to 50% and mortgages were still at the stage that they were previously. We became property owners simply that we had to take over because of default on the part of the owners. This took us to a very unpleasant phase of life which was property management.”

Hank again found himself working in the evenings and decided it was time for another venture.

“That door in my life closed in 1985 and the experience prompted me to go back to my connection with the real estate industry and I tried to make my bid for success as a real estate salesman.”

For eight months in 1985 he worked with Royal LePage, the successors of the Melton organization.

He was not required to take any formal real estate training at the time: “I was grandfathered because of my background and experience. I had to take the exam but I qualified for a license. Even at that time I had already achieved the status of teacher within the industry. I was instructing mortgage financing through CREB, AREA and through continuing education at the University of Calgary.”

An opportunity appeared in 1986 to become an employee of the board as a director of education, in its old downtown location.

For over eight years, Hanks says, “It was a very very happy association. I was totally fulfilled in that.”

Hank retired from the business in 1994. Of the changes in the industry, Hank says he is most impressed by the advancements in technology. Nevertheless, he maintains that a guiding principle of the industry back when he was involved still rings true today.

“Even though technology has advanced dramatically over the last 50 years, it’s still very much a people industry and of course that is so very obvious in the people that do well are the people that are able to relate to [their clients],” he says.

“It’s the relationships that you make that makes a career interesting and makes it very worthwhile.”

This article was written for Calgary Real Estate News, a division of the Calgary Real Estate Board, for the series “Legends of Real Estate” showcasing important members of the Calgary Real Estate Board. Please visit the Calgary Real Estate Board online.This article is part of the collection of the Calgary Real Estate News. Please visit them online.