Niho - Back to the Land

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Back to the Land

Wendy Stueck, Business in Vancouver, September 27 - October 3, 1994

When Rudy Nielsen's career hit the wall and left him close to $1 million in debt, he turned to the wilderness for solace. What he found was a new business that has made him one of the biggest realtors in BC.

Last spring, a helicopter dropped Rudy Nielsen at a coastal property he owns on the east edge of Cape Scott Park, a 15,000-hectare wilderness on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Seven days later, it picked him up on the other side- rested, calm and ready for another round of deal making in the urban jungle.

"I am a firm believer in nature," Nielsen says. Back in the city, he fights off corporate torpor by wearing jeans and plaid shirts in his New Westminster office, where vintage photos, a cowhide, and antler create a bunkhouse effect. A large hunting knife is stuck in the top of his expansive wooden desk.

"Every year, I take a sabbatical, just to get my head back together- figure out where I'm going, what's important."

It's taken considerable bushwhacking, but Nielsen's passion for nature- and an old-fashioned regard for land and its stewardship- has made Niho Land & Cattle Co. Ltd. one of the largest and most innovative realtors in the province. From his base in New Westminster, Niho buys and sells property throughout BC. Its holdings range from small riverside plots to Interior ranch properties a mile square or larger. Niho is self- sufficient, a one stop shop for back-to-the-landers, weekend campers and foreigners who dream of the frontier.

Tell Nielsen your specification- say, 10 acres, Peace River country, some water frontage, a decent stand of timber and access via gravel road- and he'll find it for you. Want to get a feel for the property before you make a visit? Niho has colour prints, maps and aerial photos on file for most of its properties; copies are available for a small fee.

Need financing? Niho runs a lease to purchase program for sites going for under $10,000. If the property you want is on Niho's books for $10,000 or more, the company may write you a mortgage. (typical terms are 25 percent cash down, and competitive rates.)

Niho even runs a trade in program: In most cases, buyers can trade in unaltered property within a year of purchase and get credit towards a new plot from Niho's catalogue. The company will also consider, on a per-case basis, trade-ons on properties purchased more than a year ago.

And as dreams go, Niho's are relatively affordable: Prices in the company's Summer 1994 catalogue range from $1,900 for a 30 by 40 foot lot in the Kootenay townsite of Nashville to $250,000 for 134 acres on Porcher Island, 15 miles south of Prince Rupert.

In the early days of Niho, which was founded in 1972, Nielsen scouted sites and properties himself, four-wheeling in over logging trails, scouting out salmon streams and timber stands. These days, his holdings have got ahead of him: He has sites on the Queen Charlotte Islands which he has not yet seen.

In heading for the hills to make his fortune, Nielsen was, in many ways, going home. Now 53, he was born in Prince George, where his stepfather was a trapper. Nielsen got his first gun when he was 12, and grew up bagging moose, deer, and caribou. "We had a 21 cubic foot freezer," he recalls. "My job was to fill it."

Prince George was a rough town in those days. His mother alarmed by his poor school record and a tendency to scrap, shipped him and his two brothers off to boarding school. Once over the culture shock, Nielsen thrived at St. George's School in Vancouver: He became an avid rugby player and was named sportsman of the year in Grade 12.

After high school, Nielsen headed back to Prince George, signing up for forestry jobs that took him into that bush for weeks at a stretch. By this time, forestry and mining were turning northern BC into boom territory, and in 1964, Nielsen decided to go along for the ride. He obtained his commercial realtor's license, and began buying and selling office buildings and apartment blocks in Prince George and other northern town.

For 16 years, business went nowhere but up. Then came 1980, and a recession that yanked the rug from under BC's economy. Single-industry towns were particularly hard-hit. Office blocks and apartments in places like Quesnel suddenly looked about desirable as Rocky Mountain fever. Nielsen came close to bankruptcy: Most of his properties went back to his lenders, but even after those were dispersed, he still faced a debt load he now says was close to $1 million.

With his two sons in tow - his first marriage ended in divorce at about the same time their business failed - he moved to Vancouver. One of the few assets he managed to hang onto was Niho, a holding company he formed in 1972 to purchase nine islands in the Fraser River at Crescent Spur between Prince George and McBride. He liked to go there to regroup, teaching his boys Darin and Dean, how to navigate white water in a canoe, to hunt and fish.

He had also held onto his real estate license, and managed to sell half-a-dozen properties and clear some of his debt.

"I didn't want to go bankrupt, even though my accountant said I should. I created those debts. And it's helped me in my deals- when I have made deals up north, I have done $300,000 deals on a handshake. So that helped me through."

He sold his islands and netted enough cash to pay off all his creditors, and the move got him thinking: The wild country had always been his inspiration- perhaps it would make a business.

"I was determined that I was not going to get back into a business where I was going to be that small fish in a big pond."

He began to invest in recreational sites throughout the province. Financing was scraped together in $3,000 lots from "investors" who would put up the cash for Nielsen to buy a property. Nielsen would then usually find some way to get revenue out of it, often through timber sales.

"Most people look at a piece of land and see rock or bush. I walk in and find what's unique about it- peat moss, gravel, a little cabin on a stream. A patch of timber that's worth a fortune. So I take that out, and leave the rest,. Make it look nice. I look at it as a homestead for people.

"In 1986, we owned three pieces of land. By 1992, we owned 360." By 1992, Niho also had clear title to the vast majority of its sites. All but a handful of original investors had been bought out, and Nielsen decided it was time to sell some property.

At the heart of Niho's operations is its database, a custom-tailored marvel put together over the past 12 years. Nielsen had an idea for a computer system that would knit pertinent information about a property- its location, current owners, liens or mortgages, major topographical features- into a seamless database. But hunts around town for capital to build such a system proved fruitless, and Nielsen eventually decided to forage ahead on its own.

That choice proved the right one for Niho, which now sits on a powerful tool. Using it, Niho can find out which sites in a certain area are subject to foreclosure, for example. A couple of keystrokes can show you who your potential neighbors would be and what kind of timber is on the land. It cross-references 64 types of information.

The rustic look of Niho's offices belies its high tech tools. Darin, 29, a largely self-taught technical whiz, has been chief designer of the system, which is being constantly upgraded. Nine PCs are linked with two servers that pack six gigabytes of storage space. More than 1,500 digital maps are on the system, as are frequently updated satellite images. Timber piracy is a big problem in some out-of-the-way reaches in the property; a sat-map can tell you if the stand of aspen that the forestry maps record your property is, in fact, still standing.

The system now includes every rural property in BC. Dean, 31, who's more on the deal-making side of the company, won't put a figure on how much Niho has invested in the system. "We started putting together the database in 1982, so that's a good 12 years of development. It's been a considerable cost."

Niho's database is the real sleeper in the company's operations, says Ozzie Jurock, the former president and CEO of National Real Estate Service (NRS) who now runs Jurock Publishing, a real estate consulting and information firm.

"What he is able to do, in terms of sorting and providing information, represents a real business opportunity. He could clone that system and sell it to others."

Nielsen has considered that option, and is trying to find the time to sort out a business plan to market Niho's technical expertise, but at the moment, he has his hands full. The company expected 50 calls a week when it began to sell it properties; these days it's fielding that many in a day.

And efforts to figure out a way to market his database won't come at the expense of his hard-won lifestyle, which is all about family. He is now remarried, to Joanne, who maxed out her credit card to help him buy his first computer. His mother, who loaned him $40,000 to get back on his feet, gets a director's fee from Niho and often drives in to Nielsen's office from her Maple Ridge home with a picnic lunch. With Dean and Darin, Nielsen likes to get out in the country and play with toys like Caterpillars and heavy-duty trucks. Fishing and hunting trips are frequent pleasures, as are regular retreats to the Nulki Lake Ranch, nine miles out of Vanderhoof. The 3,000-acre property has over four miles of water frontage on two lakes, and over the past four years, Nielsen has cleared an airstrip and added improvements including a nine hole golf course. Some cabins have been built, and Nielsen's long term plans include a resort with "lots of things to do," like four-wheeling through mudpits and fly-fishing at hidden lakes.

He bridles at the suggestion that Niho, by encouraging more people to own their little piece of the planet, may be threatening the wilderness that he loves. Less than six percent of the land in BC is privately owned, he says. Vast government holdings - and the rugged nature of much of the province's hinterlands- ensure that the backwoods retreats will be around for the next generation. Besides, he maintains, by buying and improving rural properties - often left in desperate shape by private logging operations- Niho is adding value to a natural resource, not taking it away.

He's not modest about what he and his family have accomplished, but seems to be one of that rare breed, the man who has found redemption in his own backyard.

"I wanted to stay close to my boys, and do something that I really enjoyed doing. I looked for a business probably for a couple of years. And there was Niho under my nose all the time."