Our People

The foundation of the Tri City Group of Companies is its owner, Michael Goodman. His principles, vision, ideology about home building, and the way he does business are carefully woven into the Company. Quality, style, and value are key fundamentals in every project developed by the Tri City Group of Companies. Customer satisfaction is essential.

(see Full Bio below for more…)

Michael Goodman

  • The foundation of the Tri City Group of Companies is its owner, Michael Goodman. His principles, vision, ideology about home building, and the way he does business are carefully woven into the Company. Quality, style, and value are key fundamentals in every project developed by the Tri City Group of Companies. Customer satisfaction is essential.

    Michael started building houses with his father Henry in mid-1960s. Henry was a master craftsman who could build the most intricate buildings which he learned how to do by doing. Henry built houses, commercial retail, and apartment buildings. In those days carpenters used to build much more parts of building than they do today. Master craftsmen used to build window casements, and kitchen cabinets for example. They learned the fine skills of custom carpentry. Henry did not like shoddy work, so he always insisted on doing this fine woodwork himself and overseeing all aspects of construction. In the Goodman household, there were always a workshop and cabinet-making tools along with all the equipment that was required to build a first-class home. Michael can remember being handed a paint brush at nine years old and being instructed on how prep a surface to achieve a first-class paint job.

    Henry also had a tremendous passion for wooden boats. So, son like father, Michael developed a passion for wooden boats, their fine design, and special post and beam wood homes. There is nothing more complicated than wooden boat building and repair. As a result, Michael took all the woodshop and drafting courses he could throughout high school. Michael then worked his way through university working on the houses that his father was building through the family construction business. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, Michael joined the carpenter’s union and worked on one house project after another, ranging from building to renovations. During this period, Michael continued building and renovating sailboats and floating houses on his own, furthering his craftsmanship and his passion. Check out the love of his life. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Cresset.php"

    Michael’s passion for marine woodwork and floating homes eventually brought him to the purchase of waterfront property on which he could build a floating home marina. The marina had all the elements of a subdivision, including elevated wharves, servicing, and complicated floating docks. All the services ran in the docks, and they were heated so they would not freeze. He then proceeded to build two floating homes for himself on concrete barges. Michael often tells the story about one home that weighed 250,000 lbs. and was three stories high, which he built on the bank of the Fraser River. He then loaded all the furniture into the house and used a house-moving dolly to roll it down the bank and into the Fraser River. This was a clever plan which avoided moving all the furniture and house contents down a steep ramp and a long dock walk to where the house was eventually moored in the marina. You can see the blue and white house at Riversbend Marina on the main page of the website. www.riversbendfloatinghomevillage.com.

    In the early 1980’s Michael started to purchase and renovate old apartment properties and houses from top to bottom. Between the mid-1980s and 2007, he renovated many houses, built the marina, renovated 12 apartment buildings and over 200 apartments before meeting Len Schellenberg in 1998. Len was an Okanagan builder who had been building houses, stores, and apartments since the early 1960s. Together, Michael and Len developed the Okanagan Breeze subdivision in Vernon located at 6450 Okanagan Landing Rd, Okanagan Landing, Vernon, BC. Prior to building the houses, they first needed to install $3 million dollars of offsite services. From there they designed and built model homes for the 67 lots. You can see brochure on the project by clicking here.

    Like Henry, Michael does not like poor-quality work. Driven by his sense of aesthetics from his fine arts training, he strives to provide a quality product. When Michael and his brother Dean, a well-known Toronto architect get together for a vacation they spend their time talking shop and traveling around looking at construction details in every interesting building they can find.

    Michael and his team’s ultimate passion is to help you achieve your life’s dream in your new dream home situated in one of these beautiful lots in the Upper Mission District of Kelowna.

John Orr, P. Eng

John is from a long line of carpenters and builders. He remembers as a child being on his grandfather’s job sites straightening nails and being a “Go-‘fer” and has had every role in construction from pounding nails to raising 10's of millions of dollars for construction projects.

(see Full Bio below for more…)

  • John is from a long line of carpenters and builders.  He remembers as a child being on his grandfather’s job sites straightening nails and being a “Go-‘fer” and has had every role in construction from pounding nails to raising 10's of millions of dollars for construction projects.  

     John grew up at the feet of Harold Orr, CM, PEng,  his father, a mechanical engineer,  who was instrumental in researching and developing energy-efficient housing development in Canada.    Harold worked for the National Research Council of Canada and his innovations, which include new insulation techniques and materials, air sealing and efficient ventilation, blower-door testing, and heat recycling, still serve as worldwide models for energy-efficient housing today some 40 years later. Much of what he and his team researched and developed is now seen in the R2000 energy-efficiency program used widely in Canada and the Passive House movement around the world. Harold has been awarded the Order of Canada for that contribution to building science and in fact, is credited with developing the Blower Door Technique which is now adopted around the world as well as Kelowna. This technique is one of the critical tests for energy efficiency.

     Naturally like father, like son, John has developed a keen interest in energy efficient housing and learned much from dinner time conversations and working with Harold building energy efficient structures.   

     His first real job was working on a framing crew building super-insulated housing and when he was in university, he built a super-insulated home in Yellowknife. In 1994 John earned his civil professional engineering status and is currently registered in British Columbia and Saskatchewan and has been registered in; Alberta and Ontario.  Over the years John has built over 120 houses and has renovated some 200 units.  

    He was part of the Canadian team which brought the Canadian residential building code to Russia and built the first residential project in Russia under the national building code of Canada section 9.  

    John has managed the construction of sewer, water, and road work for 6 subdivisions, poured over 50,000m3 of concrete, established 8 Redi mix batch plants,  excavated over 60 million m3  of earthworks (cut and fill), built 9 bridges, managed a piling foundation company, 3 hydroelectric stations, estimated in excess of 200 buildings, and has been the construction manager on 3 large projects with a combined value in excess of $800m. 

    John has excelled at every level …in Highschool, he won a University of Saskatchewan science fair with a residential heat recovery system unknown at the time.

    In University he won a national thesis competition of all graduating Civil Engineers sponsored by the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers and placed 2nd nationally in their structural engineering papers competition. 

    John is committed to building out the Trumpeter Road and the Upper Mission Drive houses on a custom basis as his first love is custom home construction.  He would love to discuss how he can make your custom home operate at no energy costs and actually make energy back to the grid. Look for some passive housing ideas to be applied to some of the housing on Trumpeter Ridge.

Sandy Oh, BA, MA, MBA

Mr. Oh brings together over 25 years of business experience in private and public companies to the Tri City Group. In the 1990s, Mr. Oh worked as Project Manager for Okim Holdings, retrofitting downtown Vancouver buildings, including the St. Regis Centre in 1997.

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  • Mr. Oh brings together over 25 years of business experience in private and public companies to the Tri City Group. In the 1990s, Mr. Oh worked as Project Manager for Okim Holdings, retrofitting downtown Vancouver buildings, including the St. Regis Centre in 1997. Throughout the 2000s, Mr. Oh was involved in the technology sector, incubating start-up firms, working with investment banks, and developing private businesses for public offerings on the TSX Venture Exchange.  In 2006, he worked with the Newgen Group to help assemble, finance, renovate and establish management systems for a commercial real estate portfolio (which included 310 units in branded hospitality and a mixed-use downtown building) in Eastern Canada.  In 2011, Sandy Joined the Tri City Group of Companies first in the role of VP of Real Estate and then taking over as President of Tri City Fund Management Ltd.  He too has a wealth of experience in the construction management field to bring to the table in Kelowna. 

Omar Lalani, M. Eng

Our VP of Real Estate, Mr. Lalani has worked in the building and development industry since 2002 after obtaining his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from McGill University. From 2002 until he worked as a draftsman and project manager for small to medium-sized developers, having managed infill developments, new builds, and historic building renovations in Brooklyn and Berkeley…

(see Full Bio below for more…)

  • Our VP of Real Estate, Mr. Lalani has worked in the building and development industry since 2002 after obtaining his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from McGill University. From 2002 until he worked as a draftsman and project manager for small to medium-sized developers, having managed infill developments, new builds, and historic building renovations in Brooklyn and Berkeley. He has also obtained his Master of Engineering degree from McMaster University in 2007. Mr. Lalani has been with Tri City Group since 2011. He is currently the land development consultant for Paradise Trails, Sierra Ridge, and Big Lake. He is most interested in the public and political consultation process and how various stakeholders can help move and shape a project before a shovel touches the ground.

    He and Mr. Goodman met over their shared interest in building low-cost housing, for those less fortunate and ideas of how to provide housing for what termed the working people who cannot afford to purchase a home.

    When not involved with the development side of the company, Mr. Lalani is not afraid to get his hands dirty in taking on the construction and renovation of some large projects for the Tri Cit Group. These include the redevelopment of a strip mall in Calgary and the Dickensfield Mall in Edmonton. Both projects were multi-million dollar renovations, which were complex due to a variety of challenges one runs across when renovating as opposed to building from scratch. According to Mr. Lalani, “it is far easier to build from scratch than it is to renovate.”

    Mr. Lalani is a strategic builder who is not afraid of any project and likes to think outside the box. Omar’s idea of a good time is his latest endeavor - a house that was picked up out of foreclosure, which was renovated without permits or structural considerations. He is currently straightening up the building from a structural viewpoint and digging down below the current foundation to build a legal duplex.

    Please contact Omar if you have questions regarding development, construction, or income property management. Mr. Lalani is also fluent in French. His direct email is olalani@tricitygroup.caxt goes here