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G rowing up, Krolow was fascinated with geography, recounting times he would spin the globe and point to destinations he'd love to someday travel to. This passion is something he never lost sight of, and today, it is his reality. "I've always loved the idea of islands, how they were surrounded by water, or the aerial shot with all the different colors around the water and how the sunlight reflects on different areas. I always thought it looked like a jewelry box," Krolow explained. This fascination makes Krolow, who has been vacationing on islands since he was a little boy, not your typical real estate agent, just as purchasing and building on an island isn't your typical home buying experience. Krolow studied international relations in college, starting a tour company in his late teens. Advertising tours on the internet to European travelers, Krolow would take people to small islands along the coast of the St. Lawrence River on the coast of Canada, where they would explore the land. "I was doing these tours, three in the summer, 10 people each, and I would bring them around camping and charge them a lot of money and feed them beans," he said laughing. "I was just a kid! And remember this was the late '90s when the internet was like the Wild West. So we had a website with a really funny domain name, and we'd stay in these parks, and usually you think of a park and think of a massive [area] but here they can be small– it's an honor system. So we'd pay $20 and have the whole island to ourselves." Though Krolow and his team would take the visitors to different sights, when the trip came to an end, they would talk not just about the experience, but what it felt like having the whole island to themselves. That's when Krolow got an idea. "I started going around on a boat to different islands and contacting people with no internet, meeting with island owners. I didn't end up buying one back then, but I had pictures of about 10 beautiful islands with prices, and owners very willing to sell. I would explain that I wasn't offering to sell it for them, I was just interested in buying one but as I was accumulating all this information, I thought, 'wouldn't it be really nice to have all this information in one place on the website?' The problem was that the islands weren't necessarily for rent, but I put them up on the website, I put all the prices up, and the Toronto Star picked it up and the next thing you know, there's articles that this young guy in Canada is selling islands." In the beginning, the exciting part for Krolow was just collecting these island images, but over the next few months, both press and website traffic began to skyrocket. One day, Krolow received a call from a man in Panama who wanted Krolow to sell an island he owned in Belize. Though he was hesitant, he put the island on the website anyway and six weeks later, he received a check for $60,000. "Everyone was like you should go into castles, waterfalls, anything unique, but I wanted to work exclusively with the private islands." Though Krolow and his company are based in Toronto, their clients and islands could be anywhere around the world. Krolow explained that while it isn't your typical real estate experience, he excels in finding ways to attract buyers, as well as realizing that certain areas are attractive investments, an important trick to the business. "It's not the kind of business that you can just say 'I'm going to open up an island shop,' it takes years," Krolow said. "A lot of the islands we have we've sold multiple times, we've helped rent them out, or I've spent an hour on the phone with an island owner years before it even goes on the market to build trust and make sure everything is transparent. If we feel it's not a good time to put an island on the market, we'll tell them that in the hopes that when they're ready, they will come to us. At the end of the day, we're a huge database of knowledge and experience and we just want to get it out there for people when they're ready to take that leap." V U E N J . C O M 91 VUE ON DESIGN & REAL ESTATE

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