Urospot opens overseas + parking in reverse

Weekly Regional Business Intelligence

Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

Urospot expands to the other London

The London-founded pelvic health business Urospot has crossed the Atlantic, launching a franchise in the UK, the company announced. The expansion is the first international move for founder and CEO Erin Craven, who started the company in 2019 and has since grown it to 21 Canadian locations, with nine more coming in the future. “Urospot is officially international,” Craven said in a LinkedIn post. “Today was opening day in London, England. Located on Chiswick High Road, we are in love with our newest posh spot.” Craven called the expansion “a milestone I’m still trying to find a moment to fully grasp.” The UK operation will offer the same core service: non-invasive pelvic floor strengthening via electromagnetic chair technology (the “Kegel throne”), with patients remaining fully clothed throughout. (You can read more about the core business in our 2019 feature on Urospot.) The new clinic is operated by franchisee Marisca Carruthers (pictured, on right, with Craven), who said she “couldn’t be more excited, humbled, and energized to be part of an amazing group of female entrepreneurs.”

The upshot: It's a cool milestone for a business that started as a single-location medical spa here in London and grew by franchising to women who wanted to bring the concept to their own neighbourhoods. The UK makes sense as an international expansion — structurally similar healthcare gaps, a large and underserved patient population and the same cultural stigma around pelvic health that Urospot has challenged as a brand. “The stories are the same,” Craven said. “Women being dismissed, underserved and told what they are experiencing is normal." Chiswick High Road is a pretty affluent, west London high street, which tracks with a private-pay model that costs patients several hundred dollars per treatment course. Urospot has tapped into a niche here in Canada, and the bet is that it can easily expand based on addressing a global problem. Incontinence affects an estimated 200 million people worldwide, most of them women.

Read more: LinkedIn

Fanshawe shutters south-end campus

Fanshawe College announced this week it is closing its London South Campus and consolidating the programs there into its main campus as of this fall, citing financial difficulties encountered after the international student cap was brought in. “It’s a sad day for sure,” business and hospitality dean Silvana Macdonald told The London Free Press. “There is a lot of uncertainty and anxiety for individuals, but we will support everyone as best we can.” There are likely to be layoffs, but Macdonald said the exact number isn’t yet known. Four programs — agri-business management, business & information systems architecture, health care administration management and information technology infrastructure — are going to be moved to either the school’s main campus or to its Simcoe/Norfolk campus, and Macdonald said students “will have the opportunity to complete their program with the same quality of education and support they expected when choosing to study at Fanshawe.”

The upshot: The campus, which Fanshawe opened in 2019 after leasing the building at 1060 Wellington Road (it was the former home of Westervelt College), was really a physical manifestation of the international student revenue model, and is now being unwound. It is, unsurprisingly, not the first satellite campus to fall as the Ontario college sector implodes: Seneca is closing its Markham campus, Algonquin is closing its Perth campus and Centennial College is closing a Toronto campus. Fanshawe’s South campus was newer and less substantial than some of those other satellite campuses (and some of Fanshawe’s other satellite campuses), but the continued cuts are never fun to see. “We have welcomed quite a few international students and run some amazing programs there,” Macdonald said. “But it’s the right decision.”

Chilly real estate market looks for any sign of a spring thaw

According to the London and St. Thomas Association of Realtors (LSTAR), which released data for home sales in the month of February this week, a total of 410 homes exchanged hands in the region (the LSTAR catchment area also takes in Strathroy, St. Thomas and portions of Middlesex and Elgin counties), an 18.7 per cent dropped when compared to sales in February of 2025. On the supply side, a total of 1,055 new properties entered the market in February, bringing active listings (a total of all listing) for the month to 2,421, a 13 per cent hike from February 2025. Doing her best to find something positive in what is a continuation of dismal market conditions for area realtors, LSTAR chair Robin Tiller drew a comparison to last month’s sales totals, when 341 homes sold (that total equated to a three-year low for the month). “We’re encouraged by the uptick in sales,” said Tiller in a release. “There is a lot of pent-up demand, and we’ll be closely watching the Bank of Canada’s next interest rate announcement scheduled for March 18.”

Upshot: Heading into the spring market, it’s tough to see how things might turn a corner for area realtors. Economic struggles, the ongoing trade war and, now, a new conflict in the Middle East will likely see would-be buyers and sellers continue to hunker down for the foreseeable future. And all of this has everyone on price-watch, wondering if supply-and-demand economics will bring further price declines (the average sale price in February was $622,414, down 3.5 per cent from February 2025 but pretty much on par with the $624,550 average price recorded last month). Speaking with The London Free Press, local real estate agent Phil Bailey noted: “I think there’s still a bit of a stalemate happening between buyers that think they’re going to get a deal on every single house and sellers that are coming down to reality since the Covid market but aren’t quite there yet.”

Read more: LSTAR | London Free Press

LHSC fraud defendants file defence

The defendants in the bombshell $60-million fraud lawsuits by the London Health Sciences Centre filed statements of defence this week, and unsurprisingly, everyone is pointing fingers in different directions. Former CEO, Jackie Schleifer Taylor, claims she never received any reports that allegedly documented the frauds, and is pointing the finger back at the hospital, which she claims knew about the wrongdoing for two years before it filed the lawsuit. The former CFO, Abhi Mukherjee, is claiming that the hospital is only coming after him because he filed a wrongful termination claim. Contractor Paresh Soni is attempting to point the finger at Dipesh Patel, who he claims was effectively the ringleader of the fraud. And Derek Lall, the former director of facilities at the hospital, is claiming that Patel threatened his job if he wouldn’t “turn a blind eye” to any preferential treatment toward BH Contractors — the Soni-owned company that Patel allegedly was controlling.

The upshot: None of it paints any clearer a picture of what was actually going on at the hospital and within its finances. The most eyebrow-raising claim within the defences is probably Schleifer Taylor’s claim that the hospital knew about the fraud much earlier than it says it did (and kept it under wraps), and that two current executives — Tammy Quigley and Julia Marchesan — were aware of the fraud report that Schleifer Taylor denies receiving. None of this has been tested in court, of course, but it does have the potential to add a few wrinkles to the hospital’s otherwise tidy narrative that it discovered the fraud and immediately cleaned house. Hard to imagine that any of this will become clear until it sees the inside of a courtroom.

Read more: CBC News London | London Free Press

Council reverses course on parking minimums

London city council voted 11 to three on Tuesday to direct staff to draft a bylaw amendment increasing parking minimums for townhomes and apartment buildings, doubling the minimum from one space per two units, to one space per one unit. The motion, spearheaded by Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis and councillors Peter Cuddy and Corrine Rahman, also asks staff to explore wider driveways, front- and side-yard parking and new driveways for laneway homes. Existing exemptions for major transit areas and affordable housing developments remain in place. Councillors supporting the amendment said higher parking minimums are needed to deal with pressure on neighbourhood streets. “I understand that we can have a desire for people to ride transit,” said Rahman, “[but] it is not moving fast enough to accommodate the type of growth we've already seen in the city, and the planned growth."

The upshot: The vote is a meaningful policy reversal for the city. The reduction in parking minimums, passed in 2022, was explicitly framed around things like emissions reduction and housing affordability, with the removal or reduction of parking minimums often cited by housing supply advocates as a way to spur building; the decision to double the minimums would seem to run counter to at least some of those goals. Councillor Skylar Franke was one of the opposing voices at the council table. “The right direction that we have been moving in is trying to encourage folks to live in more compact, transit-supportive, walkable neighbourhoods,” Franke said. “Increasing parking and forcing higher investment from developers into parking infrastructure, which we know is quite costly [and] further entrenches car dependency.”