Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1011

The video below is a good follow-up to my recent post about the 100 million city and the rapid population growth that we are seeing in some parts of the developing world.

If you can’t see the embedded video below, click here .

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvM7jFZGAec?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

It’s a video about what is allegedly the “first permitted, 3D-printed home in America” – an 800 square foot home that was built/printed in Austin during SXSW in about 24 hours.

The project is a partnership between New Story (a non-profit) and ICON (a construction technologies company), and the goal is to pioneer a fast and cheap housing model for the developing world.

The cost for the above home is said to be about $4,000.

Today’s post is a set of related questions for all of you.

Fred Wilson has a post up on his blog today called,  The Jiu-Jitsu Move . It’s about how people often dismiss new technologies, market entrants, and/or consumer behaviours as silly; whereas the real power move is to embrace and leverage them. That’s what he is calling the jiu-jitsu move.

He gives a few examples, but for obvious reasons this one stood out to me:

I spent the day yesterday at a real estate industry event and talked to a lot of agents about the fact that their clients are often more informed than they are these days. I encouraged them to embrace that fact and use it to their advantage and not fear it. It is hard when you have grown up in an industry when your advantage was information and you no longer have that working for you.

For all the agents (and real estate consumers) who read this blog, I am curious if you agree with the above. Are consumers increasingly more informed than agents? I am sure that many of you will disagree. But if things are really changing, what should the jiu-jitsu move be?

Today , the Slate Canadian Real Estate Opportunity Fund I closed on a 6.2 million square foot portfolio that it previously announced it was acquiring from Cominar Real Estate Investment Trust for approximately $1.14 billion.  

The portfolio includes office, retail, and industrial properties in the GTA, Atlantic Canada, and Western Canada. This brings Slate Asset Management’s total assets under management to over $5 billion.

Great work team Slate.