Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1021

Back in 2013, my friend Mike Lerner  and I designed, developed, and launched a condo review platform called the Dirt ( thedirt.co ). It’s hard to believe that it’s already been five years.

Our mission was to empower real estate consumers through greater transparency in the marketplace. And we did this by crowdsourcing condo building reviews, as well as pricing comps.

Today we are excited to announce that InsurEye Inc. has acquired the Dirt. InsurEye began as a moderated insurance review platform for home, auto, and life insurance, but it has since grown to include condo reviews.

The team at InsurEye shares a very similar goal of creating greater transparency in the marketplace, and so we are thrilled that they will be picking up where we left off.

Press release, here .

P.S. The Dirt is the reason why I started the daily blog that you are reading right now. I started writing for the company and fell in love with it as a discipline and practice. Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

“Investing is an activity in which consumption today is foregone in an attempt to allow greater consumption at a later date. “Risk” is the possibility that this objective won’t be attained.” -Warren Buffet

Warren Buffet published his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders this past Saturday. I always enjoy reading his letters and I have been doing it for years . If only he wrote a daily blog.

One of the things he talks about in this year’s letter is why Berkshire wasn’t very acquisitive in 2017:

In our search for new stand-alone businesses, the key qualities we seek are durable competitive strengths; able and high-grade management; good returns on the net tangible assets required to operate the business; opportunities for internal growth at attractive returns; and, finally, a sensible purchase price.

That last requirement proved a barrier to virtually all deals we reviewed in 2017, as prices for decent, but far from spectacular, businesses hit an all-time high. Indeed, price seemed almost irrelevant to an army of optimistic purchasers.

Some of you in the real estate game might be feeling similarly. But he ends the section with these words of advice: 

In the meantime, we will stick with our simple guideline: The less the prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater the prudence with which we must conduct our own.

Buffet has a way of simplifying things. He also, clearly, has a way of remaining disciplined.

Emily Badger of the New York Times published an interesting piece yesterday talking about the tech industry’s current obsession with trying to fix cities. And there are certainly many problems to fix .

Staying true to tech and engineering parlance, there’s lots of talk of optimization. How do you technologically optimize a city, for things such as affordable housing?

There’s no doubt that many of you will sympathize with this statement: 

“To planners and architects, all of this sounds like the naïveté of newcomers who are mistaking political problems for engineering puzzles.”

But naïveté is not always a bad thing and   with all of the money sloshing around in this industry, there’s also no doubt that this is likely a new era of city building.

The article ends by quoting JD Ross, the 27-year old co-founder of Opendoor – a startup that we have discussed many times before on this blog and is now valued at over $1 billion.

It is him saying that he wants to figure out how to put $100 million into this space as soon as he can figure out the right target to optimize for.  “It’s better than buying a Bugatti.”

Of course Sidewalk Toronto – which is mentioned a few times throughout the article – is already a perfect example of tech infiltration.

But I think Dan Doctoroff gets it right when he posits that the real naïveté will come from disrespecting urbanist traditions.

Photo by David Alacaraz on Unsplash