Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1137

Real estate companies often have a need for aerial photography. Perhaps you want to showcase an existing building. Perhaps you want to capture the views from a future/proposed building. Or perhaps you’d like to document a building under construction.

Usually in the latter case, you have to find a neighboring building and negotiate some sort of agreement so that you can place a camera on it and document your construction site. This is probably still the solution if you want a clean time lapse video.

But drones have opened up a new world of possibility and today I thought I would share with you a company called DroneBase . They’ll probably hate that I’m making this reference, but one way to describe them is Uber for drones. They connect a “large network of drone pilots” to customers needing drone footage for commercial or creative purposes.

If you take a look at their website, you’ll see that they cater a lot to the real estate and construction industries. I’m not sure how active they are in Toronto and Canada right now, but if they aren’t that active I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they are. 

And over time, I am sure that a network like this will only mean faster, better, and more affordable aerial footage.

Here is an eye-opening article from data scientist Vicki Boykis outlining the number of ways in which Facebook collects data about its users. It’s called: What should you think about when using Facebook?

One of the more surprising tidbits from Boykis’ article is that Facebook collects keystrokes. That means if you start typing a status update but never actually post it, that information is still fair game.

Facebook previously used this data for a study on self-censorship. That sounds like like a fascinating study, but I’m sure the thought is also scaring many of you if you care about privacy.

Here is a quote from the article that gets at the core of what is going on:

“The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site.”

A worthwhile read . And in case you didn’t already know, if you go to Settings -> Download a copy of your Facebook data, you can get a pretty good dump of your activity, including every private message you’ve ever sent on the platform.

The Economist recently published the following chart alongside this article talking about the impact of foreign buyers on global house prices.

They also have this set of interactive graphs that allows you to chart prices according to a number of different measures. The two metrics that The Economist focuses on (above) are house prices against rents and house prices against incomes. 

The argument they make is that as (foreign) capital begins to think of property as merely a bolthole, it can start to detach itself from fundamentals such as rents and incomes. New Zealand, Canada, and Australia are specifically called out.

This isn’t necessarily news. And one chart can only tell you so much. But I like staying on top of the various indices.