Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1185

Hotels play such an interesting role within cities. They are public-facing in a way that many other uses are not and they invite a mixing of different people – everyone from transients to locals. It is therefore no surprise that they can serve a variety of different roles. They can be cultural hubs. But they can also be places in which to misbehave.

When the Drake Hotel opened up on the west side of downtown Toronto in 2004, I remember it feeling far out. It was on the edge of that which was interesting at the time. But it quickly anchored West Queen West with its cultural and nightlife offerings. And today, we could be about to see the exact same story repeat itself in the east end with  the new Broadview Hotel .

It’s for these reasons that I was both excited and curious to learn that Bedrock (real estate company) and Shinola are in the midst of launching a new boutique hotel concept in Detroit. It is called The Shinola Hotel . It will be located at 1400 Woodward Avenue . And it will be all about the city of Detroit. They expect it to open sometime in the fall of 2018.

What I am about to say may be an availability bias  talking, but there seems to be a push by many companies into the hotel space. In 2015, Equinox Fitness announced that it would be opening its first hotel in 2018 at Hudson Yards in New York. And just last month furniture retailer West Elm announced that it would be opening a first set of hotels in both Savannah and Detroit. (Go Detroit!)

West Elm sells furniture. Equinox operates gyms. And Shinola makes and sells watches, bikes, and leather goods. But all of them are now in the hotel space. What other new hotel brands have I missed?

Image: Shinola

Yesterday I sent out this tweet , which included this graph:

The chart is from Altus Group and it is a monthly price index of new low-rise vs. high-rise housing in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). I have posted similar charts in the past, but every time this chart gets updated the spread widens and the market looks even crazier.

Some people responded on Twitter by saying that this is clearly an indication of a bubble. I don’t know if that is the case. 

But, as I have said many times before, I do believe that it tells a vivid story around supply. Low-rise housing is severely supply constrained in the GTA and high-rise housing is less so. That has helped to stabilize pricing in the latter case.

Now, you could look at this chart and say that the pace of low-rise price increases is simply unsustainable. The market must correct. 

But you could also look at it and say that the market is going through a fundamental shift whereby more and more families will start living up, as opposed to out – which should then translate into high-rise pricing trending upwards as unit sizes increase. This is where I think we are headed. 

What do you reckon is happening?

Tesla has just announced “full self-driving hardware” on all of its cars, including the upcoming Model 3, in anticipation of a big software update to be released sometime around December 2016 (hopefully). 

This will enable fully autonomous driving “in almost all circumstances” – they mention rain, fog, and dust, but no snow – at a level of safety that Tesla believes is already 2x better than the average human driver.

This is being accomplished through a souped up onboard computer and by increasing the number of surround cameras from 4 to 8. Here’s a diagram (via Tesla) of how those cameras work and how they will capture a 360 degree view:

A couple of immediate thoughts / takeaways:

The Smart Summon feature is obviously very cool. Summon on your smartphone and your car will come find you. Elon Musk has said that it will eventually find you even if you happen to be on the other side of the country. 

But this assumes that there are solid metal snake chargers  (or something else) to automatically charge your vehicle somewhere on route. It also suggests that the vehicles won’t be equipped to cross international borders by themselves.

Elon Musk has said that (unfortunately) retrofitting older Tesla vehicles to full self-driving hardware will be very difficult and costly – the cost delta is greater than buying a new car. This reinforces my belief that leasing, rather than owning, is probably a wise strategy right now given how much change is happening in the auto space.

Lastly, here’s some fine print from the Tesla Auto Pilot website:

“Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.”

Uber vs. Tesla. Round 1. Fight.

If you’d like to see a full self-driving Tesla in action, check out the  video on their website .