Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1260

I’ve been getting a lot of (email) questions lately about what to study in order to become a real estate developer. So I thought I would reblog this post  that talks about exactly that. I wrote it over a year ago and I almost forgot it existed.

At the same time, I’m reminded of something: I think these questions really speak to the fact that there’s a significant opportunity (particularly in Canada) in terms of real estate development education. 

Oftentimes when I get these questions, I end up recommending the Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) at Columbia ,  MIT , and USC . Why don’t we have something similar (and better) in Canada? We are falling behind.

I have raised this with some Universities here in Toronto, but the response I got was that they felt the real estate courses being offered as part of their existing MBA programs were more than sufficient. I think we can do a lot better.

One professor suggested that I line up a big donor and work with them to spearhead the creation of the (Insert Donor Name Here) School of Real Estate. I think that’s a great idea, but not something I have the capacity for right now.

Hopefully somebody else out there is of the same mind.

Post Update: 3 days ago the Schulich School of Business (York University) announced a one-year full time Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure (MREI) program – the first of its kind in Canada. 

This is great news. 

Now I would love to see the University of Toronto and Ryerson University (as well as others) step up and leverage their respective architecture schools. Schulich is already out of the gate on this one.

Seeing how we’ve started looking at data from last year , I thought it would be interesting to look at global home prices as of Q4 2015. Here’s a chart from Knight Frank, which they refer to as their Global House Price Index :

At the top of the list is Turkey, with an 18.4% increase from Q4 2014 to Q4 2015. (Supposedly this is because it has recently become easier for foreigners to buy property in the country.) Canada is 13th with a 6.2% increase (during this same time period) and the United States is 17th at 5.4%.

This is obviously a high level analysis. There are lots of regional and local variations within each country. For instance in Canada right now, Calgary is a very different place than, say, Vancouver or Toronto.

Nonetheless, it’s still valuable to see the relative performance of each country and see what their (Knight Frank’s) prediction is for 2016:

“Our outlook for 2016 is muted. We expect the index’s overall rate of growth to be weaker in 2016 than 2015. The global economy is experiencing a potentially dangerous cocktail of low oil prices, a strong [US] dollar and a continued slowdown in China.”

It’s also interesting to see how the countries rank in terms of affordability:

Once again, Canada ranks as being one of the least affordable countries in terms of home prices.

For a number of years now, urbanists – including myself – have been thinking about “peak car.” And that’s because if you looked at vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the United States since about 2007, the trend line was more or less flat. 

This had us wondering whether or it was simply an outcome of the recession or some sort of broader shift.

Well, if you look at the December 2015 numbers from the U.S. Department of Transportation , VMTs are once again growing. In fact, it’s now above the 2007 “peak.” Compared to December 2014, travel on all roads and streets in December 2015 was up by 4.2% or 10.6 billion vehicle miles traveled. 

Here’s the chart:

A lot of this could be because of lower gas prices . But I would be curious to hear your thoughts in the comments about whether or not you think 2007 to 2014 was (1) a recessionary blip or (2) a longer term trend in the making.