Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1261

Aaron M. Renn recently published an article in The Washington Post talking about carless cities and driverless cars. It’s an interesting read, but I’m not going to talk about those topics today. So if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll have to read his piece .

I do, however, want to focus on one particular aspect of it. 

In it, he talks about how Tesla is shifting the “locus of power in the auto industry” from Detroit to Silicon Valley and, at the same time, changing the way cars are sold. Tesla sells direct to consumers through its corporate stores, whereas franchise laws in almost every U.S. state mandate that new cars need to be sold through dealers.

I’m not sure how these laws came to be, but it’s interesting to note yet another example of technology and the internet sparking  disintermediation . That is, the removal of middle people, distributors, brokers, and so on. It’s the same thing that is happening as a result of companies like Uber and technologies like Bitcoin.

I would imagine that lot of these legacy distribution models exist today because it was previously the most efficient option. If you were a car company based in Detroit, a network of local franchisees all across the country working to sell your cars was probably a great thing. But now there are other options, as is the case with many other industries.

So what’s next? 

Wikipedia calls out the following industries as still being in the midst of disintermediation:

I bet you all know which one I’m watching closely.

Bjarke Ingels’ West 57th Street project in New York  (developed by The Durst Organization ) has just started renting apartments (March 1). 

Since I’m in the rental business, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at the rents – though I tend to obsess over all buildings and not just rental ones.

Firstly, the project has a total of 709 apartments and 178 different unit types because of the architectural variations in the building. Of these units, 142 of them (20%) have been designated as affordable and were offered up via a lottery to people who fall within certain incomes ranges. 

Here are the affordable rents via 6sqft.com :

I don’t know the exact numbers, but Curbed New York speculated – based on what was seen at other buildings on the west side – that the total number of applicants for these 142 units may have reached over 100,000!

For the market-rate units, the average monthly rents are as follows (via Curbed NY ):

• Studio: $2,770
  

• One-bedroom: $3,880
  

• Two-bedroom: $6,500
  

• Three-bedroom: $11,000
  

• Four-bedroom: $16,500
  

I wasn’t able to find average unit sizes (to calculate per square foot rents), but I estimate the overall average unit size to be around 1,000 square feet. 

940,000 sf (total gross floor area) - 45,000 sf of retail x 0.80 efficiency (lower than average because of the shape of the building) / 709 units = approximately 1,000 sf of rentable area per unit. That’s just my rough guess based on what I could find online.

Based on the Curbed comment section though, there are certainly some smaller units:

If anyone has any additional figures, please share them in the comments below. I think there are a few subscribers to this blog who are involved in the project.

Image from via57west.com

Those of you who know me or are regular readers of this blog, will know that I’m an avid social media user. 

My favorites – judging by battery consumption on my phone – are Twitter , Instagram , and Snapchat (donnelly_b). I think it’s incredible what these platforms are doing to branding, marketing, personal connectivity, city building , and the list goes on.

To that end, the March issue of Harvard Business Review has an interesting article by Douglas Holt called, Branding in the Age of Social Media . Whether you’re running a company, a city, or a real estate development project, I think you’ll find the information relevant.

The article starts by describing a shift, brought about by social, whereby big brands are now struggling to capture the attention of consumers. Instead, consumers are listening to individuals and more grassroots movements.

“Or consider Red Bull, the most lauded branded-content success story. It has become a new-media hub producing extreme – and alternative – sports content. While Red Bull spends much of its $2 billion annual marketing budget on branded content, its YouTube channel (rank #184, 4.9 million subscribers) is lapped by dozens of crowdculture start-ups with production budgets under $100,000. Indeed, Dude Perfect (#81, 8 million subscribers), the brainchild of five college jocks from Texas who make videos of trick shots and goofy improvised athletic feats, does far better.”

So what should brands be doing? Holt argues that they need to tap into these developing subcultures and emergent ideologies:

“These three brands broke through in social media because they used cultural branding—a strategy that works differently from the conventional branded-content model. Each engaged a cultural discourse about gender and sexuality in wide circulation in social media—a crowdculture—which espoused a distinctive ideology. Each acted as a proselytizer, promoting this ideology to a mass audience. Such opportunities come into view only if we use the prism of cultural branding—doing research to identify ideologies that are relevant to the category and gaining traction in crowdcultures. Companies that rely on traditional segmentation models and trend reports will always have trouble identifying those opportunities.”

For me, this ties into one of my favorite lines from Simon Sinek : “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” And now, thanks to social, it has become a lot easier to figure out what people and communities care about. It has become easier to figure out your why.

Do you see this as being relevant to your work? I am certainly thinking about it in the context of mine.