Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1283

I was reading through PwC and ULI’s 2016 Emerging Trends in Real Estate report this evening and a handful of charts stood out to me. They’re not all related to each other, which is why this blog post is called what it is. But I think you’ll find them relevant to many of the things we talk about on this blog.

1. Average home size by country

With all the interest today in “small urban spaces” it’s interesting to see that the average home size for half the countries on this list is somewhere between 500 and ~1100 sf. It’s also amazing to see Hong Kong hovering just below 500 sf.

2) The decline in homeownership in the US

I like to follow home ownership rates because there’s a lot of debate around whether or not this obsession with homeownership – which has been so central to the ethos of countries like the US and Canada – is at all falling out of a favor. This chart shows some pretty significant drops from previous highs.

3) Average home prices and the price to income ratio in major Canadian cities

Not surprisingly, Vancouver and Toronto are the top of this list with the highest average home prices and the highest price to income ratios (i.e. the worst affordability).

4) Drivers as a percentage of all commuters in the US

This chart is similar to what you would see if you looked at vehicle miles traveled. I’ve heard some people say that driving is now once again on the rise, but for the past decade and a half it’s been on a slow and steady decline.

5) Countries buying US real estate

Canada is a big buyer of US real estate. But with the dollar where it is today, I am sure that number is headed downwards.

At the time of writing this post, it’s still 2015 – at least here in Toronto. But by the time you ( subscribers ) get this post in your inbox, it will be 2016. So happy new year! I am thrilled about getting this year started and I hope you feel the same way.

To kick things off, I thought I would share a great interactive post from Guardian Cities called, A history of cities in 50 buildings . It’s a look at our urban history through 50 important and pivotal buildings. Buildings such as Southdale Center, which was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall, and Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, which was a building that really set the stage for the modern skyscraper that we know today.

Not all of these buildings have left a positive legacy on our cities. I am sure that some of you would argue that the creation of the suburban shopping mall, with its corresponding “sea of parking”, was not a step forward for cities, but a step backwards. The architect behind Southdale Center, Victor Gruen , has even gone on record saying that he refuses “to pay alimony for those bastard developments.” He hated the shopping mall.

But like them or not, these buildings are part of our urban history, and I think it’s not only interesting but important to understand their impacts. If you want to see which important buildings were missed, at least according to Guardian readers, click here . I have to say that I was happy to see both Montréal and Toronto represented in the original list , as well as a few other buildings that I’ve written about here.

On that note, happy new year to you all, again, and many thanks for reading Architect This City. If you have any suggestions for content you would like to see on this blog in 2016, please leave it in the comment section below. This may be my personal blog, but my goal is to make it valuable for all of you. Hopefully I achieve that sometimes.

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I have started to meet with developers for my new book – becoming a real estate developer – and I can’t begin to tell you how impressive and inspiring it is to learn about their stories.

It’s easy to look at someone who is successful and feel overwhelmed by everything they’ve accomplished. But nobody starts at the top of their game (unless maybe they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth). Usually there’s a backstory of sweat and struggle that rarely gets told. As the saying goes: success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

But those are exactly the kinds of things I hope to uncover with this little project. I am less interested in the successes and more interested in the early decisions, struggles, and thoughts that went into making those successes even possible.

And one thing I’ve noticed is a tendency to just go for it. In fact, when I asked one developer if he had any advice for young aspiring developers, he said: just fucking do it.

As soon as he said this I couldn’t help but think of my elementary school English teacher who used always tell us the same thing – minus the expletive – whenever we’d ask him something such as, how long should this paper be, should we focus on this or that, and so on. He would always say: What does Nike say? Just do it. No buts. Just do it.

At the time, I obviously didn’t give this much thought. But the fact of the matter is there’s so much value in doing. And it’s easy to overthink at the expense of doing. What he was teaching us was to have confidence in ourselves that we would figure it out along the way.

The reason there appears to be a lot of interest in “how to be a real estate developer” is because there isn’t really a set path. You don’t go to school, apprentice for a year under the wing of a developer and then, boom, you’re a developer. 

Most developers have carved their own paths. They just did it.