Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1287

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One of the things that I try and do here on this blog is examine the intersection of design, real estate, and technology. I didn’t explicitly set out to do that, but more and more I find myself thinking that way when I’m writing and when I’m giving talks.

Part of that is because of my passions, but part of it is because there is a big and important overlap. One example of that is autonomous, self-driving cars. The tech community is enamoured with driverless cars, but everyone involved in the built environment should also be thinking about their impacts. Because it’ll be significant.

Benedict Evans – who is a venture capitalist with Andreessen Horowitz in the Valley – recently published a post called, 16 mobile theses . It’s a look at 16 topics, trends, and shifts that are happening in the tech space. (There’s also a related podcast discussion .)

If you’re involved in internet products, you absolutely need to give it a read. But I also think it’s interesting to read it through the lens of a designer or real estate person. Productivity is changing. Notions around the living room are changing. And yes, autonomous vehicles are going to have a profound impact on the urban landscape of our cities – just as cars did initially.

Below are 3 excerpts from Benedict’s post that I really enjoyed.

The first is about mobile and just how massive it is:

“The mobile ecosystem, now, is heading towards perhaps 10x the scale of the PC industry, and mobile is not just a new thing or a big thing, but that new generation, whose scale makes it the new centre of gravity of the tech industry. Almost everything else will orbit around it.”

The second is about how “networked” is quickly becoming a given:

“Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t. Many of those uses cases will seem silly to us, just as our grandparents would laugh at the idea of a button to lower a car window, but the sheer range and cheapness of sensors and components, mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain, will make them ubiquitous and invisible - we’ll forget about them just as we’ve forgotten about electric motors.”

And the third is about those self-driving cars:

“The move to electric and the move (if and when) to autonomous, self-driving cars fundamentally change what a car is, but also what the whole automotive system might look like. Electricity changes the mechanical complexity of cars and hence changes who might build them and what they might look like. Autonomy and on-demand services change who buys them, meaning the buying criteria will be different. But they could also change the urban landscape just as much as cars themselves did - what do mass-market retail or restaurants look like if no-one needs to park?”

Can you think of other ways in which tech will impact cities and the spaces we occupy?

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One of the most common questions I get from readers of this blog is: How do I become / get into real estate development?

In fact, I get it so often that I’ve decided to write a book as my response. It may be a short one or it may end up a long one. If you’ve emailed or messaged me with this question and I haven’t responded, I’m sorry. There’s a lot of you out there. But I do want to help and that’s why I’ve decided to take on this hobby book project.

As part of the book, I’ll be talking about my own journey, as well as the actual nuts and bolts of development. But I would also like to feature some much more established players in the business. In order to do that, I’ve decided to crowdsource some of the content for this book. 

So here’s my ask to you: If you’re a real estate developer and would like to share your story,  please complete this short questionnaire . You can be located anywhere in the world.

My plan is to select a handful of developers from around the world and then feature their stories, one-by-one. I’m confident that there will be a lot of interest in hearing how successful developers established their careers and/or own businesses.

I’ve been thinking about doing this for quite awhile now. It feels good to get started. 

Here in Toronto there’s a push for more family-sized apartments. That’s what the planners want to hear.

Because the city has been trying to encourage developers to build more of them for years, but the challenge has always been that they didn’t sell or that they took a long time to sell. The market wasn’t ready.

But as I discussed earlier this week , that is starting  to change. I think Toronto is reaching a tipping point where low-rise housing has simply become too expensive and people are starting to look to alternatives, mostly at the mid-rise scale.

It’s interesting though that something of the opposite appears to be happening in New York. I don’t know enough about the New York new construction market to really comment on overall unit mixes and sizes, but there definitely seems to be a push to create more affordable micro-units.

Curbed published this last October:

“…a report currently under public review, called Zoning for Quality and Affordability, recommends relaxing density caps and eliminating the 400-square-foot minimum for studio apartments, thereby creating more housing for single people. Almost 50 percent of the city’s population is estimated to be single , but only seven percent of the housing stock is studios.”

And just recently, New York completed its first all-micro-unit apartment building called Carmel Place. Rents start at $2,650 per month for a 265 square foot apartment. 

As a point of reference, that works out to be $10 per square foot per month and more than 3x the highest rents you could reasonably achieve in the more desirable areas of Toronto, today.

The model suite is 302 square feet and looks like this:

All of the above photos are via Curbed .