Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 129

The Globe and Mail just published this piece about job cuts across the real estate industry. And pictured in the article is my friend Norm Li , who runs a renowned visualization company here in Toronto, but just recently had to lay off 75% of his team.

This is sad — and quite a departure from the way things were before 2022. You used to have to book Norm and his team many months in advance just to get in the queue. That's how busy they were creating visual content for the architecture and development industry.

But there's not much you can do when the market more or less shut offs. And Norm is not alone. The article estimates that there are some 536,300 jobs in the new construction sector in Canada. And based on the way the above chart is looking, up to 170,000 of these jobs are currently at risk of disappearing.

If you look at the comment section of the article you'll find that a lot of people either couldn't care less or actually relish the fact that the real estate industry is shedding jobs. A lot of people responded with "good." This is not at all surprising (and not just because it's, you know, a comment section). Homes remain unaffordable in Canada.

In the first quarter of this year, RBC estimated that the share of income needed to cover homeownership costs in Toronto is still averaging over 60%. And so for many/most people, the new construction sector isn't a source of personal utility; it's a creator of things that aren't affordable.

Oh, you can't make money anymore? Good.

But here's a better kind of "good" to consider: as painful as the current conditions are for everyone in the industry — myself included — the market is being forced into a reset. Among many other things, municipalities are rethinking their development charges, construction costs are coming down, and nearly every developer seems to be pivoting their new-home business toward bona fide end users (as opposed to investors).

What I think this means is that when the market does return — and it, of course, will — it is highly likely that it will be rooted in sounder fundamentals. And this, I would say, is good.

Cover photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash ; pre-construction home sales chart from the Globe and Mail

This week, our team toured a new 9-storey mass timber residential building going up at 230 Royal York Road in Toronto. The developers are Windmill Developments and Leader Lane Developments . The construction manager is Oben Build . The mass timber company is Vancouver-based Intelligent City . And when it's completed, it is expected to be the tallest residential building in Toronto . But I suspect it won't hold this title for very long. Building out of wood is destined to become a major part of how we build in this city and country. So here are a bunch of photos from the site walk. I tried to include as many detail shots as possible so that you can all get a sense of how it pieces together.

I was recently on Ben Myers' Toronto Under Construction podcast with Ilana Altman ( The Bentway ) and Rob Spanier ( Spanier Group ). It was generally a discussion about what makes for great public spaces, how Toronto is evolving its public realm under infrastructure like the Gardiner Expressway, and what it means to design cities with people at the forefront. If you'd like to have a listen, click here . I hope you enjoy it.