Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1300

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Recently it has been in the news that BuzzBuzzHome.com – the new construction real estate site – will be launching a “buy now” feature in the new year (2016).

This will allow people to buy condos and homes online with their credit card, which means that people will be able to pay the $5,000 deposit online and process all the paperwork that today happens within a sales office.

This is huge.

If you’re somebody who has used a computer and the internet before, the process today feels archaic. Typically you go online to register for a project and then somebody will call you to arrange an appointment. If you ask them to email you the price sheet and floor plans ahead of time, they’ll almost always tell you that they can’t do that and that you’ll need to come into the sales office for an appointment. 

But what about if you end not liking the floor plans and you’re about to waste a few hours of your time? Too bad. The sales funnel requires you to be present in person. This is nothing against the many talented sales professionals working in new construction; it’s just that if I can design and price out a car online and if Mark Cuban can buy a $40 million jet online , then I should be able to shop for a new condo online.

BuzzBuzzHome has been chipping away at the current model for years and they’ve managed to get a lot more information online than was previously available. When Matthew and Cliff first launched BuzzBuzzHome in the late 2000s it was almost unheard of for developers to put any sort of pricing and floor plans online. Now they at least have some of that on their site. I’m glad they stuck with it.

Because what’s equally exciting about what BuzzBuzzHome is doing is that in order to offer a “buy now” feature, they also need to have an accurate account of all developer inventory on hand. And so alongside this “buy now” feature they’re also building out a full cloud-based inventory management system for developers. 

This means that BuzzBuzzHome will soon be managing the supply-side of the new construction marketplace. Think of the data and analytics you can extract from a platform like this. It’s going to bring much greater transparency to this industry.

But if your business is in any way connected to the new construction real estate market, I would take this morning and think about how the above innovations could impact your business model. I can think of a few winners and losers.

Some of you might be thinking that people aren’t going to make the biggest purchase of their life online. But I would bet the farm that many people will. I know I would.

On Tuesday night I attended a great industry event that Quadrangle Architects organized about mid-rise buildings. 

Mid-rise buildings (somewhere around 4-12 storeys) are all the rage in Toronto these days. But there are many challenges associated with this building typology and this was an event to talk about them and hopefully push things forward.

One of the speakers at the event was Jeanhy Shim of Housing Lab Toronto . And I’d like to share one of her slides here:

It reads:

Value = (rational benefit x emotional benefit) / price

I believe she admitted to taking it from someone at Bruce Mau Design . But that’s okay. That’s how ideas build. What I really like about it is that it attaches a value to the things that are difficult and sometimes impossible to measure: the emotional stuff.

As I mentioned in this post over the weekend , we are all obsessed with the quantitative side of our businesses. In the case of development, we look at prices, per square foot prices, apartment sizes, and the list goes on. And we often reduce our “ products ” to these sorts of key metrics.

But if you’re competing just on numbers, then you’re missing a big and important part of the equation. People consume things – and housing is no different – for a number of different reasons. We buy things because of how it makes us feel, how it reinforces our sense of self, how it improves or promises to improve our lives, and so on. These are all harder to measure than square footage. 

But we are living in a data driven world and more and more of this type of information will become available for city building. If you and your business can get your head around it first, you’ll have a huge advantage. 

If you’re interested in tech and tech products, you might be familiar with a platform called Product Hunt that helps you discover new products/startups on a daily basis. They launched back in 2013 and have since become an important part of the startup ecosystem.

Here in Toronto, the Product Hunt community has been incredibly active with organizing regular meetups. Every 2 months they host an event, which includes a keynote speaker, 3 product demos from local startups, a panel discussion, and of course the usual drinks.

The next Product Hunt Toronto event (#7) is scheduled for Thursday, November 26th at 6pm and the focus is on digital products serving the real estate industry. Back when I became obsessed with this space, this would have been considered pretty niche. But today there’s a tremendous amount of interest in the overlap between real estate and tech. And I’m thrilled to see that.

If you’re also interested in this space, you should grab a ticket right now . They just went on sale yesterday, but usually sell out within a few days. At the time of writing this post, there are only 82 tickets left. I’m also going to be delivering the keynote talk. So I hope to see you there :)