Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1316

One of my closest friends, who also happens to be in the same industry, is currently testing out a new construction marketplace idea. It’s called Tenderlet and it’s an online platform that helps your average house or condo owner “find the best local construction professionals at the lowest prices.”

Right now it’s just a basic website , but he is obviously thinking that it could grow into a far more robust online marketplace.

The way it works is real simple:

1. You tell Tenderlet about your construction job – everything from a water damaged ceiling repair to new hardwood flooring. 

2. Tenderlet goes out and gets multiple quotes on your behalf (just like how the professionals do it). 

3. Then Tenderlet comes back to you with at least 3 quotes and a recommendation. It’ll even handle scheduling and payments.

Eventually he’s imagining that there will be a mobile app, reviews for the construction professionals, and a location dimension, which can make all the difference, particularly for smaller jobs. But you have to start somewhere.

I think he’s on to something here. I know I want to use it. So I would encourage you to check out tenderlet.com  and give it a try. If you have any feedback about the idea, I am sure he would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

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I recently heard someone say, in a pejorative way, that all real estate developers think of what they build as “products.” I imagine this is in contrast to thinking in terms of buildings as spaces for people to live, raise a family, do their life’s work, and so on.

When I heard this I immediately thought to myself, yeah, we (or at least I) do think of our spaces as products. But I also didn’t see it as a negative thing.

In my view, there’s no reason that classifying something as a “product” has to make it any less beautiful, functional, and/or filled with design intent. My iPhone is a product. The wine on my shelf that somebody labored over is a product. The chair I’m sitting on right now is a product. All of these items were produced by people and then I consumed them because I liked what those people had made.

When I was completing my first master’s in architecture and real estate, I used to walk back and forth across campus between the design school and the business school. And in these two places, we talked about bricks-and-mortar in very different ways.

In the business school, buildings were the proverbial widget. How much does this widget cost to produce? How much can I sell or rent this widget for in the market? And how do I scale up my business so that I can sell/rent more widgets?

On the other hand, in the design school we weren’t all that concerned with the cost of the widget or even what people would pay for it. Instead we were concerned with making it something so much more than just a plain old widget. These weren’t buildings. This was capital “A”, Architecture.

I don’t think either school was wrong in their thinking. I just think they were missing each other. 

Business is business. If you don’t make a profit then you’re not going to be around for very long. And while many companies can survive by making shitty products, those aren’t great businesses. The best businesses also deliver products that people absolutely love.

So whether we call it architecture, a product, or even a widget, the goal should be to delight people. (Am I allowed to say “customer”?) Make people so happy that they have to tell their friends about it. If we’re doing that, then frankly I don’t care what we call it.

Yesterday the Washington Post published a great chart showing the housing types of the 40 largest cities, by population, in the US. The list is ordered from lowest to highest according to the percentage of single-family houses in the city (green bar).

Here’s the chart:

Not surprisingly, many of the cities at the top of this list (meaning they have the lowest percentage of single-family houses) are in the older east coast cities. 

It’s also interesting to see just how much the rowhouse dominates the urban landscape in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In Philadelphia, almost 60% of the housing stock is an attached rowhouse .

Housing is the backdrop for such a big portion of our lives. And when you live in a particular kind of home, it impacts your life whether or not you realize it. The dense rowhouses of Philadelphia and the single-family houses of Oklahoma City are the result of two very different kinds of urban landscapes.

In Toronto, that backdrop is in the midst of a dramatic change. More and more of us are now living in high-rise condos. That hasn’t always been the case, of course. It’s a recent shift. But it looks like it’ll be a big part of our future.