Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1347

I am currently in Hunstville, Ontario (Muskoka region) and I have about 15 minutes before I need to head out for dinner. So this is not going to be a long post.

I did, however, want to share with you a new real estate app that I learned about today called  SQFT . (Thanks Evgeny .) They were just featured in TechCrunch and their mission is to make it easier and cheaper for people to buy and sell homes using just their smartphone. They’re calling themselves the first DIY real estate portal in America.

As a homeowner, you create the listing yourself and then it gets syndicated out to hundreds of other websites (including the big players like MLS, Zillow, and Trulia).

You’re still technically working with “independently operated licensed real estate agents”, but the app itself handles setting up the showings and even the offer negotiations. Their hope is that they can reduce real estate commissions to < 2%.

This is a space that I’ve been following closely for a number of years now and seems to be really heating up. Opendoor.com is another online real estate platform that I’ve written about a few times . And in my view, they are the furthest out front.

My realtor friends don’t like it when I say this, but I think we’re going to see a lot of changes in this space in the near future.

Yesterday I spent the evening walking Toronto’s new Queens Quay Boulevard, which fully  reopened this past Friday after a number of years of construction. 

It is part of Waterfront Toronto’s revitalization efforts and represents a solid decade in the making. West 8 of Rotterdam and DTAH of Toronto won the international design competition for the central waterfront back in 2006. And this past weekend a big component of that vision was unveiled.

But first, let’s take a look at what Queens Quay Boulevard used to be like. Here’s a Google Streetview image from 2009:

The streetcars ran in the middle of the street. Cars drove on the north and south side on both sides of the tracks. And the sidewalks were fairly small and usually at capacity during the busy summer months. It wasn’t a great street.

Now here’s a photo that I took yesterday from that same vantage point (2015):

The street has been completely reorganized. On the north side of the streetcar tracks is where the cars now drive in both directions. On the south side of the tracks the lanes of traffic have been replaced with a 2-way bike trail (part of the Martin Goodman Trail). And on both sides the pedestrian areas have been greatly expanded. It’s now a magnificent street.

If you haven’t yet been down to the new Queens Quay, I would encourage you to check it out on either foot or bicycle. (If you go on bicycle, let me know and I’ll join you.) 

Toronto may have taken a giant step backwards with its recent decision on the Gardiner East , but we also took a giant step forward with the reopening of Queens Quay Boulevard.

I was out for brunch last weekend with a few close friends from high school. It’s a “monthly reunion” that happens nowhere close to every month. But the hope is certainly there.

During brunch the topic of my blog came up. And one of my friends asked me how I got started and how the hell I keep up with one blog post every single day. (I get that second question all the time.)

I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s worth revisiting.

Earlier this week venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a post on his blog called The Blank Screen . And I really liked how he described the experience of writing a daily blog post:

Sometimes this process produces great insights for me and possibly others. Sometimes it produces garbage. But I’ve come to realize that the daily post, and its quality or lack thereof, is not really the thing. It is the ritual, the practice, the frequency, the habit, and the discipline that matters most to me. And, I would suspect, the same is true of the readers and commenters who frequent this blog.

Fred’s blog was a major source of inspiration for me. I saw him doing it. I saw the value he was getting out of it. And I wanted to do it too. So I did, almost 2 years ago. 

But he also inspired me in another way.

Venture capital and real estate development share many similarities in my mind, even down to the way that deals are often structured with preferred returns and promotes.

But the interesting thing about venture capital is that it went from a largely closed and “ivory tower” kind of industry to now one where almost every venture capitalist blogs, tweets, and strives for greater transparency (when possible).

I thought this was a fascinating shift and it made me think that the exact same thing was bound to happen in real estate development. So I am trying to make that happen. Hopefully this blog is helping.