Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1439

Last Friday the Toronto Star published an article talking about the growing demand for character office buildings in submarkets outside of Toronto’s core. Specifically, it was talking about the Downtown West and Liberty Village submarkets (citing a report from CBRE ).

I’m sure this isn’t news to most of you. Cool loft spaces have been popular for years. But it’s interesting to look at how rents and vacancy rates have changed for these submarkets and product types over time.

Since 2002, average (net) asking rents for brick-and-beam buildings in the west end have gone from $16.12 to $22.23 per square foot. Almost a 38% increase. By comparison, office space in the core has gone from $28.40 to $32.38 per square foot. A 14% increase.

And if you look at vacancy rates since 2007, you’ll see that the character office market has really tightened up over the past 4 years or so. There’s growing demand for a limited amount of supply.

With the growth that the downtown core is seeing and with the rise of Toronto as a creative startup hub, I’m sure we’ll continue to see strong demand for this type of space. But there’s only so much of it to go around. So I think we’ll also end up seeing greater interest in the east side of downtown and also more interesting new builds .

Images/Charts: CBRE

I was at a good friend’s wedding last night (congratulations again to Adrien + Rachel! ), and one of the topics that came up at our table was whether it is better to own or rent your home. Now, in North America, conventional wisdom would suggest – almost mandate – that you have to own your place. If you’re still a renter, well then you’re “throwing away your money” my friend.

But are you really? 

A big part of the value of owning your home is that it’s forced savings. Every month when you make those principal and interest payments, you’re paying down your mortgage and socking away money for the future. And this can be a great thing for a lot of people, particularly if you’re not disciplined enough to save otherwise.

But when you own a home, you’re also spending time and money on maintaining that home, and you’re also tying up capital that could be used elsewhere. So consider this: what if, instead of putting your savings towards a downpayment, you simply continued to rent and created an investment portfolio that you then contributed to on a regular basis just as you would a home?

Depending on your assumptions, renting could turn out to put you further ahead financially. Here’s an example of that scenario from the Globe and Mail .

Similarly, I remember being told in business school that companies that own their own real estate tend to under perform those that do not. And the rationale is that owning lots of real estate ties up capital that could otherwise be reinvested in the core business. In other words, if your core business is making widgets, then invest your money in making better widgets, not in real estate.

But this is not to say that everybody should rent. Obviously I’m a big believer in real estate. And for a lot of people, owning may make sense. This post was really just to say that the owning vs. renting decision may not be as black and white as you might think.

Image: Flickr

Seattle recently installed its first protected downtown bike lane on Second Avenue . Here’s a short video of it in action (pay attention to the signalling setup and the pedestrians that walk into the bike lanes). Click here if you can’t see the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2iQCCHlR0s?rel=0]

Shortly after it opened, they quickly discovered that the left green arrow and solid green circle (shown above) were confusing drivers. The intent was for the left green arrow to signal that you could turn and for the solid circle to signal that you could drive straight ahead.

But even with the accompanying sign, drivers kept getting confused and thought a green circle meant you could go wherever you want.

So the Seattle Department of Transportation quickly adjusted and changed the green circle to a north arrow. And it seems to have fixed the problem. I think it goes to show how important the details can be with these things.