Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1440

Some of you told me that yesterday’s post on careers was actually quite sad. That it came across as if I were advocating for people, not to do what they love, but to instead do what makes them the most money. But that was not my intention. 

There were a lot of reasons why I got into real estate development , and perhaps I oversimplified yesterday. But a lot of it actually came down to the fact that I’m passionate about building great cities (hence this blog).

And I thought it was ultimately unfair that some investment-banker-turned-developer, who doesn’t really care about cities, might end up having more say over the built environment than me, the architect. 

So I decided to sacrifice designing individual buildings in the hope that I’d one day be able to give back to cities on a much larger scale. And I still hope to be able to do that.

In any case, to end the week on a more fun note, I thought I would do a post called Fun Friday and link to 2 city tours: one of Brisbane, Australia, and one of Porto Alegre, Brazil. 

But these aren’t just any city tours. They are by local skateboarders showing you their city. I posted one for Toronto about 8 months ago , so some of you might be familiar with the series.

I love how differently skateboarders look at the urban environment. I hope you can appreciate it as well. 

Brisbane, Australia :

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEFQLjnhKT4?rel=0]

Porto Alegre, Brazil :

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taF71igPZY0?rel=0]

As a result of writing Architect This City, I’m fortunate enough to receive a lot of emails from random people. But I’m always open to meeting new people, and so I enjoy this very much.

One of the most common questions I get is from architects, and students of architecture, who want to know about transitioning over to real estate development. (Posts related to this topic also happen to be some of my most popular .)

So today I thought I would share a story with all of you about the one decision that ultimately lead me into real estate development.

When I started graduate architecture school, I already had inklings that I was going to get into development. That’s one of the main reasons why I went to Penn . I knew that I could concentrate in real estate and I knew that I could take courses over at the business school. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

But during my first year, I still wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to reconcile this dual interest. In fact, I remember feeling really conflicted. I loved architecture and design, but I also really enjoyed business and entrepreneurship. I was also interested in making money, and architecture isn’t often the best place to do that.

So for my first summer internship, I decided to apply to both architecture firms and to real estate developers. I was fortunate enough to be offered jobs in both. And on the architecture side, I actually got my top choice, which was the Bjarke Ingels Group in Copenhagen. To this day, Bjarke remains one of my favorite practicing architects.

But when I looked at the numbers, I quickly realized that real estate developers were prepared to pay me about 3x more than any architect would and that, if I were going to take an architecture job, I was going to end up going more in debt just to live throughout the summer.

While internships are often career loss leaders, I took this as a sign of things to come. This was a 10 or 20 year decision in my mind. And even though I loved architecture, I figured I would quickly fall out of love with it if I couldn’t pay my bills or live the lifestyle that I wanted.

So I accepted a real estate job and I moved to Dublin, Ireland for the summer to work for a small consultancy called Urban Capital (no relationship to the Toronto firm of the same name). And I haven’t looked back since.

This may not have been the right decision for some of you, but it was for me. So if you’re at a crossroads, my advice is always to think about where you’d ideally like to be in 10 or 20 years. Because once you establish that, it’ll become much easier to make that decision today.

This week on Architect This City is turning out to have a big focus on technology. And it’s not going to stop today, because this evening I had the chance to try the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset for the first time (many thanks to Dave Payne of Invent Dev for the demo). As a reminder, Oculus is the company that Facebook recently acquired for $2 billion .

Now virtual reality certainly isn’t a new idea and lots of people have been promising – for a long time – that it was going to revolutionize the world. Which may be why I had somewhat low expectations going into this. But I have to say that I was blown away. Despite being a bit choppy (to get good visuals it ran at around 15 frames per second), I was shocked at how immersive the experience was.

Here’s a picture of Rick exploring the (virtual) space behind him:

It was actually really strange watching somebody move around as they explored another world. The demo that Dave showed us was of an apartment suite. You could walk around the living room. Turn around and see the front door. Walk up to the window and admire the view outside. It was incredible, but somewhat scary at the same time.

Obviously there are ton of potential use cases for this. I’m imagining a buyer touring a condo suite and picking their finishes before it’s even built. I’m imagining an architect designing a building in 1:1 scale by waving their hands around in a virtual world. I’m imagining “traveling” to a beach to treat seasonal affective disorder . And the list goes on.

This isn’t going to happen overnight. I actually got a bit nauseous because of how choppy the video got at times. But I can certainly see the potential. Virtual reality is coming. It’s clearly the future of gaming. And I’m sure it’ll get applied to many other areas of the economy. I guess that’s why Facebook bought these guys for $2 billion.

If you have an interest or need in the 3D visualization space, I would encourage you to reach out to Dave at Invent Dev . He’s super passionate about the work that he’s doing and is looking to collaborate with more people in the design and real estate spaces. Thanks again Dave.