Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1455

Today it was announced that Zillow.com will be buying Trulia.com for $3.5 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Based on share of web visits, the biggest real estate website in the US has just acquired the 2nd biggest.

Both companies make the bulk of their money through advertising sales to real estate professionals (i.e. agents and brokers). But what was interesting to read in their  press release  is that, even with this merger, the combined revenue of both Zillow and Trulia still only represents about 4% of the estimated $12 billion that US real estate professionals spend on marketing each year. 

Zillow says it’s because the real estate industry hasn’t fully made the switch to online and mobile – and thus it represents a huge market opportunity for them. And from my experience I would say that this is likely the case. But it could also be because the real estate community is putting their marketing dollars elsewhere online. 

Whatever the case may be, Zillow.com (and its portfolio of companies) is now firmly positioned as the largest real estate website in the US. But even still, Zillow.com has never felt fully “ net native ” to me. It has never felt as if it were specifically built for the internet and that it’s only possible because of the internet. Instead, it feels like an offline model ported over to online. And the two are quite different.

The reason I feel this way is because there’s an inherent tension to the way the online residential real estate market works today. Virtually every lead generation tool (that agents use) is intended to funnel buyers and sellers to them. That’s why so many real estate websites have sucked for so long. Because the goal wasn’t to keep you locked into a website, it was to get you to connect, in person, with an agent.

Zillow and Trulia started to break with that tradition by offering a lot more information online. Before they came along, it was a lot harder for real estate consumers to do their own research. But at the end of the day, Zillow makes money when it’s an effective sales funnel for agents. And since that’s always been the way the market has worked, it doesn’t feel net native to me.

If my gut is right, then it means there’s still lots of opportunities in this space.

On Friday when I was driving up to Thornbury, I ended up taking a route that goes through Shelburne, Ontario . I’ve taken this route at some point before, but I don’t remember seeing so many wind turbines. I guess it must have been before this particular wind farm had been built out.

It turns out that these wind turbines belong to the  Melancthon wind facility, which is the largest installation in Canada . The facility contains 133 wind turbines and has the capacity to generate 545,000 megawatt hours each year – enough renewable energy to  power roughly 70,000 households . The facility is owned and operated by TransAlta and they’ve entered into a 20-year contract to supply renewable energy to the Ontario Power Authority.

But what I also happened to notice were the many signs posted around with wording like the title of this post: “Bad neighbors build wind turbines.” And after speaking about it with people over the course of this weekend, I very quickly learned that there was fierce community opposition to this project.

The concern with wind turbines is typically twofold. People don’t like the way they look and they worry about the noise that they will generate. There’s even an alleged condition called “Wind Turbine Syndrome.”

I personally think they look quite beautiful. They seem so symbolic of the future and progress. But I am intrigued by the noise concern and so I decided to do a bit of research. I found this video from the UK . The big takeaways are that living beside a main road is generally much louder than living beside a wind turbine, and that a wind turbine isn’t usually that much louder than a quiet suburb, until you get fairly close to it. So I wonder if it’s really as bad as people are making it out to be.

Either way, the issue at hand is incredibly important. We’re talking about renewable energy. And while you may not like the look of wind turbines scattered across the horizon as much as I do, I strongly believe that we need to figure out ways to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. It’s for this reason that I’m a big supporter of both wind and solar power.

So perhaps the counter to those signs scattered around Shelburne is the following: Responsible communities build wind turbines.

Image: Wikipedia

Right now, I’m sitting on the sun deck at my friend’s cottage and looking out at the Georgian Bay . So this is going to be a short post. The New York Times just published  a stunning photo series of hidden rooftop pools and gardens in New York . All of the photos were taken from a helicopter. If you’re as fascinated by cities as I am, I think you’ll really like them.