Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1462

If you’re a regular reader of ATC, you’ll know that I’ve been following the startup Opendoor.com for a few months now. I first wrote about it when it was codenamed Homerun and I just recently wrote about them as preface to a real estate survey I was conducting.

Well, about an hour go it was announced that they’ve just raised $9.95M in venture funding from everyone and their grandmother. Here’s the list of investors (via TechCrunch ):

Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, Former YouTube and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, Yammer co-founder David Sacks, Angelist’s Naval Ravikant, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Initialized Capital’s Harjeet Taggar, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, Former Twitter vice president Elad Gil, Blippy co-founder David King, Flixster co-founder Joe Greenstein, Angel investor Mike Greenfield, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, Path’s Dave Morin, Facebook vice president Dan Rose, Trevor Traina, Resolute Ventures’ Mike Hirshland, Caffeinated Capital’s Ray Tonsing, Felicis’ Aydin Senkut, True Ventures’ Om Malik, Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Crunchfund’s Michael Arrington (who disclaimer: founded TechCrunch) and SV Angel.

Not surprisingly, there are quite a few people who see an opportunity in the $20 trillion US residential real estate market – which I think is a good thing. This is a space that–despite its size–hasn’t seen an awful lot of innovation.

There still isn’t a lot of information about the product, but there’s a clear focus on creating liquidity in the marketplace. Despite being located in San Francisco, the company will be launching in 3 markets outside of California – where liquidity isn’t as great for homeowners.

The goal is to transform the typical 90 day selling process into a few clicks online. Homeowners submit their home to the platform and then Opendoor makes an instant offer to buy. Done.

What I wonder then is if it’s going to be an arbitrage play. They buy the homes below market (because they’re offering total liquidity) and then they turn around and sell them at market.

Do you have any guesses as to their business model?

I recently discovered a New York-based startup called Floored . What they do is create “interactive, online 3D models for real estate.” They take spaces that may or may not exist yet, and turn them into interactive experiences that can be accessed online from any browser.

Here’s one they created for ClearRock Properties and Cushman & Wakefield, designed to show how two adjacent retail spaces would look if they were combined into one.

There’s been a lot of talk over the years about how limiting 2D floors plans are for communicating space to potential tenants and purchasers. But in the same way that virtual reality has never really taken off, neither have 3D floor plans, interactive walkthroughs, and other more sophisticated tools. When people buy a new condo, for example, they still buy it based on a floor plan.

However, as the technologies get better–and perhaps as BIM supersedes CAD  as the dominant platform for architects and designers–I think we’ll see these 3D tools become standard in the industry.

And one of the things that I think it will allow us to do is be much more iterative in the way we design and build spaces. Right now it’s almost impossible to test different iterations of a building in the same way that, for example, a web developer might test different websites. Construction is a pretty permanent act. But 3D could open up that possibility.

I was reading the New York Times this morning and I stumbled upon an interesting article about Shubert Alley . I wasn’t aware of Shubert Alley, but I’m sure many of you probably are. It’s a 300-foot long pedestrian-only alley in the theater district of New York. It connects 44th Street and 45th Street and runs west of Broadway.

And apparently it’s a big deal in the theater world – or at least according to Richard Hornby  in 1991: “In New York, the desirability of a theatre is inversely proportional to its distance from Shubert Alley.”

But what you may not be aware of is how the alley–which today serves as a public gathering space–was actually created. In 1913 when the Shubert and Booth theaters were built, the fire code dictated that theaters had to have separate fire exits on the sides of their buildings that connected directly to a main street. 

Most of the time this led to blank sidewalls, but in this instance, the Shuberts and their architect Henry Beaumont Herts , decided to run an alley all the way through the block to serve as their emergency exit. 

But what seemingly started as a pragmatic response to a code requirement, ended up creating what some people would consider the heart of the theater district. Sometimes constraints can be a good thing for design.

Image: New York Times