Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1464

The responses are still coming in from yesterday’s real estate marketplace survey , but I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to complete it. I really appreciate it. I was reviewing the responses this morning and I thought there were a couple of interesting takeaways.

First, most people who own a home have at one point or another thought about selling that home. And even the people who haven’t thought about it, said they would be willing to sell under the right circumstances. That is, they would sell for the right price, for a better place, and so on. At the time of writing this, nobody said they would never ever sell.

I think this is interesting because, even though the real estate market is a highly illiquid market, my hunch is that it could be made a lot more liquid with the right frameworks in place and if the barriers to selling could be reduced.

And sure enough, many of the folks who said they have thought about selling (but haven’t yet), said it’s partially because it’s too expensive and too much work to sell. But in addition to these barriers, two other points emerged that I hadn’t given a lot of thought to before – but make total sense. 

Homeowners also said that they haven’t sold because they’re too emotionally attached to their home and because they’re afraid they won’t be able to find another place to move into. 

Because of how illiquid the real estate market is and because home transactions are typically asymmetric (that is, buying and selling are independent actions), there appears to be a real concern that you could sell your home and never find anything better.

And since a home is such an emotion filled asset (as opposed to, say, a stock), people are naturally afraid of making the wrong choice. But then that begs the question: Are we, as real estate consumers, being left with suboptimal outcomes because we’re simply too afraid of the making the wrong choice?

If you know me at all, then you’ll know that I’m a big proponent of introducing more technology into the real estate space. I think the industry is one that has been incredibly slow to embrace technology, but that it’s only a matter of time before it does.

Two months ago I wrote a post talking about how entrepreneur and venture capitalist Keith Rabois is  working on a home buying startup codenamed Homerun  — now called  Opendoor . Here’s how  he recently described the state of affairs :

“My friend [PayPal and Palantir cofounder] Peter Thiel suggested that I come up with an idea to innovate in residential real estate,” Rabois told VentureBeat in April. “It’s the largest part of the economy unaffected by the Internet. And that was definitely true then, and even with things like Trulia and Zillow, it’s fundamentally true today. But the process of [selling a home] hasn’t been transformed by technology.”

What Opendoor is trying to do is really interesting, but I have a different idea. It’s called  Unlyst . And today I’d like to ask the ATC community for a small favor. I’ve created a short home buying and selling survey (embedded below) that will take you at most 2 minutes to complete.

If you could please take the time to do that, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve made the results public as well, so you’ll be able to see how buyers and sellers currently feel about the real estate marketplace. If you can’t see the survey below, please click here . Thanks for your help!

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I must have been living under a rock because I just discovered this weekend that Toronto is in the midst of hosting WorldPride . I obviously knew that it was Pride Week , but I didn’t realize that we had outbid Stockholm in 2009 in order to be awarded the event. 

I also didn’t realize that Cawthra Park near Church Street & Wellesley Street was being revitalized in preparation for both WorldPride 2014 and for the Pan Am & Parapan American Games in 2015 – which Toronto will also be hosting.

Here’s a site plan of the final design:

And here’s what the completed design looks like:

I like the pavers and I like the overhead LED lights. Those may not seem like big additions, but it’s amazing how those small little details can impact the way a space feels. I think it creates an intimate and inviting space. What do you think?

Images: thinc design