Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1536

When most people think of brands, I suspect that they think of companies, products and services. But what about the brand of your city? As cities continue to compete for talent in the global economy, brand is becoming a hugely important differentiator.

I just stumbled upon the Anholt-GfK City Brands Index and here’s their 2013 ranking:

1. London
2. Sydney
3. Paris
4. New York
5. Rome
6. Washington D.C.
7. Los Angeles
8. Toronto
9. Vienna
10. Melbourne

The study looks at 6 key dimensions: presence, place, pre-requisites, people, pulse and potential.

What do you think of the above list?

Here’s a bit more information on how the index was prepared:

"The Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index measures the image of 50 cities based on more than 50 questions related to perceptions of their Presence, Place, Pre-requisite, People, Pulse and Potential.  For the 2013 study, a total of 5,144 interviews were conducted in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Russia, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.  Adults age 18 or over who are online are interviewed in each country.  Using the most up-to-date online population parameters, the achieved sample in each country has been weighted to reflect key demographic characteristics including age, gender, and education of the online population in that country.  Fieldwork was conducted from May 8th to May 23rd, 2013."

Yesterday the Globe and Mail published an article titled, “ Weakening rental picture latest condo market worry. " At first glance, this title seems worrisome. Particularly since Toronto’s condo rental market was supposed to be so robust, with vacancy rates hovering around historic lows.

But as I read the article, I was reminded, once again, about how opaque the real estate marketplace is. To make this prediction, the research group quoted in the article mined craigslist postings. Granted, craigslist is probably the largest source for condo rental listings (even more so than MLS), but I don’t think it necessarily makes it a reliable source.

Craigslist is a messy marketplace. You have expired listings; brokers posting listings in the owner section; brokers posting fake listings for the purpose of lead generation; and so on. It seems to me that there could be a huge margin of error if you tried to rely on this data. So I’m not so sure I would put a lot of weight on a supposed 1.6% rental rate decline .

But what does worry me is how imperfect the real estate marketplace is. It’s incredibly hard to get good data and I think that this is bad for everybody involved in real estate. But network effects are a hard thing to overcome, which is why a messy and ugly marketplace such as craigslist can remain so dominant.

Last night I watched CBC’s the Condo Game documentary. This is what it’s about:

"The Condo Game examines the forces at play behind the fastest moving condo market in North America – Toronto – and discovers that the glittering glass hides a sea of troubles."

If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here at CBC’s Doc Zone . It’s about 45 minutes long.

Generally, I found the piece to be overly sensationalized. (If you watched it and it left you worried about condos, contact me . I’d love to hear from you.) However, that’s not to say that the documentary doesn’t raise some important points. One that I absolutely think is worth discussing is the  Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) .

Many developers like “the board” because it provides recourse. If the city fails to take action on a development application within 180 days, developers have the right to appeal to the board.

While I do think it’s critical to have some sort of mechanism to unlock a gridlocked planning process, I also think that it’s fundamentally problematic to give the province ultimate decision making power over municipal planning decisions.

Real estate development is very much a local business and these decisions should be happening at the local level. However, with the OMB looming overhead, it has left municipalities disempowered. “We’ll deal with it at the board” always remains an option. 

But what if there wasn’t a board? What if municipalities and developers had to figure out a solution between the two of them? We’d certainly end up with less wasted money (on expensive lawyers), but I think we’d also end up with better design and planning outcomes.

To do this though, the city needs to get their act together with respect to zoning. Almost nothing is zoned for what developers end up building. But I think this largely has to do with the fact that the city knows any dissenting decision will just get appealed. Again, they’re disempowered.

So I think it’s time we empowered cities . This may seem scary to some developers at first, but there’s a lot to be gained.