Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 192

I was at a family lunch this week and we got on to the topic of VR/AR headsets. Some of my relatives have the Meta Quest, but nobody has the Apple Vision Pro and nobody has even tried it. However, the comment was that the Meta one is already pretty convincing, so the Vision Pro must be that much more amazing. Like I do on this blog , I encouraged everyone to go and book a demo.

What is obvious, of course, is that Vision Pro is far from a mainstream product. Few people are buying it. It's too expensive. And I think most people can't imagine a world where it becomes part of their daily life. But as we were all talking, I was reminded that I'm dangerously close.

Here are 3 use cases that I'm already excited about:

• Watching movies and doing work on airplanes . I love traveling. But sitting on a plane sucks. If I could watch immersive movies and bury myself in work, I think I might actually enjoy having my femur crushed by the seat in front of me. It would be an environment free of any distractions. Already I have found reliable in-flight wifi to be a game changer for productivity.

• Experiencing live sports from seats I wouldn't pay for in real life . To be fair, I don't generally watch a lot of sports unless a Toronto team is in the playoffs. But selling an unlimited number of courtside seats (or their equivalent) to people via Vision Pro seems like an obvious use case. I would pay for this after experiencing Lebron dunk in my face in the demo, especially if it works with groups of people. And if it doesn't already exist, I'm sure there will be a way to stream live content.

• Walking through the BIM model of a yet-to-be-constructed building . The construction industry needs this. I need this. I walk all of our sites at least once a week. But imagine if it were possible to do this before construction actually starts and costly mistakes are found on site. That's always been the promise of BIM, but alas, it hasn't solved the problem of poorly coordinated drawings and too many site changes.

The list of great use cases is endless. These are just 3 that immediately came to mind and that wouldn't require the technology to be significantly better to spur greater adoption. In fact, the technology is already there and convincing enough. I also don't think the above requires the hardware to be as small, or as fashionable, as a pair of sunglasses. It just needs to be cheaper, a bit more portable, and have a few incremental features.

At that point, I'll be ready to buy. What about you?

Cover photo by Bram Van Oost on Unsplash

Welcome again to 2025.

Yesterday we spoke about what might happen in 2025 and my predictions for the year ahead. Today we're taking about what Globizen is specifically focused on. But first, I think it's important to reiterate what we're all about. We are a city building company and community focused on creating better places . These words were chosen carefully. We want to be both a business and a community.

What this means is that in addition to obviously working on our own property portfolio, we also want to collaborate with others on this mission of creating better places. It is recognition that "city building" takes many forms; we couldn't possibly do it all; and we want to broadly support all those who are doing great things and working to build more livable, beautiful, and economically vibrant places.

Now, our work. At the highest level, we are focused on three development strategies:

• Differentiated end-user focused condominiums in prime locations. While we do think that it will take a few years for the market to absorb the current pipeline of condominium projects under construction in the GTA, we also believe these 3 things to be true: (1) end-users represent a more durable demand segment for housing compared to investors; (2) prime locations in global cities such as Toronto will maintain their value over the long term; and (3) design-focused and differentiated product offerings only become more valuable in a down market. Overall, this thesis is based on the view that we are in the midst of a housing reset and that there is/will be a market for the right projects. In some cases we will aim to execute in the short-term, and in other cases we will set ourselves up to be patient.

• Infill apartments in walkable and transit-oriented communities. We see the scale of housing that is permitted on an as-of-right basis continuing to grow. Over the last few years, Toronto added permissions for fourplexes, then 6-storey apartments, and the current plan is to streamline the process for even larger mid-rise buildings. This is creating two interconnected opportunities: (1) the ability for developers to feasibly develop smaller projects; and (2) the opportunity for a systems-based approach to development -- one that allows a greater repetition of designs, materials, and the overall process. We call this the "productization of housing", and it's fundamental to our multi-family rental strategy.

• Hotels, creative retreats, and hospitality experiences. Increased travel, remote work (including from digital nomads), and a desire for unique in-person experiences; these are all important and growing macro trends that will continue to reshape the landscape of our cities. We think of this as being centered on an underlying aspiration to be a kind of citizen of the world, and so we're interested in real estate opportunities that can respond to this demand. Last year, we completed our first "creative retreat" in Park City, Utah . And this year, we're focused on bringing the first design and lifestyle hotel to the waterfront in Canada's largest wine region -- the Niagara Benchlands .

Alongside these specific strategies, we are committed to growing our real estate advisory and development management services business . This is something we started in earnest in 2024 and want to do more of this year. Finally, we would like to grow our lifestyle shop and ramp up content creation in a way that can support our real estate strategies and our broader goal of promoting and creating better places. It's going to be a fun year.

If you'd like to work with us on any of this, please do get in touch .

Happy new year, everyone! Yesterday we spoke about what actually happened in 2024 (and evaluated my predictions from exactly a year ago). Today, let's prognosticate about what might happen in 2025 (keeping in mind that I'm based in Toronto and so there will naturally be a bias toward this market):

• Very broadly speaking, our current commercial real estate downturn started, in my opinion, around the middle of 2022. That's when sentiment started to feel different and the market was starting to respond to increasing interest rates. Over the past few years, I've been overly optimistic in terms of how soon the market would reset. But eventually I'll be right. So I'm going to call 2025 as an important turning point where we see more capitulation, more bankruptcies, and a shedding of legacy assets/deals. For the other side of the market, this will mean more new deals.

• This, however, does not mean that we will see a development environment that anywhere resembles what we saw prior to 2022. On the new construction residential side (condominium and multi-family rental specifically), I think it's going to take 2-3 years for us to work through and absorb our current supply pipeline. This will be an obvious headwind for land prices. The successful projects in this environment will be located in core/prime locations, underwritten at more modest scales, and focused largely on end users.

• In 2024, we saw the continued rise of more people going back to the office. Here in Toronto, the average weekday figure is approximately 73% of what it was pre-COVID (data from November 2024). This year, I think we'll see this figure get close to 90% and then likely start to level off, some five years after the first lockdowns. I think it makes sense that we'll stabilize at some number below pre-COVID levels, but I also think it'll be a number that is much higher than most people expected just a few years ago.

• I am reversing my position on autonomous vehicles (relative to last year). I believe we're much further along -- specifically Waymo is -- than most people think right now. Autonomous vehicles are happening and, in 2025, I think we'll see a significant expansion of coverage across the US led by Waymo + Uber . I don't think we'll see anything earth shattering from Tesla in regards to FSD, but who knows, Elon is good at making things happen. The big test will be cities with snow. This will likely take longer.

• At the time of writing this post, the price of EU carbon permits is approximately €71.98 per tonne of carbon dioxide. It's all-time high was €105.73 in February of 2023, but some/many believe that it will need to be closer to €150 by 2030 if the world hopes to reach net zero by 2050. So for this reason, I'm going to say that its price rebounds to between €90-100 this year. This is largely a guess, but I'm including it in my predictions (at least partially) because it's quantifiable and easy to score later.

• Crypto and technology more broadly are going to have an awesome year in 2025. As Fred Wilson wrote on his blog yesterday , one of the things we saw in 2024 was "Silicon Valley's hostile takeover of the federal government, via an infiltration of Donald Trump's MAGA movement." The "establishment government" was seen as being antagonistic toward tech and innovation, and so the industry jumped teams. One would expect that to pay dividends this year.

• More specifically, I think we're going to see a web3 consumer application that finally breaks into the mainstream. Already, I've been impressed by NFT marketplaces like Rodeo . Many people won't appreciate that it's powered by some blockchain, but that's exactly what we want. We want the underlying technology to recede into the background and for the experience/utility to come into the foreground.

And with that, I will end and leave you all with this recent tweet from Chris Dixon. It's worth clicking through and reading the entire thing.

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A big thank you to everyone who continues to read this blog. We're now into year 12 of this daily writing practice (my first post was in August 2013), and I'm still feeling more inspired than ever. It truly feels like we're at the dawn of so many new and exciting things: a new real estate cycle, an unprecedented innovation environment, and the list goes on. Next up, I'm going to write specifically about what we at Globizen are focused on for this upcoming year.

Cover photo by Tyler Rooney on Unsplash