Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 345

This is an interesting chart from Bloomberg Green comparing some of today's innovations against innovations of the past. At the top of today's innovations are EV batteries, which from 2010-2020, saw annual deployment growth similar to that of US WWII aircrafts. However, when it comes to reducing costs, both EV batteries and solar PV modules come out on top with annual declines approaching almost 20%.

Of course, these probably aren't perfect comparisons. If you look at EV batteries and solar PV modules from 2020 to 2023, their growth rates jump to 72% and 39%, respectively. So who knows if these are the right time slices to be using in order to accurately capture the "key expansion periods." Regardless, it does provide some historical context and it does say something. These are important innovations.

In a recent interview with FT , the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, said that the company is looking at the following expansion plans:

• Offering long-term rentals of up to one year (currently, only about 18% of bookings on the platform are for 30 days or longer)

• Offering more "things to do on your trip", including car rentals and dining

These brand extensions make natural sense. You book a trip and then maybe you need a car, or something fun to do. I have used Airbnb "experiences" on a number of occasions to book things like boat tours and photographers. It's a great service.

Perhaps more interesting, though, is how the housing component of their platform is evolving. They started by offering excess or found space for rent (which was very clever). Then it grew to become a short-term rental platform that competed with hotels.

This has created a significant amount of regulatory risk for the company ( see New York ), and so it's not surprising that they're looking at other ways of slicing up housing: rooms, nights, months, and now years.

Longer stays are less contentious.

If you're renting on a nightly basis, then you're an annoying tourist that is taking away housing. And if you're renting on a monthly basis, then you might be an annoying digital nomad and that is similarly problematic. But if you're renting for a year, well, then, that's perfectly fine.

Now you're just a normal city dweller.

Is there a world where Airbnb becomes a major platform for traditional long-term rentals?

At the end of 2020, I wrote about a cross-laminated timber apartment building that Joanne and Fred Wilson were building in Brooklyn at 383 Greene Street .

Well, that project is now complete and stabilized, and it turns out that it was the first CLT apartment building ever built in NYC, which is quite an accomplishment.

On her blog , Joanne describes the project as being a "labor of love", and that certainly sounds right. But they are now also onto their next CLT apartment building at 122 Waverly Avenue (called Frame 122 ).

This would suggest that whatever their development model is, it is working for them. My assumption is that they want to both make our cities more sustainable and own high-quality rental assets for the long-term (possibly forever).

If you'd like to see how 122 Waverly was assembled, here's a short video that Joanne recently posted on her blog:

https://youtu.be/h4uVl9d4iPg?si=bwl5Y7LeKNU99YO3