Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 386

The typical way to do it looks something like this:

• Hire a creative agency

• Come up with a new name and brand identity that speaks to your target market

• Create a new website and new social media accounts

• Start marketing the project with this new single-purpose brand and identity in the forefront (the developer's brand is usually far less prominent)

Of course, this is the typical way and things do vary. What I would like to discuss today is this last point: the interrelationship between new project-specific brands and developer brands. Because in most other industries, the brand of the company is paramount. It is everything. When BMW releases a new car model, it is BMW and then the something . It is not the something , with BMW hidden at the bottom of the page.

So why is real estate any different?

One possible explanation is the entrepreneurial and opportunistic nature of development. New projects are often the result of people and groups coming together to make a specific "deal" happen. And unless you're an established player with a long history, you may not have a consumer-facing brand with much equity in it. So you rely on a new single-purpose one instead.

But perhaps the main reason is that, as an industry, we have never really succeeded at making buildings a product (architects sometimes despise when you call buildings this). It is for this reason that every building can feel like a prototype and that prefabrication remains this dream that never seems to become a reality. A product implies something repeatable and producible at scale. And buildings are generally not that. Every market and site are unique.

All of this said, there are ways that developers are building meaningful brands for themselves.

The first way is to obviously focus on building your own brand alongside or in lieu of strong project brands. One example of this is Toronto-based Urban Capital . They build a specific kind of condominium building/product and, to the extent that it's possible, it doesn't change whether they're building in Saskatoon or in Halifax. David Wex, one of the partners, describes this as branded vs. opportunistic real estate development .

Another example is Toronto-based Fitzrovia (which I wrote about, here ). They are one of if not the most active rental developers in the city. And if you go into one of their apartment buildings, you'll find the same No. 10 Dean coffee shop and bar in the lobby; the same rooftop pool (called LIDO); the same gym (called The Temple); and the list goes on. Their goal is to build a consistent and hospitality-like experience for apartments.

The second way to go about building a brand is to make it so attractive that other developers will pay you to use it. The best example that I can think of is London-based YOO . A partnership between John Hitchcox (a developer) and famed designer Philippe Starck, they have built a business out of creating branded residences for third-party developer clients. And this is in some ways the holy grail of development: you get paid without taking on the risk of building.

Of course, this same licensing model is also used with hotels. And hotel brands are globally the most common kind of branded residence. What this obviously tells us is that brands matter a great deal in real estate. They matter so much that developers will pay to use the right one, because it will likely command a premium and it will likely increase sales/leasing velocity.

It is for this reason that I've always felt it important to grow the parent brand alongside any project-level brands. And it's why we never bother creating new social accounts for our individual development projects. Brand building takes time. If you're going to invest time and money into one, why not take advantage of the compounding at the very top of the house.

The US has tech and France has luxury goods :

The roots of French dominance lie in a luxury ecosystem that dates to the court of Louis XIV, and a culture of corporate raiding that began with Bernard Arnault. After gaining control of LVMH in 1989, he set out to build the first house of luxury brands through serial acquisitions. Rivals followed his lead. Increasingly, the global luxury industry is based on goods that are still made by small Italian firms but sold by big French conglomerates. Gucci, Bulgari, Fendi — all are Italian brands now under French owners.

While US tech firms overshadow all rivals, the same can be said of French luxury. Among the top luxury firms, the French have annual sales three times higher than the Swiss, more than four times the Americans and Chinese and 12 times the Italians.

One of the most interesting things that LVMH is doing, though, is a combination of tech and luxury goods. In 2021, they announced, along with founding partners Prada and Cartier, a new luxury goods blockchain called Aura .

The idea behind Aura (an appropriate name, in my opinion) is to create a kind of digital passport that proves authenticity and ownership, and also allows for traceability. So if you want to sell one of your luxury items or you need to service it, now someone can easily see the chain of ownership and determine that it's real.

This to me is a perfect use case for the blockchain technology and, as of March of this year, the group was reporting 24 brands on board. At the same time, they also announced a new feature that allows brands to participate through public chains such as Ethereum or Solana.

All of this is probably still very esoteric to most. But eventually the tech will recede into the background and most will probably just see it as, "I'm buying this expensive purse and along with it I get this digital passport thingy that lives on my phone. I don't know or care how the tech works, but it makes me feel even more special."

However, a big question remains: What does all of this innovation do to industry concentration? (Which is one of the main points of the above article .) One promise of crypto is that it will be a decentralizing force in our economy. And while I believe this to be directionally true, I obviously understand that LVMH has an empire to maintain here.

For those of us who deal in real estate, it is also interesting to think about this topic of brands and authenticity when it comes to property . And so we will talk about that later this week on the blog.

We have spoken about this topic -- of larger family-sized suites -- many times before on the blog. And my argument then, as it is now, is that the largest barrier is cost. We can talk about cultural biases (which I do think exist in North America) and, sure, we can talk about how to better design for families. But until we solve the problem of costs or until low-rise housing gets so prohibitively expensive that it tips the scales in favor of multi-family buildings, I'm not sure we're going to see a meaningful shift.

To be fair, it does appear that the number of families living in apartments and condominiums is increasing here in Toronto. My neighbor is one data point. However, broadly speaking, I don't think it's happening with the "larger family-sized suites" that most people imagine in their minds when they talk about this opportunity.

So how do we address this? There are a number of interesting ideas in the above Twitter thread that I would encourage you to check out. Ratcheting down or eliminating development charges (and other government levies) on larger suites is one of them. But what is obvious is that this is a challenging problem to solve. So the brutally honest answer is that I don't really know what will be most effective. But here are three potential places to start.

As-of-right mid-rise buildings

Remove the barriers to building more mid-rise. One irony of mid-rise buildings is that they are probably the most desirable form of multi-family housing and yet they're the most expensive to build. A lot of this has to do with construction costs and other unavoidable diseconomies of scale, but there are other things we can do. In my view, we should target to make all mid-rise buildings fully as-of-right. This means no rezoning costs, no community meetings, and overall simpler designs. Instead, the rough process should be: buy site, work on permit drawings, and start marketing new homes.

Growth pays for as much as possible

Please watch this short 1-minute video:

https://twitter.com/itsahousingtrap/status/1664981658196488193?s=20

This is also something that we talk a lot about on this blog. But most people outside of the industry don't think of it in this way, or they don't care. The mantra is that "growth pays for growth", which obviously sounds good. Tax new housing based on its impacts. But in reality this is not what's happening. What is happening is that "growth pays for as much as possible as long as new home prices keep rising." And it persists partially because nobody except evil developers see these large bills. But if we really want to make new housing more affordable and if we really want to encourage more families in new multi-family buildings, then we need a more equitable solution.

Financing new family-sized homes

The way we finance new homes impacts the kind of housing that gets built. Here in Toronto, new condominium projects generally require a certain percentage of pre-sales, because construction lenders want as much certainty as possible that they will get their money back upon completion. In theory, it also reduces the chance of overbuilding because you've pre-sold most/all of the homes. So there are obvious benefits to this approach. However, the problem is that you need people to now buy in advance. And oftentimes, the people buying early aren't families who expect to need 3 bedrooms in 5.2 years. Should there be another financing solution for larger homes?

Once again, these are just three potential places to start. But I think they're all critically important. If you have any other suggestions or ideas, please leave them in comment section below.