Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 581

Urbanation released its Q3-2021 rental report for the Greater Toronto Area at the beginning of this week. The vacancy rate in purpose-built rental buildings fell to 3.0%. This is down from 5.1% in Q2-2021 and 6.4% in Q1-2021. For the former City of Toronto (the city pre-amalgamation), vacancy rates declined to 3.8% in Q3-2021, down from 9% in Q1-2021. So people are renting apartments.

At the same time, rents are growing. The average rent for newer purpose-built rentals was $2,389 per month or $3.30 per square foot at the end of last quarter. This is up 3.8% from Q2. But what is also interesting to see is how quickly the core / downtown is snapping back. Looking at condominium rentals, the former City of Toronto had the lowest leases-to-listings ratio at the start of the pandemic in Q2-2020. But in Q3 of this year, its ratio was the highest. See below.

Average rents have also spiked for condo rentals in the core, posting an 11.4% quarter-over-quarter increase and a 6.2% year-over-year increase. The average rent is now sitting at $2,405 per month or $3.62 psf. See above. Remember when everyone thought that cities were dead and nobody was ever going to live in a downtown apartment ever again? Yeah, that was funny.

Charts: Urbanation

https://twitter.com/beijingdou/status/1451314356210241538?s=20

This past weekend Bright Moments opened up their NFT art gallery in New York's Soho. This is the company's second gallery. The first was in Venice, California. And there are plans for eight more cities, with Berlin being the next one. (When is Toronto?!)

Bright Moments is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which is interesting in its own right but is a topic for another post. You can read a bit more about Bright Moments and DAOs, here and here .

What I would instead like to talk about today is how Bright Moments is operating at the intersection of NFT art and real-world spaces. They are in effect a community. It's a place for artists to release/showcase their work and a place for people to connect.

One of the things that the company is doing with each gallery launch is minting an NFT collection that is tied to the city and that uses the local demonym. When they opened their popup in Venice, they launched the CryptoVenetians . And last weekend in New York they launched the CryptoNewYorkers .

In each case, 1,000 NFTs were minted and the idea is that once they have expanded to their 10 cities, there will be a collection of 10,000 NFTs.

I have said it before, but this is an exciting time in the world. Maybe this current NFT craze ends up being a massive bubble, or maybe it doesn't. Either way, things are exciting.

But here's the thing.

Organizations like Bright Moments show you just how important physical spaces, live communities, and cities continue to be. It doesn't matter that this is digital art being displayed on a screen and that one could be viewing it from anywhere. People want to hang out in the same room and experience these sorts of new things together.

I can't see that ever going away.

I am moderating a panel at the Toronto Real Estate Forum later this year (it's on December 2 to be exact). The topic is innovation in development. There is a great panel of speakers ( more info here ) and the plan right now is to cover everything from new design and construction approaches to the rise of crypto and blockchains. Topics that are all near and dear to this blog.

But we are still in the early stages of planning and I haven't yet figured out what the questions to the panel will be. So I thought it would be interesting to hear from all of you: What would you say are the most important topics to cover when it comes to innovation in development? What's next for our industry, or what should be next for our industry?

If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment below. That way everyone can see them. Supposedly this is one of the most asked for topics at the real estate forum, and so it's clearly top of mind for many people.