Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 587

We have a running joke in our office about the manic nature of the development business. Sometimes you feel like you're having the best day of your life and everything is clicking and moving forward. And sometimes it feels like you're about to die (slight exaggeration). Things are stuck, nothing is moving, and/or a new problem has just popped up. So our team likes to joke that we have a "manic meter" in our corner of the office. Sometimes it's up and sometimes it's down.

Part of the challenge is that progress in the world of development generally takes a very long time. Whenever I talk to someone who isn't in the industry and I explain our timelines, they are usually shocked and question why things move so slowly. For example, we just spent the last 82 days trying to pull a building permit that realistically could have been issued in an afternoon. That is frustrating. Meter down. We have also spent more than half a decade working on some planning approvals. That's even more frustrating. Meter down.

The way I have learned to respond to this dynamic is to try and move as fast as possible. Never assume you have enough time, because things will generally always take longer than you expect. You need to be constantly moving and pushing. So you need to be impatient in the short-term. I also find it helpful to break big projects down into smaller projects so that you have wins to celebrate along the way and you can feel some accomplishment. Having hobbies that don't take decades to come to fruition may further help.

But alongside being impatient in the short-term, you also have to be patient in the long-term. Our team started working on One Delisle in 2015. We are now in 2021 and preparing to start construction. That's a marathon, not a sprint. So what you need to do is find the right balance between short-term impatience and long-term patience. This, I guess, is part of the manic nature of this business.

Meter up.

China Evergrande Group has been in the news lately for being one of the most indebted property companies in the world . The company is now looking to raise some $5 billion by selling a stake in one of its business lines. That seems like a lot of money, but apparently it has upwards of $300 billion in liabilities. As I was reading about the company ( in this WSJ article ) I was surprised by some other stats about China's housing market. According to some sources, nearly a third of the country's GDP can now be tied back to real estate-related activities (see above chart). On top of this, about 21% of homes in urban China were thought to be vacant as of 2017. This equated to about 65 million empty homes. I don't know what the exact numbers look like today, but these are staggering figures that speak to overbuilding.

Chart: WSJ

La Foundation Louis Vuitton (which is housed in a building designed by Frank Gehry ) has an exhibition on right now that displays the art collection of two brothers: Mikhaïl Abramovitch Morozov (1870-1903) et Ivan Abramovitch Morozov (1871-1921). The collection contains mostly early modernist work from the late 19th century and includes pieces by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, as well as others, including some Russian avant-garde work. We went through the exhibition last week when we were in Paris. Partially to see the collection and partially to see the architecture, which is, you know, very Frank Gehry. See above photo.

As I was going through the exhibition I was reminded of how much I like the Impressionist movement. I like the work, but I also really love the story. The Impressionist movement started in Paris in the late 1800s and many consider it to mark the beginning of modern art. It broke free of tradition and violated the rules of what was considered to be proper art work at the time in France.

Because of this, the Impressionists were heavily criticized at the outset. So much so that they were routinely rejected from exhibiting in the traditionally accepted art venues in Paris. The annual Salon de Paris was the big and most prestigious one as I understand it. This forced the group to organize their own exhibitions and circumvent the incumbents in order to get their work out into the world, which is pretty much what any "startup" has to do. Obviously the rest is history and now people to go to museums like La Foundation Louis Vuitton to look at Impressionist art work and talk amongst their friends about how we don't make art like they used to back in the late 19th century.

I mention all of this because of what is happening today in the world of NFTs. Non-fungible tokens and their application to digital art feels to me like history is repeating itself. We are at the dawn of something new and a lot of people seem to think that what's happening today is pretty stupid: Why pay thousands or even millions for a JPEG? I can just download a copy to my computer for free. This is not art. How do you even display it? I don't get it.

I am sure that most of the NFTs that people are buying today will go to $0 in value; just like a lot of the paint that has gone onto canvasses over the years hasn't created much value. Art is a funny thing. But that doesn't mean that cultural value will not be created over time. When people are talking and they think what you're doing is dumb, you may actually be on to something. The Impressionists taught us this important lesson well over a century ago.

Photo: La Foundation Louis Vuitton