Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 629

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1399368976229097473?s=20

I came across the above floor plan over the weekend. I reshared it on Twitter and there was then a pretty good discussion about what people like and don't like. I mean, who doesn't like looking at floor plans?

The suite is 790 square feet with 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. It rents, at least according to Bobby's original tweet, at $2,600 per month. That's $3.29 per square foot. I'm guessing that the apartment is in Philadelphia solely based on Bobby's location.

The divisive thing in this floor plan is the two inset bedrooms. Some people don't like these. But designing a good floor plan is like working through a puzzle. You have all these constraints (some of which are just personal preference) and you have to find ways to work around them.

When you're working with a deep urban floor plate, you pretty much have no choice but to design floor plans with inset bedrooms. Otherwise, the suites get too big and they stop making economic sense. I have talked about this a few times before on the blog.

So what you do is "bury" the bedroom(s) and keep the main living space as open as possible. In this case, the living/dining dimensions are about 17' wide x 10' deep. So a pretty good size, and certainly a very good width.

An alternate solution might be to flip one of the bedrooms up towards the main glass (keeping the second one inset). But given that you only have 17 feet to work with here, something is going to have to give. So if you made the living room 9' wide, you'd then only have somewhere around 8' for your bedroom.

Personally, I don't mind inset bedrooms, especially if they allow for more generous living spaces. So I think that this is a fairly reasonable and functional suite layout. I would have absolutely lived in an apartment like this when I was going to school in Philadelphia. (Is this even the right location?)

But if I were to make a few tweaks:

I would compress the bedrooms slightly to enlarge the living space even more. (Though if the target market is student roommates, perhaps the idea is to allow for a desk in the bedroom.) I would then flip the closets to the partition wall between the two bedrooms to improve sound attenuation.

I would also try and get the kitchen out of the hallway and into the main living/dining area. I don't know where all the plumbing stacks sit (see, constraints), but perhaps it just slides up toward the glass. Another solution might be on the other side of the upper bedroom (where there is currently a closet).

But what are your thoughts? Would you rent this apartment? Comments welcome below.

Benjamin Tal -- CIBC's Deputy Chief Economist -- is seemingly everywhere. And earlier today, he was delivering an annual economic update at an online event hosted by Brattys LLP (our condo lawyers) in partnership with CIBC. Below are a handful of slides that I found interesting and that I tweeted out during the event.

All of our personal risk curves changed during this pandemic. When the first wave hit, we all had no idea how bad this was going to be and what to expect. And so we all stayed home and washed our hands and our groceries. That changed with each subsequent wave. And now we're all ready and anxious to be done with this.

Tal referred to this as one of the most unequal recessions we've ever seen. If you had a high paying job, you probably kept it. And after you stopped spending money on eating out, entertainment, travel, and watching the Leafs lose in person, you likely had a meaningfully higher savings rate. That has created some $100 billion of "excess cash" sitting on the sidelines.

This cash wants to be spent and I think we're going to see it flying out the door in the second half of this year. Much of it will also flow into services, which should help to prop up the hardest hit segments of the economy. So while there has been some real pain, many are expecting the economy to snap back pretty quickly. Get ready for some euphoria in the second half of this year.

This last slide is particularly relevant to the kind of things we often talk about on this blog. It is essentially showing the increased demand for housing outside of the city during this pandemic (as of Q4 2020).

A flatter line (Vancouver, Calgary) indicates that year-over-year price growth was less affected by "distance from the city center." On the other hand, a steeper line (Toronto, Ottawa) indicates that price growth was stronger the more you moved outward from the core. In the case of Toronto, it was nearly 20% YoY when you got about 60-70 kilometers out of the city.

But it's important to keep in mind that the core of Toronto still grew at about 5% year-over-year. About the same as in Vancouver. And in the case of Ottawa, the number looks to be about 17.5% in the city center. These are meaningful numbers and not the kind of symptoms you would expect to see from downtowns in the middle of a death spiral.

I would argue, as I have many times before, that this last chart is the result of short-term phenomena. I bet we'll see a number of these pitches reverse by the time Q4 2021 arrives.

https://youtu.be/FA80wzkPBNM

Last week was the official broker launch for One Delisle . In normal times, we would have packed the house and done a fun in-person event involving food, and probably some negronis. Instead, Lucas , Riz , and I did a livestream from the sales gallery at Yonge & St. Clair.

That video is now available online (embedded above and here ). You'll have to get past our hair (Lucas and I are both in desperate need of a cut), but otherwise it's pretty cool. Shoutout to Veronica for pulling everything together and making it awesome.

If you'd like to schedule an appointment at the sales gallery, send a note to sales@onedelisle.com . Please also feel free to contact me directly (or copy me on the email to the sales team). If you're interested, I would encourage you to act quickly as demand has been incredibly strong.