Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 741

One of my favorite YouTube channels is the B1M. Apparently it is the most subscribed-to channel focused on construction. If you don't already subscribe, you can do that over here .

Below is a recent video about Australia 108 in Melbourne. It's still under construction, but it is topped out and it is now the tallest building in the country at over 300m. That makes it a "supertall."

When you're building this tall, it can make a lot of sense to segment and occupy portions of the building before construction is fully complete. Among other things, it helps to manage risk. And that's exactly what they've done here.

The contractor building Australia 108 is Multiplex . They also happen to be our construction management partner on Junction House . Except our project is a bit more boutique than Australia 108.

https://youtu.be/aJGiiMIeWxA

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1265740083447173120?s=20

Joining a Zoom (or other video) meeting is as frictionless as opening up the calendar invite and clicking the link. No need to login or do much else, except maybe fiddle with the audio for a bit. "Can you hear me now?" The benefits to this are obvious. But if you're Zoom (or another video conferencing company) there could be a slight problem: I don't really care where that link is taking me, as long as it's taking me to the meeting I was supposed to join 4 minutes ago. In other words, there aren't really any network effects. The service doesn't get any better for me as more people use it, because anybody can join the link that I send them. Benedict Evans recently made this argument, here , and he goes on to posit that video calls, like voice calls, are destined to become a commodity. All that will matter is how you package them up. Makes sense.

I recently discovered and subscribed to Packy McCormick's "Not Boring" newsletter. So far it's quite good, and so here I am mentioning it to you all on the blog. In his latest newsletter , he makes the case for why Airbnb and Zillow -- the two largest residential real estate tech companies -- should merge. Naturally this new company would be called Zillbnb. You can read all about why he thinks this is a good idea over here, but I would like to point out one thing that I found interesting.

Packy makes the argument that "easiest-to-book, shortest duration reservations" are a leading indicator for changes in demand. In other words, platforms like Airbnb can start to tell you where people might want to live and platforms like Breather can start to tell you where people might want to work.

To support this argument he uses the example of his Airbnb rental outside of New York City. Sure, demand initially fell off a cliff at the beginning of lockdown, but then it started to surge as New Yorkers sought refuge outside of the city. And while I think that this particular change in demand will likely end up being short-term in nature, a similar trend is being reported around in the world . Did we hear it first on Airbnb?