Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 900

This morning BILD and Altus Group released their January 2019 new home sales figures for the Greater Toronto Area.

Here are the highlights:

• 1,362 new homes sold in January 2019 across the GTA. This is up 14% compared to last January.

• Of these, 942 (~69%) were condominiums (includes low, mid, and high-rise, as well as townhouses). And 420 (~31%) were single-family homes (includes detached, semi-detached, and freehold townhouses).

• Condominium sales volume is sitting only about 5% below the 10-year average and the benchmark price increased this month to $803,638, which represents a 12.5% year-over-year increase.

• On the other hand, single-family home sales are down about 53% from the 10-year average and the benchmark price decreased by about 8.1% compared to last year. It is sitting at $1,130,046.

While there continues to be a bifurcation in the new home market, we are seeing improvements across the board and the data is consistent with Altus' prediction that 2019 will see an increase in overall sales.

It is also important to consider how geography might factor into the above numbers. Here are the January sales numbers for the last three years broken down by region within the GTA:

Just under 80% of the new condominiums sold last month took place in Toronto, whereas only about 1.2% of the single-family homes sold last month took place in the city. You can count them on one hand. There were only 5.

So rather than just look at this in terms of housing type, I think the other way to interpret the data is that it could suggest strong and continued demand for centrally located and transit-oriented communities.

And that just so happens to translate into a condominium.

Photo by  Eugene Aikimov  on  Unsplash

Earlier this month it was announced that the on-demand electric scooter and bike startup, Lime, had closed a $310 million series D round. This values the 18-month old company at around $2.4 billion and brings its total raise to $867.1 million . For comparison, Bird -- its main competitor -- has raised around $400 million.

These numbers should tell you about the kind of growth that the "micromobility" startup is seeing. They are now in 15 countries and its riders have taken over 34 million trips. In the last 7 months alone, the company reports that it has seen a 5.5x increase in ridership. They are seen as an affordable last-mile solution. Supposedly 1/3 of its users report an income of less than $50,000 per year.

Lime entered the Canadian market last fall via Waterloo. They have yet to expand anywhere else, though I suspect we'll see them in Toronto this spring/summer. One of the barriers is that their scooters (with airless tires) aren't equipped to deal with snow, so they currently pack them up during the winter months.

This is in addition to the regulatory challenges they are facing in cities all around the world. But like Uber, I am sure there is a compromise to be had.

The third edition of Savills' annual Tech Cities report is now out. Savills is a global real estate company headquartered in London and a few years ago they started looking and what makes a successful "tech city." As always, you should take these rankings with a healthy dose of scepticism. But this one is based on over 100 individual metrics across 6 main categories:

• Business environment (such as the size of the financial services industry)

• Tech environment (such as the amount of inward VC investment)

• City buzz and wellness (is it a cool place to live?)

• Talent Pool (is the city creating and attracting young/smart talent?)

• Real estate costs

• Urban mobility

Here are the top 30 cities for tech and startup companies:

New York takes the top spot, supposedly because of its deep talent pool and position as one of if not the capital the world. But my friends in the Bay Area tell me that their housing shortage is also starting to impact SF's tech dominance.

Generally, the report finds that the above "tech cities" should see their GDP rise by 36% over the next decade, compared to 19% for other developed cities. I'm not sure how much of this has to do with tech, but the above list does differ from what you'd see in a more conventional global cities index. Here you have Austin ahead of global cities such as Hong Kong. And you have Toronto ahead of cities like Tokyo and Paris.

One takeaway that shouldn't come as a surprise to readers of this blog is the rise of Chinese cities in the index. Beijing is ahead of New York, London, and San Francisco by a wide margin in terms of annual VC investment. And Chinese cities as a whole are starting to take a greater share of global VC dollars (second chart below).

If you'd like to download a PDF of the full report, you can do that here .

Image: Photo by  Jason Briscoe  on  Unsplash