Over the weekend, Berkshire Hathaway announced that it has come to an agreement to buy Arizona-based homebuilder Taylor Morrison for US$6.8 billion in cash. The agreed-upon price is $72.50 per share, representing a 24% premium over the company's closing stock price on the prior Friday. Once the transaction closes, Taylor Morrison will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and become a privately held company within the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate.

Now, the press release only says so much, but I did find the canned quotes interesting. Greg Abel of Berkshire said that the company wants to "unify our site-built homebuilding operations into a combined platform." And Sheryl Palmer, CEO of Taylor, said the acquisition "will allow us to scale the Taylor Morrison platform in ways that would not be possible as a standalone company.”

Berkshire has a long history in housing. It also owns a manufactured home company (i.e. not site-built), and various companies that make up the housing supply chain: bricks, paint, insulation, roofing, sales, and more. So it'll be interesting to see what they are able to achieve by way of a "combined platform." It has elements of both vertical and horizontal integration.

The other interesting thing about this announcement is that it also seems to signal the following: Abel wants Berkshire to be more of an active manager (finding those "synergies" across its subsidiary companies), and he likely feels the housing market is at or near the bottom of the cycle (despite current inflation risks). Regardless, the US has a structural housing deficit and so homebuilding is probably a good business to be in for the long term.

Cover photo by Josh Olalde on Unsplash

I hope you all had a great weekend.

Yesterday was the annual Bike for Brain Health ride in Toronto. It was an absolutely beautiful morning (much warmer than last year) and I rode 60 km. I'm sorry, I didn't have it in me to do the 90 km circuit. I'll try to be more committed next year.

The good news is that Bianca didn't go into labour while I was on the DVP and so I didn't need to show up at the hospital in full spandex. While clearly suboptimal, I feel like that would have made for a useful story to embarrass our daughter with in the future.

It's starting to feel a lot like summer in the city and with that comes the feeling of nostalgia. There's something obviously magical about this time of year, and this past weekend was particularly nostalgic for me because on Friday I also had my 25-year high school reunion.

Unnecessary details: I went to two different high schools and this reunion was for the first one, which was also my elementary school. It was nice of them to invite me.

Seeing friends that, in some cases, I hadn't seen in over 25 years reminded me that you can't replace the people that you grew up with. High school is a high-definition time.

Among many other things, it's when you're figuring out which clique you belong to, what music defines you, what it means to nervously ask a girl out on a date (and have her say no), and what it's like to have your heart broken.

My unproven theory (rigorously developed over the weekend) is that you will always share a unique bond with the friends that you had during this period of personal development. I mean, they were there during the really awkward years.

We also had small class sizes and everyone knew everyone. I'm sure that helped. I'm still close with a number of people from high school and from elementary school, but this weekend reminded me that I should make even more of an effort.

I'd also like to be a better cyclist, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Something tells me that I'm going to have less rather than more free time going forward. And I can't wait.

Regularly scheduled city-building programming will resume tomorrow.

According to recent data from Altus Group and BILD, a total of 1,100 new homes were sold across the GTA in April. This is a noticeable increase from 384 in April 2025, though it's still below the 10-year average of 2,418.

Importantly, this was the first month that new home sales could qualify for Ontario's new HST rebate, and the data suggests that the program is starting to have a positive effect on the market.

But let's not forget that this policy is not yet fully enacted.

The window for buyers is open and everyone fully expects the required federal legislation to pass, but that has not happened yet. The result is that there's still friction around how exactly the rebate will be administered.

As things become clearer, I suspect we will see an even greater uptick in new home sales.

Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Chart via the CBC