Now that One Delisle is nearing its final height, the team hired Jacob Côté Photography to go out and capture some progress photos of the site. If you'd like to take a look, they're posted over on Globizen's blog journal. My absolute favourite is the twilight-hour shot with the light blue sky and view toward downtown and the lake. It's the kind of shot that reminds me why I love Toronto.

In other news, the structural backup wall is now underway along the Yonge Street retail frontage. This structure will allow for the reinstatement of the Art Deco facade that was dismantled, catalogued, and stored off-site since the start of construction. Following this, the remainder of the ground floor will be clad in curtain wall (pictured below).

The structural steel for the top of the building, or what we internally call the "architectural crown," was also recently delivered to site. This structure will frame a two-storey volume at the top of the building, conceal the mechanical penthouse, and serve as the building's last important architectural move. Watch for it this summer.

Lastly, we welcomed a select number of brokers to site this week to tour our recently completed model suites. If you have clients you'd like to bring to site or if you yourself are interested, I would encourage you to reach out to the team to book a private site tour. Email sales@onedelisle.com or phone 416-551-4520.

Aziz Sunderji of Home Economics has come up with an interesting way of measuring luxury home sales. He starts by identifying the top-decile price in 2019 for a collection of metro areas (i.e., the top 10% of all home sales in a given market).

This means that if the top 10% of homes in a city sold for $1 million or more, then $1 million is the threshold for a home to be considered "luxury."

But to prevent general market inflation from skewing things over time, he then adjusts this luxury threshold according to how the entire market performed. For instance, if average home prices have increased by 30% since 2019, then the luxury threshold also increases by 30%. In our example, it is now $1.3 million.

Now what?

By definition, in 2019, exactly 10% of sales in a given market were deemed to be luxury. But because the luxury threshold moves in tandem with the general market, Aziz is then able to see if the luxury segment grew or shrank in a particular market.

If, for example, only 4% of home sales are now above the new trended luxury benchmark, well then this indicates a shift toward affordability, as opposed to luxury. To be considered luxury today, a home's value has to have grown faster than the average home in that market.

The result is the above chart, which shows three luxury outliers, and two in particular: San Jose and Miami. This illustrates that so-called "K-shaped" economy.

Cover photo by Charlie Lederer on Unsplash

Charts from Home Economics

The richest person in Utah is a man named Matthew Prince. Prince, who grew up in Park City and was once a ski instructor at Park City Mountain Resort, is the co-founder of a tech company called Cloudflare. I'm assuming his riches came from the tech company and not from being a ski instructor. But he still seems to like skiing because he's been mounting a highly public and aggressive campaign to buy the resort from Vail.

There is a narrative in the ski and snowboard community that Vail has destroyed the industry through poor management, expensive lift tickets, homogeneity, and just an overall loss of what the vibe used to be. The market may also agree with this narrative because Vail's stock price is down nearly 60% over the last five years.

So Prince's message to Vail is "you're a bad capital allocator" and his pitch to the Park City community is one that sounds really nice. It's basically a community-first rescue mission. He has promised zero personal profit of any kind (he apparently has enough money), pledged to reinvest 100% of the resort's profits into infrastructure upgrades and employee compensation, and floated ambitious ideas to build a massive gondola network connecting Main Street Park City to some of the neighbouring canyons (which would be totally awesome).

Vail's response continues to be that the resort is absolutely not for sale. But Prince is trying to encourage them to adopt a more asset-light model, where they control the brand and the Epic Pass, and local billionaires like Prince run the physical properties.

To provide a bit of real estate context here, Vail owns the mountain infrastructure, the snowmaking equipment, and the overall business operations, but much of the resort sits on land owned by Toronto-based Talisker. My understanding is that the land lease gives Vail all the practical indications of ownership for a very long time, but I thought I would explain this nuance given that we like to talk about real estate specifics on this blog.

I have no idea where this public pursuit will go, and I know nothing about Prince's values as an individual, but the story is certainly compelling. There's something to be said for a rich local wanting to buy a resort just for the love of skiing.

Cover photo by Patrick T'Kindt on Unsplash