I sat next to a software developer at my friend's wedding a few weeks ago, and I figured I would ask him the obvious question: "What percentage of the code that you write today is now being done through AI?" At first he was reticent to answer, but eventually he told me that it's, like, the majority. That sounded right.
I then decided to pull out my phone and force upon him something that I've been vibe coding. I'm sure he found this boring, but his response was interesting nonetheless. He said, "This is the future of software. It is going to be both highly personalized and built by actual users. And because of this, it's going to be better software." In other words, accountants will build what they need, photographers will build what they need, and real estate developers will build what they need.
What I showed him was Propeur.com, a residential property management platform tailored toward small Ontario landlords that I have been building for my own purposes and as a tool that Globizen can use for its infill rental projects. It's still early days and there are bugs to work out, but here's what you can do so far:
Add your rental properties and receive a Monday morning email with a summary of what happened over the last week and what's on the horizon.
Manage tenants and rental units, including move-in and move-out dates, and all of the critical dates surrounding rental increases.
Automatically track current debt balances and maturity dates.
Store all relevant property documents, and have them automatically labeled and categorized in the appropriate folders.
Create a public property profile for both on-market and off-market units (here's an example).
Sync bank accounts and categorize expenses by property and unit.
Export transactions to a CSV, filtered by property, date, and revenue/expense category.
Log maintenance requests and automatically email them out to a contractor or maintenance person (the next step will likely be some kind of tenant portal).
Export tax reports at the end of the year.
Again, it's still very much a preliminary beta release and there are certainly bugs. But already, I find myself using it almost daily. If you're a small landlord in Ontario and would like to give it a spin, you can sign up here. I'd love to get your feedback on the platform. And if it's something you find useful, please feel free to drop me a line and I'll buy you a coffee.
Cover photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
The conventional beauty of the internet and software was that it had effectively zero marginal cost. That is to say, it might cost you a lot of money to create something initially, but once created, you could scale it very quickly, more or less for free. This has been a great way to make money, and it's the opposite of something like real estate development where everything takes forever and costs too much money.
But the landscape has shifted rapidly. Dror Poleg wrote this week that intelligence, rather than software, is now eating the world. The fundamental difference is that while software had zero marginal cost, AI does not. When we ask AI something, it has to reason it out in real time, and in order to do that, it needs to consume lots of energy and compute.
As a result of the above, we are seeing something we’ve never seen before: Software demand is beginning to bump into physical constraints. The world is struggling to allocate sufficient land to build data centers and to produce and redirect the energy required to meet AI demand. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are spending an unprecedented amount of money to build these new data centers, but they are approaching their financial limits. Google has recently partnered with Blackstone, one of the world’s largest landlords, to expand and expedite the construction of new data centers.
All this sounds like great news for real estate developers. Finally, order has been restored in the universe: If you want to grow your business, you need to pay more rent; the natural scarcity of land is asserting itself. Instead of software eating the world, it is now the world that is eating the free cash flow generated by software companies.
However, these specific dynamics may only remain true in the short to medium term. As dystopian as it may seem, there is indeed an organized and real effort to bring data centres into space. Some of the advantages of this include abundant, continuous energy and zero land-use constraints to fetter growth. Now, I don't know enough to comment on the feasibility or timing, but it certainly sounds like great fodder for a Black Mirror episode.
In 1983, the Eiffel Tower underwent a significant structural renovation that included the removal of an original helical staircase used to bring visitors up the tower. New elevators were installed in its place, and the specific section connecting the second and third floors was dismantled and cut into 24 sections.
Four of these sections were saved for French public heritage, and the remaining 20 sections were auctioned off to the public. Since then, these stair sections have traded for staggering numbers, with the record being Section No. 13 selling for €523,800 in 2016.
But now, for the first time since the original 1983 auction, Stair Section No. 1 is about to hit the market through Artcurial. The pre-sale estimate is €120,000-€150,000, but as is customary with auction houses (and auction dynamics in general), I'm sure this is a deliberately low number.
If any of you are in the market for an original Eiffel Tower staircase from 1889, you can register for the auction here, which is scheduled to take place on May 21 at 2pm Paris time. I'll be checking in from afar with curiosity. Because somebody is really going to want this.
Photos from Artcurial