In my BARED post with Michael Cooper he described real estate development as being one of the most creative things you can do because of all of the constraints that one has to deal with. This certainly feels true on many days. A lot of… Read More
It’s fine to talk about the importance of big cities in today’s world, but there’s another side of this coin to consider. What happens to the towns and smaller cities who aren’t guiding the global economy? Here is an interesting snippet from the NY Times… Read More
I’ve always been fascinated by questions around the origin and location of cities. How did they get their start and why did they get founded where they did? Access to water and resources are obvious factors. But it could have also been for defensive reasons. … Read More
Below is a mapping (by Taylor Blake of the Martin Prosperity Institute) of the top 10 metro economies in the world by GDP at purchasing power parity. In brackets, is a country with a comparable GDP. Tokyo is the world’s largest metro economy with ~$1.6… Read More
Real estate companies often have a need for aerial photography. Perhaps you want to showcase an existing building. Perhaps you want to capture the views from a future/proposed building. Or perhaps you’d like to document a building under construction. Usually in the latter case, you… Read More
Here is an eye-opening article from data scientist Vicki Boykis outlining the number of ways in which Facebook collects data about its users. It’s called: What should you think about when using Facebook? One of the more surprising tidbits from Boykis’ article is that Facebook… Read More
The Economist recently published the following chart alongside this article talking about the impact of foreign buyers on global house prices. They also have this set of interactive graphs that allows you to chart prices according to a number of different measures. The two metrics… Read More
I am one of those people that gets annoyed when people don’t follow proper escalator etiquette. The etiquette being: stand on the right; walk on the left. Some cities – London and Tokyo come to mind – are draconian about this. But it turns out… Read More
Balconies, outdoor spaces and, more broadly, the relationship between inside and outside are important considerations in multi-family residential design. Earlier this year, Mansion Global ran a piece talking about a recent trend in cities such as New York, Toronto, and London, where high-rise outdoor spaces… Read More
The New York Times recently argued that self-driving cars can’t cure traffic, but that economics can. Here is the key soundbite: “Maybe autonomous cars will be different from other capacity expansions,” Mr. Turner said. “But of the things we have observed so far, the only… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 