Some of you have probably come across this photo online (this particular one is via Civil Beat):

It is a photo of what looks to be the only remaining house in Lahaina, following Hawaii's devastating wildfires this month.

Naturally this raises an important question: Why was this house spared?

The likely answer is that it was a combination of things. But some believe that the single biggest factor was the non-combustible zone that the owners had inadvertently created around the perimeter of their home.

They did it to direct water and avoid possible termite damage, but it turns out that this is what most jurisdictions recommend in order to reduce wildfire risk.

Here in Canada, FireSmart recommends a 1.5 meter non-combustible zone.

So while luck surely played a part, so too did design.

Good morning from rainy New Hampshire.

It’s been raining all morning, but apparently there is an ocean hidden in the above picture. We also got in after dark and so all I really saw was what I could see on the drive from the airport.

Whenever I am reminded that the vast majority of built form in North America is car-oriented in nature, I can’t help but think of how sticky all of this is going to be.

Witold Rybczynski put it accurately when he said, “urbanism and architecture observe different time lines.” Buildings may take forever to build, but relative to urban form, they actually change pretty quickly.

New materials and styles emerge, and so do new buildings. But the streets that surround them change so slowly, that for all intents and purposes, they mostly don’t change.

What that means is that, for better or for worse, most of what we see is likely to persist. No wonder there is an arms race going on with autonomous vehicles.

A friend of mine just sent me this blog post from the venture capital firm, Shadow Ventures. They specialize in the built environment (i.e. real estate and construction) and the post is called, "What McKinsey gets wrong about the built environment." Here's one of the points that they make:

We are project based. While we are much larger, the most similar business is the movie industry. Project based, different source of funding/budget every time, the team changes (but we have our faves).

This is very true. Oftentimes what happens in real estate is that you start with an opportunity. Something like, "buy this building, fix it up, and then sell it for more." If the opportunity sounds compelling, a common approach is to then "get control of the asset and figure out how to capitalize it."

What this means is a conditional deal so that you can (1) do your due diligence and (2) figure out how to pay for it. This gets back to the three-legged stool that we've spoken about before. To do real estate stuff you basically need 3 things: a piece of real estate, relevant experience, and, of course, some money.

This speaks to the entrepreneurial nature of real estate. But it also speaks to why it is maybe unfair to evaluate the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry as you might the automotive industry. The auto industry doesn't capitalize and make each car slightly differently.

This is one of the many things that makes real estate unique. And it's why we have seen an enduring effort to figure out the "productization" of housing. It's about being less project based.