I was out for brunch last weekend with a few close friends from high school. It’s a “monthly reunion” that happens nowhere close to every month. But the hope is certainly there.
During brunch the topic of my blog came up. And one of my friends asked me how I got started and how the hell I keep up with one blog post every single day. (I get that second question all the time.)
I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s worth revisiting.
Earlier this week venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a post on his blog called The Blank Screen. And I really liked how he described the experience of writing a daily blog post:
Sometimes this process produces great insights for me and possibly others. Sometimes it produces garbage. But I’ve come to realize that the daily post, and its quality or lack thereof, is not really the thing. It is the ritual, the practice, the frequency, the habit, and the discipline that matters most to me. And, I would suspect, the same is true of the readers and commenters who frequent this blog.
Fred’s blog was a major source of inspiration for me. I saw him doing it. I saw the value he was getting out of it. And I wanted to do it too. So I did, almost 2 years ago.
But he also inspired me in another way.
Venture capital and real estate development share many similarities in my mind, even down to the way that deals are often structured with preferred returns and promotes.
But the interesting thing about venture capital is that it went from a largely closed and “ivory tower” kind of industry to now one where almost every venture capitalist blogs, tweets, and strives for greater transparency (when possible).
I thought this was a fascinating shift and it made me think that the exact same thing was bound to happen in real estate development. So I am trying to make that happen. Hopefully this blog is helping.
Untitled by Lynne Meng on 500px
Yesterday I ran a quick 3-4 question survey on ATC called homes for families. The objective was to get a sense of people’s preferences for apartment vs. ground-related housing (house or townhouse) when it comes time to raise a family.
The results are public so anybody can take a look at the data. At the time of writing this post there were already 70 responses. That’s not a huge data set, but the data is more or less what I expected to see.
Here’s what I found (if the data set was larger, I would have made charts):
The vast majority of respondents were from Toronto. No surprise there. That reflects the readership of this blog, which itself can be quite Toronto-centric at times. (I’ve been trying to branch out more, I swear.) That said, I was thrilled to also see respondents from cities like Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Porto, and Sydney.
Of the people who specified that they have kids, 11% live in an apartment. 17% live in a townhouse. And 72% live in a house. If you add houses and townhouses together, you get 89% of people with kids living in some kind of ground-related dwelling.
Of the people who specified that they don’t have kids, 61% live in an apartment. 6% live in a townhouse. And 33% live in a house. This is the kind of split that I generally expected to see for Toronto.
For the people who specified that they don’t have kids, they were then asked where they plan to move if/when they do have kids. 13% plan to move to another apartment. 8% plan to move to a townhouse. 33% plan to move to a house. 23% don’t plan to move (i.e. they are planning to stay put). And 23% don’t plan to have a family.
Interestingly enough, 100% of the people who said that they were not planning to move, were already living in a ground-related housing unit (a house in almost all of the cases). So in reality – and if you exclude the people who don’t plan to have kids – about 83% of respondents expect to raise their kids in a house or townhouse.
Again, this isn’t a big sample size, but the trend appears more or less flat. 89% of respondents who already have kids are already living in a ground-related unit. And when people were asked to project where they would like to be living once they have kids, 83% said they want a house or townhouse.
Do you think these numbers accurately reflect consumer preferences in your city?
Ever since I was a little kid, I have thought that I would one day get into politics.
A lot of it has to do with me wanting to affect positive change, which is also one of the reasons I love real estate development (and one of the reasons I write this blog). Developers might have a bad rap in some circles, but I view it as a mechanism for positive change in the built environment.
However, I have also felt that politics is something that’s better to do when you have grey hair and you don’t actually need the money to live. That way people take you more seriously and you can, hopefully, just do what you feel is right as opposed to playing the political game.
But more and more I find myself thinking: Brandon, you would make a terrible politician.
I don’t want to play games. I don’t want to have to think about which stance will win me the most votes. And I don’t want to have to dance around questions so I can avoid upsetting certain constituents. I’d rather be clear and decisive about what I think is the right thing to do.
But that doesn’t always work so well in politics. So I think I’ll just stick to building things and writing this daily blog.