Touring and generally looking at buildings is, in my opinion, an important part of being a developer. Whenever I tour a project, I always learn something new. Because invariably, someone will say something like, "the building inspector made us do X." Immediately after you then email all of your project teams and ask them if they've run into this same problem. And then, hopefully, you're a little bit better than the last project.
This kind of knowledge transfer is a good thing, but I also think it's a reminder of just how opaque and fragmented information is within our industry. There's a lot of information and experience that simply isn't stored anywhere, other than in someone's head or deep on someone's hard drive never to be found ever again.
Sometimes it might be part of a firm's competitive advantage and they don't want to share it with others. That's fair. But in my experience, most people in this industry are more than happy to share what they know and where they've made mistakes. It helps us all get better. But might there be a more effective place to share this knowledge beyond individual conversations, conferences, building tours, and group chats?
There has to be. And my prediction is that it will eventually live on a blockchain.
As a follow-up to last week's post about giving free land to the City of Toronto, I am now thrilled to report that, today at 12:14 PM, we received our building permit!
Some of you were keen to hear about what happened following the post. So here's the update. I published the original post last Wednesday. And to be honest, it received far more attention than I was expecting.
On Thursday morning I received a call from the city. They weren't thrilled about my post, but were very helpful and said that they would ensure the conveyance happened immediately. It then got done before noon that same day.
Planning then sent a note to buildings saying that the permit was ready for issuance. Yay. Buildings acknowledged that they were working on it, and on Monday of this week we received a summary of the outstanding fees and the instructions for the wire transfer.
We paid the fees immediately and on Tuesday we received a payment receipt from the city. Then today -- Wednesday -- we received the building permit. So it was exactly one week from post to permit. A big thanks to everyone who helped to finally move this forward.
Hopefully it's clear that last week's post came strictly from a place of prolonged frustration. I wasn't trying to be mean. Our lawyer reminded me, after the post, that we've actually been working on this land conveyance for over 2 years.
I was reading today about how DroneBase has partnered with FLIR Systems to offer infrared and thermal imaging missions. FLIR actually invested in DroneBase. For those of you who aren't familiar with DroneBase, they operate the largest drone network in the world and have a wide variety of services geared toward the real estate industry.
This news is noteworthy because infrared thermography cameras allow you to see and measure the thermal energy emitted from objects -- such as buildings. For the real estate industry, or even for individual homeowners, it would allow you to quickly visualize things like leakiness (lack of air tightness), water damage, and so on.
These kinds of scans already exist, but putting thermal sensors on drones has the potential to make this technology much more scalable and cost effective. I am sure we will be seeing more of this. And when we do, I bet we'll discover that many buildings don't actually perform all that well from an energy standpoint.
Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash