Toronto Life recently published an interesting article called Stuck in Condoland. A lot of people have mentioned it to me, so there seems to be a lot of interest in the topic. It basically profiles the lives of a few young families who live downtown and are trying to raise young children in relatively small condos (think 700 square feet).

I thought it was interesting because I like the idea of small and efficient living. The average post-war bungalow in Toronto was probably less than 1,000 square feet. And so this modern notion that you need a big house in order to properly raise a family is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although we’re a richer city today and that’s what happens when people become wealthier: they consume more.

But the article also makes it seem that developers only want to build small condos and that larger condos and single-family homes just aren’t profitable enough. Thus the reason all these families are being forced to into tiny shoeboxes in the sky. But that’s not really true.

Look, just like every other for-profit business on the planet, developers are concerned with making money. And so they will always look for ways to increase efficiency, drive down costs, and so on. But there are certain realities of the market that developers don’t have control over.

First, developers aren’t building new single family homes in the city (at any sort of meaningful scale) because there’s no land to do so. And because the land use policies in place and the current thinking around how we can more sustainably build our cities for the future dictate that we should be building more intensely. In other words, building up. So it’s not a question of developers not wanting to build single family homes; it’s a question of not being able to.

Second, trust me when I say that if the market wanted large 3 bedroom family units, developers would build them. Mandating them is a useless exercise if people don’t want them or are unable to afford them.

The challenge we face is that a reinforced concrete condo tower is more expensive to build than a wood-framed single family house. So until land values get to a point where single family homes become the more expensive option (compared to condos), I don’t think we’ll see a huge rush towards 3+ bedroom suites.

This is my hypothesis at least. Because when you buy house, you’re really buying two things: the house itself and the land. If the house itself (wood) is cheaper to build on a per square foot basis than a condo (concrete), then the variable that will make a difference is the land. And as people like to say: “buy land, they ain’t making any more of it.”

So what I’m saying is that I just don’t think the situation is as simple as: “developers are bad, all they want to do is build tiny condos and make lots of money.” It’s more complicated than that. But I do believe the question of how families are going to live in the city is an important one.

Since I started blogging last year, I’ve been getting regular emails from both people I know and from readers I don’t know (but hope to one day meet) asking for advice on buying real estate. Usually somebody sends me the link to a place they’re thinking about buying, and they want to know what I think about the property and the neighborhood.

I’m more than happy to help when I can and I try to be brutally honest in terms of what I think. What’s interesting about this dynamic though, is that I don’t have a vested interest in any of the outcomes. Whether I tell that person I love the place or that it’s shit, I don’t stand to gain anything. And that means I can be brutally honest. It’s for this same reason that customer reviews on websites can work so well. 

Because on the flip side, if I make money when you buy, then guess what, I’m going to want you to buy. That’s how it works for any industry–from financial services to real estate to retail. That’s why some stores will promote the fact that their sales people are not on commission. Although you could argue that those sales people are then less motivated to help you.

In any event, all of this got me wondering if there isn’t some way to take customer reviews to the next level. Could a decentralized sales model work?

Last year I had a conference call with one of the chief officers of one of the top 3 real estate websites in the US and I was told that they had actually tested a “social buying model.” It ultimately failed, but it strikes me as an interesting concept. Reviews are starting to feel a bit dated now on the social web, but I think the idea of crowdsourced input is here to stay.

Image: Flickr

Two things happened yesterday. And since there’s a nice tie in, I’d like to talk about both of them.

First, here at TAS, we launched a new condominium project called Kingston&Co. We had already gone public with some information, but we now have an updated rendering and we’ve gone live with a public Q&A section on our website (kingstonandco.ca). The questions are all geared towards topics that we think are on a lot of people’s minds and anybody can respond. Instead of trying to cover up the elephant in the room, we wanted to do the opposite and get it out and into the open. It’s all about promoting greater transparency.

Second, I watched this 45-minute interview with author and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk last night before going to bed. It’s a great video and I would encourage you to watch it if you have any interest in entrepreneurship, social media, marketing, capitalism and overall hustle. But if you don’t have the time, here are some of my key takeaways. Gary makes, on average, between $3-5 million a year selling the social media dream (but it could be more depending on things like his angel investments). Everybody is a media company first. He has clients putting 100% of their marketing dollars into social media and they’re seeing a ROI. It took him 1 ½ years to get anybody to care about his video blog Wine Library TV. And don’t just ask. Give as well.

That last point is a tie in to his latest book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. And what he’s effectively saying is that, as a brand, you need to be mostly giving to your customers (that’s the jab). It could be valuable content you produce via social media or whatever. It’s you, delivering value to your customers in some way. Then, once you’ve done that, you can go in for the right hook, which is the ask: Buy my stuff. The idea is that you build up trust with your customers and develop a relationship so that you get the privilege of asking them to give you money.

The alternative, of course, is what we’re all already familiar with: brands constantly bombarding people with right hooks. It’s the let’s throw a bunch of shit up against the wall and see what sticks approach. And it’s related to the whole permission marketing vs. interruption marketing debate popularized by marketer Seth Godin.

But Gary’s argument–and I found this really interesting–is that constant right hooks is the approach we had to take before the internet and things like social media. Those right hooks were so expensive to deliver through billboards, print ads, TV commercials and so on, that companies simply couldn’t afford to be delivering any jabs. But all that has changed with social media and technology. Now, the best brands succeed by building trust and establishing relationships with their customers–often one-by-one.

And this is exactly what we’re trying to do with Kingston&Co. We know that there’s a lot of discussion happening in the marketplace around condos and we didn’t want to ignore it. We wanted to address it. And if you look at our messaging, you’ll notice that in most cases we’ve put “Join the conversation” ahead of the typical “Register now.” That’s because we truly do want to have a conversation.