Big Ben Myers of Bullpen Consulting doesn't usually have strong opinions on Twitter (obviously joking), but I did see him respond to this tweet this morning:

The assertion he is responding to is basically this: "developers are stupid because they tend to hold onto land during downturns, instead of building through them." On some level, I think I know where this line of thinking is coming from. It's the whole Warren Buffet philosophy of "being fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful."

But what it ignores is development feasibility. Developers typically rely heavily on the availability of debt financing. First you need land financing in order to acquire the land, and then, once you have your entitlements, condominium pre-sales and/or any other requirements in place, you move onto a construction loan (which often "takes out" your land loan).

Maybe you have deep enough pockets to fund everything with cash, but most of the time that is not the case. And so if these debt facilities are not available to you, then you are not building.

The other part of this equation is that, during downturns, it can be harder to forecast your future revenues. What can I sell/rent this space for, and how long will it take to absorb? These are difficult questions in the best of times, but they're even more difficult when you don't have a lot of market activity/comparables to point to.

All of this contributes to debt being less available, especially for smaller developers. It also makes new sites difficult to underwrite. Because as we have talked about many times before on this blog, land should be the residual claimant in a development pro forma. Revenue minus development costs equals how much you can afford to pay for land.

If the math doesn't work and if you can't get financing, it almost certainly doesn't matter how much "leading" you feel like doing. You're not building.

If you're building a multi-family rental building, you're almost certainly building it "on spec." What this means is that you're building an empty building and, once it's done, you will then work to rent it out. (Nobody rents an apartment years in advance.) In this scenario, you will know what your costs are once the building is complete, but you won't really know what your revenue will be until you start leasing. If demand is strong and the market has moved since you started building, maybe your rents will be a pleasant surprise. If the market has moved in the opposite direction since you started building, your rents might be an unfortunate surprise. The laneway house I recently completed is an example of a spec rental building. I built it without a tenant, but I assumed that I could rent it out upon completion. That proved to be true, but mind you it was only one unit. So it was relatively low risk.

If you're building an office building, it is bit more common to have some pre-leasing in place. Early on in my career, I worked on an office development where we started construction with about 25% of the leasing complete. This wasn't enough for construction financing, but we saw that demand was strong and we needed to start right away in order to meet our lead tenant's occupancy timing. And so we made the decision to go. We ran on equity for the first bit of construction, but once we completed enough leasing we were able to place our construction facility and lower the project's overall equity requirement. We took a chance and everything ended up working out okay. But it could have not worked out. What would have happened if a pandemic hit after we started construction? Leasing activity would have completely stopped.

If you're building a condo building (at least in this city), you'll likely be pre-selling your suites. You don't necessarily have to do this. There are examples of well-capitalized condo developers building on spec without any pre-sales whatsoever. (Build, lock in your costs, and then sell.) But generally most developers will pre-sell, secure their construction financing, and then begin construction. In some ways this lowers your risks, as well overall systemic risk in the market. It also lowers your equity requirement as a developer. But it does create another possible risk. Once you pre-sell, you're effectively locking in and capping your revenues. So you better have a very good handle on your costs. Otherwise you could be exposing yourself to cost escalations without any way to claw back some of your margins.

The other thing to consider is whether you want to yield or not. Is it better to sell all of your suites as soon as possible (bird in hand) or sell only what you need, holdback the rest, and hope that prices increase going forward? I don't think there is a right or wrong answer here. Some developers don't want any market risk and so they take the bird in hand when they can. Other developers prefer to profit maximize and/or safeguard themselves against unforeseen costs, and so they sit on inventory. If you have unsold suites, you can always push revenues. Either way, what is hopefully clear from this post is that development is risky. This is just one example of some of the decisions that need to be made. There are countless others. Sometimes you'll get it right. And sometimes you won't. Hopefully the former happens more than the latter.

Toronto has more people living in apartments than not. Looking at 2016 census data, the City of Toronto has about 1,112,930 occupied private dwellings and the breakdown between apartments (both lower and higher than 5 storeys) and grade-related housing is roughly 60/40. If you look at what's been built more recently, the split is closer to 80/20. From 1996 to 2014, about 78% of all housing completions in the city were condominiums/apartments.

So what is obvious to me is that the City of Toronto is becoming more dense, rather than less dense, and that family housing is destined to become more urban. As of 2011, there were 10,145 more families with children living in apartments/condominiums in the city compared to 15 years earlier. By comparison, the number of families with children living in low-rise housing remained more or less flat over this same time period.

Of course, what this data doesn't speak to is the number of people and families that may have opted to leave the City of Toronto for the suburbs -- driving until they qualify for the kind of housing product that they would like to consume. The number of children living in higher density housing might be increasing within the city, but we probably shouldn't ignore the pull toward the suburbs that still exists during family formation.

Cities around the world are working to make their urban environments more suitable to families and young children. Here in Toronto we have something known as the Growing Up Guidelines. But the focus seems to be largely on design considerations -- think playrooms and stroller-friendly foyers. That's crucial, but it's not everything. There are also very real economic realities to consider.

The average price of remaining condo inventory in the Greater Toronto Area last quarter was nearly $1,100 psf. That puts a family-sized 1,000 sf suite at $1.1 million -- and a lot more if you're in a central neighborhood. The average would be closer to $1.5 million downtown. Obviously not all families can afford this. So there's an affordability challenge. It's one thing for the critics to say that developers should be building larger suites, but the market needs to be there.

Another consideration is that of financing. Most developers rely on construction financing in order to build their projects. And in order to build a new condominium, there is typically a requirement to pre-sell a certain number of suites (revenue is the actual governor). This is generally a lot easier to do with smaller suites and with investor suites because these buyers tend to be more comfortable waiting out construction.

Families, on the other hand, usually have a more immediate time horizon. It's harder to forecast when the need will arise and it may not be financially viable to do that pre-emptively. And so I would argue that in addition to having an affordability challenge, we also have a financing structure in place that biases the type of homes that get built. There are, of course, advantages to this model. Pre-sales are a way for lenders to mitigate risk. It helps to ensure that the market doesn't get ahead of itself. But there are side effects.

Despite all this, we are seeing more families with children in higher density housing. Anecdotally, I see it happening in elevators with the number of strollers. This trend is destined to continue, but the winds are not entirely at the back of this shift.