In my BARED post with Michael Cooper he described real estate development as being one of the most creative things you can do because of all of the constraints that one has to deal with. This certainly feels true on many days.

A lot of these constraints also create competing tensions. One example is the tension between what landowners want and what the city may want.

The value of development land is dependent on what you can build on it. It is, in theory at least, the residual claimant once you factor in all of your other development costs. But in a competitive land market, owners will naturally have high expectations around what their land is worth. And telling them about the intricacies of your residual claimant Excel model will fall on deaf ears if the output doesn’t match their expectations. They see what other land is selling for – even if the land use policies are entirely different – and they want the same or more.

So to make the math work, it often becomes about density. In practice, many financial models are probably working in the opposite direction to what I described above: here’s how much money the landowner needs to sell; now let’s figure out if we can get enough density to make this work.

Of course, the challenge with this approach is that you naturally start to push up against a ceiling with respect to density. Landowner wants more density. City wants less density. If I ever ran a development model today where this wasn’t the case, I would instinctively worry that my model wasn’t working properly.

And therein lies the tension: how can I give this landowner the money that she/he wants, but at the same time satisfy the city and the community, and build enough density such that the project doesn’t lose money? For the time being, ignore the archaeological dig that will need to be done on the site and the creek running underneath it that is going to add $2 million to your underground costs.

This is where you have to get creative. One potential solution is try and make the price dependent on achieved density. But not all landowners will go for this and sometimes the price spread is so great that even a density bonus isn’t going to close the gap.

I like to believe that there’s always a creative solution to every problem. Try and make it work. Don’t give up. But the reality is that in many cases the land just isn’t worth the asking price and you’re going to need to walk away. That can be sad, but it can also be the smart thing to do.

I just stumbled upon an older (2014) article by Oliver Wainwright in the Guardian called, The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting authorities and ruining our cities. In case the title didn’t give it away, it’s a scathing article about the current state of real estate development and city building.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Across the country – and especially in superheated London, where stratospheric land values beget accordingly bloated developments – authorities are allowing planning policies to be continually flouted, affordable housing quotas to be waived, height limits breached, the interests of residents endlessly trampled. Places are becoming ever meaner and more divided, as public assets are relentlessly sold off, entire council estates flattened to make room for silos of luxury safe-deposit boxes in the sky. We are replacing homes with investment units, to be sold overseas and never inhabited, substituting community for vacancy. The more we build, the more our cities are emptied, producing dead swathes of zombie town where the lights might never even be switched on.”

Now, I’m not that familiar with the London market, so I can’t really comment on the dead swathes of zombie town. But I did enjoy the insights into the UK entitlement process.

At the same time, my overarching thought as I read through the article was that I don’t believe that making money and doing what’s right need to be mutually exclusively. You can do both in development and in business. Making money as a developer does not mean you have to build shitty buildings.

Part of the development game is managing an endless number of competing tensions. And profitability and responsible city building is just one of them. Of course, you have to want to do the right thing in the first place.

Last month a deal here in Toronto caught my attention because of how rare it is. 

It was the sale 39-41 Roehampton Avenue as a development site for a new (proposed) 48 storey condo tower.  What’s unique is that it’s being called the first ever “condo replacement” project in the city.

What that means is that the existing 27 unit condo building (built in the 80′s) was bought out (along with some other adjoining lands) and it will be replaced by a new condo tower.

In order for this to happen a minimum of 80% of the condo owners had to agree to the sale. According to Bisnow, the owners received approximately $550 per square foot, which is thought to be above market for the building (though well below market for new construction).

I wonder how many owners voted no. If everybody had voted yes, they probably would have mentioned 100% buy-in. I also wonder if this could mark the start of a wave of “condo replacement” projects.