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| 1. | Brandon Donnelly | 14M |
| 2. | 0xdb8f...bcfd | 4.5M |
| 3. | jcandqc | 4.1M |
| 4. | 0x65de...c951 | 2.1M |
| 5. | kualta.eth | 869.1K |
| 6. | Ev Tchebotarev | 170.5K |
| 7. | stefan333 | 81.7K |
| 8. | voltron | 81.5K |
| 9. | William Mougayar's Blog | 28.4K |
| 10. | Empress Trash | 19.8K |

Kembangan by Jason Waltman on 500px
Earlier this week I attended RealNet’s Q1 2015 market update webinar for the Greater Toronto Area. If you don’t already subscribe to RealNet, you should consider it. They’re one of the best sources for Canadian real estate market information.
During their webinars, they occasionally run interactive surveys where they ask the audience a question and participants respond using their web browser. On this particular webinar, they asked the following question, which I thought was interesting:
What is the likely housing moving by Millennials in raising their families?
A) Move Up - Embrace urban high-rise housing forms
B) Move Out - Accept extended commutes (including the Greater Golden Horseshoe and Hamilton Area) to find affordable ground oriented housing
C) Move In - Cohabitate parental homes
It’s an interesting question because it’s one that I’ve asked myself a number of times. Sure, Millennials are rushing back to cities and living in high density and walkable communities, today, but what are they going to do and where are they going to move when they start having children?
As a Millennial myself, I know that I’ve always told myself that I want to stay urban for as long as I can (i.e. Move Up). But I’m only one data point. And given the seemingly endless demand for low-rise housing in Toronto, I always felt like I was in the minority. I figured that the majority of people, at least here in this city, still want a ground-related home when it comes time to raise a family.
Putting aside economics, I still think that may be the case for a lot of home buyers. But the majority of people on this week’s RealNet webinar (which would be almost exclusively folks from the real estate industry) either think that preference is going to change (or already has) or that consumers won’t have a choice due to affordability.
50% of the people on the call answered A – move up and embrace urban high-rise housing forms. The balance was about 44% for B and 6% for C.
That’s not the outcome I expected to see. So today I’d like to re-ask this question to the Architect This City Community. Where do you think Millennials are going to move once they start having children? Please let us know in the comment section below.
A lot of shopping malls are dying. You’ve probably heard this before. But how bad is it and what exactly is happening?
Well, a new report by CoStar (heard through the New York Times) found that nearly 20% of the 1,200 malls in the US are presently in trouble. “Trouble” is defined as a mall with a vacancy rate of 10% or more.
But what’s perhaps most disconcerting about this number is that, as recently as 2006, only about 5% of the malls in America would have been pegged as being “in trouble.” Here’s a chart from the New York Times (I’d love to see this same graph with a longer time horizon):
But not all malls are dying. The general sentiment seems to be that the high-end A malls are and will continue to thrive, and that it’s only the B and C malls that are dying:
Tom Simmons, who oversees the mid-Atlantic shopping center division of Kimco, another real estate giant, is more blunt. “There are B and C malls in tertiary markets that are dinosaurs and will likely die,” he said, but “A malls are doing well.” (NY Times)
So why is this happening? Some think it’s because the US is over-retailed. And some think it’s because of rising income inequality – which would explain why the high-end malls continue to thrive. But the experts seem to agree that it’s not the result of more people shopping online:
One factor many shoppers blame for the decline of malls — online shopping — is having only a small effect, experts say. Less than 10 percent of retail sales take place online, and those sales tend to hit big-box stores harder, rather than the fashion chains and other specialty retailers in enclosed malls. (NY Times)
I wrote a post 2 months ago where where I argued that big box stores will be the most impacted by online shopping (which is why so many of them now sell groceries). But I don’t believe that they are the only retailers that will be affected. Quite the opposite: Every retailer is or eventually will be impacted by the internet.
This threat is real.
Millennials have no hesitations about buying things online and, in many cases, they would prefer to do so. It has already been well documented that we (I’m a Millennial) don’t like driving as much as previous generations. So what makes you think we’d enjoy the process of driving to a mall?
But the other factor at play, I think, is that malls are no longer the “public space” of young people. Their position as a kind of cultural institution is waning. At the same time, more and more people are craving uniqueness. They like independent shops, not malls that all look and feel the same. And as these young people become old people, we might find that even the A malls start becoming impacted.
I don’t believe, for a second, that retail nodes within cities will ever disappear. But I think our attention would be better spent figuring out what the mall of the 21st century will be, as opposed to hiring PR firms to try and spin doctor our way out of this dead mall phenomenon.
Image: Flickr
Continuing with our discussion of Vancouver, I was reading today that baby boomers in the metro area (those aged 55 and older) are estimated to be holding over $163 billion of clear title property. That is, homes without any mortgage. This figure comes from Rennie Marketing Systems out of Vancouver.
What’s interesting about this number is that it signals both a lot of equity that could be used for downsizing, rightsizing and lateral moves into a condo, and a source of capital for millennials to buy their first home. In fact, according to a survey that Rennie Marketing also conducted, somewhere around 40% of first time buyers in Vancouver are getting deposit help from their parents and/or grandparents.
But the question that comes to my mind is: Are there going to be enough middle aged people willing and able to buy $163 billion worth of real estate? Because one person’s sale is another person’s buy.

Kembangan by Jason Waltman on 500px
Earlier this week I attended RealNet’s Q1 2015 market update webinar for the Greater Toronto Area. If you don’t already subscribe to RealNet, you should consider it. They’re one of the best sources for Canadian real estate market information.
During their webinars, they occasionally run interactive surveys where they ask the audience a question and participants respond using their web browser. On this particular webinar, they asked the following question, which I thought was interesting:
What is the likely housing moving by Millennials in raising their families?
A) Move Up - Embrace urban high-rise housing forms
B) Move Out - Accept extended commutes (including the Greater Golden Horseshoe and Hamilton Area) to find affordable ground oriented housing
C) Move In - Cohabitate parental homes
It’s an interesting question because it’s one that I’ve asked myself a number of times. Sure, Millennials are rushing back to cities and living in high density and walkable communities, today, but what are they going to do and where are they going to move when they start having children?
As a Millennial myself, I know that I’ve always told myself that I want to stay urban for as long as I can (i.e. Move Up). But I’m only one data point. And given the seemingly endless demand for low-rise housing in Toronto, I always felt like I was in the minority. I figured that the majority of people, at least here in this city, still want a ground-related home when it comes time to raise a family.
Putting aside economics, I still think that may be the case for a lot of home buyers. But the majority of people on this week’s RealNet webinar (which would be almost exclusively folks from the real estate industry) either think that preference is going to change (or already has) or that consumers won’t have a choice due to affordability.
50% of the people on the call answered A – move up and embrace urban high-rise housing forms. The balance was about 44% for B and 6% for C.
That’s not the outcome I expected to see. So today I’d like to re-ask this question to the Architect This City Community. Where do you think Millennials are going to move once they start having children? Please let us know in the comment section below.
A lot of shopping malls are dying. You’ve probably heard this before. But how bad is it and what exactly is happening?
Well, a new report by CoStar (heard through the New York Times) found that nearly 20% of the 1,200 malls in the US are presently in trouble. “Trouble” is defined as a mall with a vacancy rate of 10% or more.
But what’s perhaps most disconcerting about this number is that, as recently as 2006, only about 5% of the malls in America would have been pegged as being “in trouble.” Here’s a chart from the New York Times (I’d love to see this same graph with a longer time horizon):
But not all malls are dying. The general sentiment seems to be that the high-end A malls are and will continue to thrive, and that it’s only the B and C malls that are dying:
Tom Simmons, who oversees the mid-Atlantic shopping center division of Kimco, another real estate giant, is more blunt. “There are B and C malls in tertiary markets that are dinosaurs and will likely die,” he said, but “A malls are doing well.” (NY Times)
So why is this happening? Some think it’s because the US is over-retailed. And some think it’s because of rising income inequality – which would explain why the high-end malls continue to thrive. But the experts seem to agree that it’s not the result of more people shopping online:
One factor many shoppers blame for the decline of malls — online shopping — is having only a small effect, experts say. Less than 10 percent of retail sales take place online, and those sales tend to hit big-box stores harder, rather than the fashion chains and other specialty retailers in enclosed malls. (NY Times)
I wrote a post 2 months ago where where I argued that big box stores will be the most impacted by online shopping (which is why so many of them now sell groceries). But I don’t believe that they are the only retailers that will be affected. Quite the opposite: Every retailer is or eventually will be impacted by the internet.
This threat is real.
Millennials have no hesitations about buying things online and, in many cases, they would prefer to do so. It has already been well documented that we (I’m a Millennial) don’t like driving as much as previous generations. So what makes you think we’d enjoy the process of driving to a mall?
But the other factor at play, I think, is that malls are no longer the “public space” of young people. Their position as a kind of cultural institution is waning. At the same time, more and more people are craving uniqueness. They like independent shops, not malls that all look and feel the same. And as these young people become old people, we might find that even the A malls start becoming impacted.
I don’t believe, for a second, that retail nodes within cities will ever disappear. But I think our attention would be better spent figuring out what the mall of the 21st century will be, as opposed to hiring PR firms to try and spin doctor our way out of this dead mall phenomenon.
Image: Flickr
Continuing with our discussion of Vancouver, I was reading today that baby boomers in the metro area (those aged 55 and older) are estimated to be holding over $163 billion of clear title property. That is, homes without any mortgage. This figure comes from Rennie Marketing Systems out of Vancouver.
What’s interesting about this number is that it signals both a lot of equity that could be used for downsizing, rightsizing and lateral moves into a condo, and a source of capital for millennials to buy their first home. In fact, according to a survey that Rennie Marketing also conducted, somewhere around 40% of first time buyers in Vancouver are getting deposit help from their parents and/or grandparents.
But the question that comes to my mind is: Are there going to be enough middle aged people willing and able to buy $163 billion worth of real estate? Because one person’s sale is another person’s buy.
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