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Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of this daily blog. (In August of this year, we'll enter the 14th year of this daily practice.)
Exactly a year ago, I published a post talking about what might happen in 2025. It was last year's prediction post. Today, let's see how I did.
Real estate development: I admitted that I had been overly optimistic in terms of how soon the market would reset (specifically Toronto). But I did still argue that 2025 would be an important turning point in terms of people capitulating and more legacy assets/deals getting reset. I think we did start to see this. We looked at a number of receivership sites and came across many instances where a landowner would take 40-50% of what they paid. The problem is that the market still hasn't fully reset and we're still in the midst of absorbing our current housing supply pipeline. So while it sounds nice to buy something for $0.40 on the dollar, what do you then do with it?
Return-to-office: I said that we would see the average weekly occupancy index in downtown Toronto reach 90% by the end of 2025 (it was 73% when I wrote the post a year ago). As of November 2025, it was 82%. Not quite.
Autonomous vehicles: I reversed my position (relative to the prior year) and said that autonomous vehicles are way further along than most people thought, at least at the time. And boy, was 2025 a great year for Waymo. It feels like they're now in scaling mode.
EU carbon permits: A year ago, they were priced at €71.98 per tonne of carbon dioxide, compared to an all-time high of €105.73 in February of 2023. I guessed that they'd be between €90 and €100 by the end of 2025. Right now they're at €87.28.
Crypto: I thought that 2025 would be a good year for crypto given the MAGA movement's support for it. For a while, it seemed like that would be the case. But if I look at the price of Ethereum, it's down 15.21% year-to-date. So not what I predicted. But I continued to dollar-cost average.
Web3: I went on to predict that we would see a breakout web3 consumer app in 2025. I also mentioned that I was impressed by NFT marketplaces like Rodeo. Well, Rodeo has gone on to mostly die and I'm not sure it would be fair to say that there was anything that crossed over into the mainstream. I'm going to give myself a zero for this one. But if I had to pick something, I would say that Coinbase's "Base App" represents meaningful progress. Base continues to dominate the Ethereum Layer 2 market. It's fast and cheap.
I wish you all a healthy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2026.
Cover photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash
This week, the largest publicly traded company in Canada by market capitalization — the Royal Bank of Canada — told its employees to return to the office at least four days a week starting this fall (you know, once the summer is over). This is a first among Canada's largest banks, but it's still more timid than what US banks have been doing. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, asked its employees at the start of this year to return to the office 5 days a week. Goldman Sachs did the same way back in March 2022. And when people weren't doing it, they sent reminders.
Since at least 2023, RBC has been saying that remote work is hurting productivity. And if that is true, then this is an imperative. Of course, it's also a positive thing for cities. In-office work is a centralizing force. But the really important thing to be focused on here is productivity. Canada has an existential productivity crisis. We used to closely track the US, until we didn't. From 2001 to 2021, the US saw its labor productivity grow at roughly 2% per year. In Canada, our growth rate fell to 0.9% per year, which is why this chart from Statistics Canada looks the way it does.
Let's check in on office utilization (in Toronto). The last time we talked about this was in April. At that time, the average weekly utilization figure was 63%. The peak day -- Wednesday -- was 73%. And the low day -- Friday -- was 40%. Today, well as of September 15, these numbers are now 69%, 79%, and 39%, respectively (see above chart). So we continue to climb. The only slight downward trend is Fridays. People don't like coming into the office on Fridays. Still, the average is up 6% over the span of about 6 months. This makes you continue to wonder: When does this level off? I also don't know what this index looked like before 2020. Are we back, or not yet?
Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of this daily blog. (In August of this year, we'll enter the 14th year of this daily practice.)
Exactly a year ago, I published a post talking about what might happen in 2025. It was last year's prediction post. Today, let's see how I did.
Real estate development: I admitted that I had been overly optimistic in terms of how soon the market would reset (specifically Toronto). But I did still argue that 2025 would be an important turning point in terms of people capitulating and more legacy assets/deals getting reset. I think we did start to see this. We looked at a number of receivership sites and came across many instances where a landowner would take 40-50% of what they paid. The problem is that the market still hasn't fully reset and we're still in the midst of absorbing our current housing supply pipeline. So while it sounds nice to buy something for $0.40 on the dollar, what do you then do with it?
Return-to-office: I said that we would see the average weekly occupancy index in downtown Toronto reach 90% by the end of 2025 (it was 73% when I wrote the post a year ago). As of November 2025, it was 82%. Not quite.
Autonomous vehicles: I reversed my position (relative to the prior year) and said that autonomous vehicles are way further along than most people thought, at least at the time. And boy, was 2025 a great year for Waymo. It feels like they're now in scaling mode.
EU carbon permits: A year ago, they were priced at €71.98 per tonne of carbon dioxide, compared to an all-time high of €105.73 in February of 2023. I guessed that they'd be between €90 and €100 by the end of 2025. Right now they're at €87.28.
Crypto: I thought that 2025 would be a good year for crypto given the MAGA movement's support for it. For a while, it seemed like that would be the case. But if I look at the price of Ethereum, it's down 15.21% year-to-date. So not what I predicted. But I continued to dollar-cost average.
Web3: I went on to predict that we would see a breakout web3 consumer app in 2025. I also mentioned that I was impressed by NFT marketplaces like Rodeo. Well, Rodeo has gone on to mostly die and I'm not sure it would be fair to say that there was anything that crossed over into the mainstream. I'm going to give myself a zero for this one. But if I had to pick something, I would say that Coinbase's "Base App" represents meaningful progress. Base continues to dominate the Ethereum Layer 2 market. It's fast and cheap.
I wish you all a healthy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2026.
Cover photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash
This week, the largest publicly traded company in Canada by market capitalization — the Royal Bank of Canada — told its employees to return to the office at least four days a week starting this fall (you know, once the summer is over). This is a first among Canada's largest banks, but it's still more timid than what US banks have been doing. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, asked its employees at the start of this year to return to the office 5 days a week. Goldman Sachs did the same way back in March 2022. And when people weren't doing it, they sent reminders.
Since at least 2023, RBC has been saying that remote work is hurting productivity. And if that is true, then this is an imperative. Of course, it's also a positive thing for cities. In-office work is a centralizing force. But the really important thing to be focused on here is productivity. Canada has an existential productivity crisis. We used to closely track the US, until we didn't. From 2001 to 2021, the US saw its labor productivity grow at roughly 2% per year. In Canada, our growth rate fell to 0.9% per year, which is why this chart from Statistics Canada looks the way it does.
Let's check in on office utilization (in Toronto). The last time we talked about this was in April. At that time, the average weekly utilization figure was 63%. The peak day -- Wednesday -- was 73%. And the low day -- Friday -- was 40%. Today, well as of September 15, these numbers are now 69%, 79%, and 39%, respectively (see above chart). So we continue to climb. The only slight downward trend is Fridays. People don't like coming into the office on Fridays. Still, the average is up 6% over the span of about 6 months. This makes you continue to wonder: When does this level off? I also don't know what this index looked like before 2020. Are we back, or not yet?
What this suggests is that the Canadian economy has not yet entered the 21st century. We haven't innovated enough. We aren't commercializing enough of our research. We aren't taking enough risks and funding new ideas. We aren't starting enough big new companies (despite being smart and highly educated). And I would argue that we over-indexed on housing and construction. And I say this last point as a real estate developer! Though it's not as self-sabotaging as it may seem. Developers need a strong macro environment in which to build into. You can't grow a robust economy by just building housing.
Now, I don't know if any of these things will absolutely require people to be in an office 5 days a week. Maybe hybrid is enough. Productivity isn't perfectly correlated with in-office work from what I can tell. But I do know that for Canada to enter the 21st century it's going to require hard work, a culture of greater risk taking, more innovation and entrepreneurship, and a relentless desire to out-compete the rest of the world. The goal is to be the best, or at least it damn well should be. But for this to happen, I do believe that, broadly speaking, it will demand more, not less, time together with people.
Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
What this suggests is that the Canadian economy has not yet entered the 21st century. We haven't innovated enough. We aren't commercializing enough of our research. We aren't taking enough risks and funding new ideas. We aren't starting enough big new companies (despite being smart and highly educated). And I would argue that we over-indexed on housing and construction. And I say this last point as a real estate developer! Though it's not as self-sabotaging as it may seem. Developers need a strong macro environment in which to build into. You can't grow a robust economy by just building housing.
Now, I don't know if any of these things will absolutely require people to be in an office 5 days a week. Maybe hybrid is enough. Productivity isn't perfectly correlated with in-office work from what I can tell. But I do know that for Canada to enter the 21st century it's going to require hard work, a culture of greater risk taking, more innovation and entrepreneurship, and a relentless desire to out-compete the rest of the world. The goal is to be the best, or at least it damn well should be. But for this to happen, I do believe that, broadly speaking, it will demand more, not less, time together with people.
Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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