BlogTO recently asked: Is it a good time or a bad time to buy a condo in Toronto right now? My unsolicited opinion is that if you are someone who would like a home in Toronto, now is an excellent time to buy it. But that's not actually what I want to talk about today.

If you read the post, you'll come across this line: "She emphasized that these are unprecedented interest rates..." Hmm. I think it's important to point out that these are not unprecedented rates. Rates today are certainly higher than they have been for about two decades. But they've been even higher before and, if you go back to say the 1980s, rates today still look historically low.

We just got used to ultra low rates and now we need to adjust to them being higher. And we will. The first step is feeling confident that rates won't go even higher in the short term. Because if you think you know where rates are going to hang out, you can then make decisions around that.

Seth Godin recently posted this four quadrant chart on his blog. It is for plotting different products based on price and based on want vs. need. In his post, he asks his audience to think about what they’re offering and which quadrant it fits within. It can only be in one.

I am fascinated by questions of pricing. At at some point on this blog, I wrote about a pricing class that I took at Rotman while I was doing my MBA about a decade ago. It stands out to me as one of my favorite university classes.

So let’s consider these four quadrants.

In the top left, you have inexpensive products that are wants and not needs. This quadrant is where you’d place those novelty sunglasses you picked up for your friend’s theme party. Fun for that moment, but if they break or you lose them, that’s probably okay.

In the top right are expensive wants. Seth uses the example of a Hermès purse. The need is a place to put your belongings, but that’s not how these sorts of items are priced. The real value, arguably, comes from their “signaling” and how they make the owner feel.

This is the luxury goods category. Demand will likely be cyclical and sporadic, and so you’ll need to make sure that you have fat margins.

In the bottom right are expensive needs — like a pacemaker. Seth’s point is that these products need to work exceptionally well, all of the time. In the case of a pacemaker, it is truly a matter of life or death. At the same time, there’s going to be less price sensitivity.

In the bottom left are the inexpensive wants. Low cost products that people really want and are infinitely useful. Seth’s example is Amazon Web Services.

This quadrant of products is attractive because demand will naturally be extremely high. Cheap and invaluable will do that. However, Seth’s caution is that you still need to sustainably deliver the goods. These aren’t novelty sunglasses.

I find it helpful to think of products as existing in only one quadrant. But most offerings aren’t going to exist all they way in one corner. It’s perhaps important to consider the “job to be done.” (To borrow from the late Clayton Christensen.)

Take, for example, housing. On a fundamental level, it’s a need. We all need shelter. But it can also be a want, or have aspects of want. I need a place to live. But I want a place in the mountains. This subtle difference means something very different when plotted precisely.

Image: Seth Godin

BuildZoom, which is a tool to help people find local contractors, recently looked at construction costs across the US.

Here is their 30-city average index running from 1950 to roughly today:

Here is a chart showing the most and least expensive cities (that is, the cities that deviate the most from their 30-city average):

And here is a chart that compares labor cost appreciation to material costs:

Labor costs account for the bulk of the geographic variation in construction costs and the most expensive cities to build in also tend to have the highest median home prices.

The way to read the above chart is that any city with a y-axis value greater than 1 means that labor costs have appreciated faster than material costs from 2008 to 2017.

In the case of San Francisco, labor costs have appreciated 32.8% (> 1.3) faster than material costs. 

Part of this likely has to do with the fact that San Francisco is an expensive city in which to live. People have to be paid more if they’re going to work there.

Full blog post from BuildZoom, here.