I was searching around trying to find data on long-term real estate prices and I came across a paper by Tom Nicholas and Anna Scherbina called, Real Estate Prices During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.

Here are some stats about Manhattan real estate (from the paper) that you all might find interesting:

- In 1930, Manhattan housed 1.5% of the US population, but had approximately 4% of all US real estate wealth.

- To construct their price indices the authors randomly collected 30 real estate transactions per month in Manhattan between 1920 and 1939. The mean price per square foot in 1929 was $6.91 (year of Black Tuesday). And the mean price per square foot in 1939 – 10 years later – was $2.29.

- Buildings containing a store at grade tended to sell at higher prices. The authors speculate that this could be because a zoning change in 1916 made it difficult to open stores in “residential” areas.

- Buildings with three, four and five storeys tended to sell at a discount. Six storeys or higher and the buildings generally had an elevator, which resulted in higher pricing.

- Manhattan real estate prices reached their highest level in Q3-1929 before falling 67% by 1932. Prices remained more or less flat during the Great Depression.

- If you bought a “typical property” in 1920, it would have retained only 56% of its value (in nominal dollars) by 1939. In fact, it took until 1960 for assessed property values in Manhattan to exceed their pre-Depression pricing.

- An investment in the stock market index during this same time period, 1920-1939, would have outperformed real estate by a factor of 5.2x.

Much of this probably seems hard to believe given the market today. Imagine waiting 40 years for the value of your property to come back.

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

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.

Toronto Life recently published an interesting article called Stuck in Condoland. A lot of people have mentioned it to me, so there seems to be a lot of interest in the topic. It basically profiles the lives of a few young families who live downtown and are trying to raise young children in relatively small condos (think 700 square feet).

I thought it was interesting because I like the idea of small and efficient living. The average post-war bungalow in Toronto was probably less than 1,000 square feet. And so this modern notion that you need a big house in order to properly raise a family is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although we’re a richer city today and that’s what happens when people become wealthier: they consume more.

But the article also makes it seem that developers only want to build small condos and that larger condos and single-family homes just aren’t profitable enough. Thus the reason all these families are being forced to into tiny shoeboxes in the sky. But that’s not really true.

Look, just like every other for-profit business on the planet, developers are concerned with making money. And so they will always look for ways to increase efficiency, drive down costs, and so on. But there are certain realities of the market that developers don’t have control over.

First, developers aren’t building new single family homes in the city (at any sort of meaningful scale) because there’s no land to do so. And because the land use policies in place and the current thinking around how we can more sustainably build our cities for the future dictate that we should be building more intensely. In other words, building up. So it’s not a question of developers not wanting to build single family homes; it’s a question of not being able to.

Second, trust me when I say that if the market wanted large 3 bedroom family units, developers would build them. Mandating them is a useless exercise if people don’t want them or are unable to afford them.

The challenge we face is that a reinforced concrete condo tower is more expensive to build than a wood-framed single family house. So until land values get to a point where single family homes become the more expensive option (compared to condos), I don’t think we’ll see a huge rush towards 3+ bedroom suites.

This is my hypothesis at least. Because when you buy house, you’re really buying two things: the house itself and the land. If the house itself (wood) is cheaper to build on a per square foot basis than a condo (concrete), then the variable that will make a difference is the land. And as people like to say: “buy land, they ain’t making any more of it.”

So what I’m saying is that I just don’t think the situation is as simple as: “developers are bad, all they want to do is build tiny condos and make lots of money.” It’s more complicated than that. But I do believe the question of how families are going to live in the city is an important one.