This tweet by Sean Sweeney is, of course, 100% true. It is also true of markets and investing in general. When everyone feels confident, money becomes available, and then returns fall. There's too much competition. But when everyone is scared and liquidity dries up, bargains emerge. Now there's very little competition.

Warren Buffett has made an entire career out of playing this paradox. It's his well-known "be greedy when others are fearful" mantra. But in order to do this, you need to be patient, you need to have the resources, and you need to have the right emotional temperament when things are in meltdown.

I am seeing this first-hand in Toronto real estate. To give just one example, development land is right now worth, oh I don't know, roughly half of what it was before (a broad generalization).

There are very good reasons for this. The value of land depends on what you can do with it, and if you can't do anything with it, then it's not worth very much. But as soon as you can once again do something with it, and clarity returns to the market, the bargains disappear.

So to find the "great deals" you have to be willing to wade into areas where most of the market is unwilling to go in the current moment. Put differently, there's money to be made when you're right about something that most people think is wrong, or when you're able to do something that most people can't do for whatever reason.

All of this is easier said than done, but I think about Sean's tweet a lot these days. It's easy to find reasons to say no right now. But here's the approach I'm trying my best to take: it's a great time to be in real estate. In fact, it's a generational opportunity. And so it's my job to find the great deals.

Cover photo by Sean Pollock on

In Chinese culture, certain numbers — like 4 — are generally considered unlucky because of how they sound. I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, but as I understand it, 4 sounds similar to "death." And this is even more the case in Cantonese.

Four sounds exactly like death, fourteen sounds like "definitely die," and forty-four is the equivalent of "die, certainly die." (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) It is for this reason that in certain real estate markets, and in particular Cantonese-speaking markets like Hong Kong, 4-related numbers are often avoided whenever possible.

This can also be the case in other markets. Before we launched sales for One Delisle, the team made the decision to be mindful of this superstition and skip floors 4, 14, and 44. The result is that the homes on floor 4 became suite 501, 502, 503, and so on, and the building itself went from having 44 floors to 47 floors.

We did this so that nobody would be buying on the "die, certainly die" floor, and so from a marketing perspective, I think these strategies can make a lot of sense.

But what I would also say is that, from a development perspective, you should avoid this whenever possible. It adds coordination complexity. What we saw happening early on was that someone would say suite 501, and then you'd have someone else question whether they were talking about the suite on architectural/construction/legal level 5 or the suite on marketing level 5.

To solve this, we had to be extremely draconian about how levels and suite numbers were allowed to be communicated. Firstly, there's no such thing as a "legal" suite number. Suite numbers are purely a marketing thing — a number that goes on a front door. The legal description of a condominium suite involves a legal level and a legal unit.

So what we did was call a meeting and tell everyone the following: Any and all communication regarding suites needs to include the legal level, legal unit, and suite number, and failure to use all three numbers means you will be liable for any mistakes. We then updated the drawings to reflect this nomenclature.

Building buildings requires some assholes.

My first boss used to tell me that development is the closest thing to being in the military. Never having been in the military, I can't say whether this is accurate or not, but it should give you an indication of what it can feel like to build. Sometimes skipping floors is just what you need to do. But if you can avoid it, it's one less thing you need to be an ass about.

This tweet by Sean Sweeney is, of course, 100% true. It is also true of markets and investing in general. When everyone feels confident, money becomes available, and then returns fall. There's too much competition. But when everyone is scared and liquidity dries up, bargains emerge. Now there's very little competition.

Warren Buffett has made an entire career out of playing this paradox. It's his well-known "be greedy when others are fearful" mantra. But in order to do this, you need to be patient, you need to have the resources, and you need to have the right emotional temperament when things are in meltdown.

I am seeing this first-hand in Toronto real estate. To give just one example, development land is right now worth, oh I don't know, roughly half of what it was before (a broad generalization).

There are very good reasons for this. The value of land depends on what you can do with it, and if you can't do anything with it, then it's not worth very much. But as soon as you can once again do something with it, and clarity returns to the market, the bargains disappear.

So to find the "great deals" you have to be willing to wade into areas where most of the market is unwilling to go in the current moment. Put differently, there's money to be made when you're right about something that most people think is wrong, or when you're able to do something that most people can't do for whatever reason.

All of this is easier said than done, but I think about Sean's tweet a lot these days. It's easy to find reasons to say no right now. But here's the approach I'm trying my best to take: it's a great time to be in real estate. In fact, it's a generational opportunity. And so it's my job to find the great deals.

Cover photo by Sean Pollock on

In Chinese culture, certain numbers — like 4 — are generally considered unlucky because of how they sound. I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, but as I understand it, 4 sounds similar to "death." And this is even more the case in Cantonese.

Four sounds exactly like death, fourteen sounds like "definitely die," and forty-four is the equivalent of "die, certainly die." (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) It is for this reason that in certain real estate markets, and in particular Cantonese-speaking markets like Hong Kong, 4-related numbers are often avoided whenever possible.

This can also be the case in other markets. Before we launched sales for One Delisle, the team made the decision to be mindful of this superstition and skip floors 4, 14, and 44. The result is that the homes on floor 4 became suite 501, 502, 503, and so on, and the building itself went from having 44 floors to 47 floors.

We did this so that nobody would be buying on the "die, certainly die" floor, and so from a marketing perspective, I think these strategies can make a lot of sense.

But what I would also say is that, from a development perspective, you should avoid this whenever possible. It adds coordination complexity. What we saw happening early on was that someone would say suite 501, and then you'd have someone else question whether they were talking about the suite on architectural/construction/legal level 5 or the suite on marketing level 5.

To solve this, we had to be extremely draconian about how levels and suite numbers were allowed to be communicated. Firstly, there's no such thing as a "legal" suite number. Suite numbers are purely a marketing thing — a number that goes on a front door. The legal description of a condominium suite involves a legal level and a legal unit.

So what we did was call a meeting and tell everyone the following: Any and all communication regarding suites needs to include the legal level, legal unit, and suite number, and failure to use all three numbers means you will be liable for any mistakes. We then updated the drawings to reflect this nomenclature.

Building buildings requires some assholes.

My first boss used to tell me that development is the closest thing to being in the military. Never having been in the military, I can't say whether this is accurate or not, but it should give you an indication of what it can feel like to build. Sometimes skipping floors is just what you need to do. But if you can avoid it, it's one less thing you need to be an ass about.