Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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  • Opendoor.com raises $9.95M to make selling your home as easy as a few clicks

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    If you’re a regular reader of ATC, you’ll know that I’ve been following the startup Opendoor.com for a few months now. I first wrote about it when it was codenamed Homerun and I just recently wrote about them as preface to a real estate survey I was conducting.

    Well, about an hour go it was announced that they’ve just raised $9.95M in venture funding from everyone and their grandmother. Here’s the list of investors (via TechCrunch):

    Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, Former YouTube and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, Yammer co-founder David Sacks, Angelist’s Naval Ravikant, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Initialized Capital’s Harjeet Taggar, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, Former Twitter vice president Elad Gil, Blippy co-founder David King, Flixster co-founder Joe Greenstein, Angel investor Mike Greenfield, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, Path’s Dave Morin, Facebook vice president Dan Rose, Trevor Traina, Resolute Ventures’ Mike Hirshland, Caffeinated Capital’s Ray Tonsing, Felicis’ Aydin Senkut, True Ventures’ Om Malik, Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Crunchfund’s Michael Arrington (who disclaimer: founded TechCrunch) and SV Angel.

    Not surprisingly, there are quite a few people who see an opportunity in the $20 trillion US residential real estate market – which I think is a good thing. This is a space that–despite its size–hasn’t seen an awful lot of innovation.

    There still isn’t a lot of information about the product, but there’s a clear focus on creating liquidity in the marketplace. Despite being located in San Francisco, the company will be launching in 3 markets outside of California – where liquidity isn’t as great for homeowners.

    The goal is to transform the typical 90 day selling process into a few clicks online. Homeowners submit their home to the platform and then Opendoor makes an instant offer to buy. Done.

    What I wonder then is if it’s going to be an arbitrage play. They buy the homes below market (because they’re offering total liquidity) and then they turn around and sell them at market.

    Do you have any guesses as to their business model?

  • Embracing 3D in the real estate industry

    I recently discovered a New York-based startup called Floored. What they do is create “interactive, online 3D models for real estate.” They take spaces that may or may not exist yet, and turn them into interactive experiences that can be accessed online from any browser.

    Here’s one they created for ClearRock Properties and Cushman & Wakefield, designed to show how two adjacent retail spaces would look if they were combined into one.

    There’s been a lot of talk over the years about how limiting 2D floors plans are for communicating space to potential tenants and purchasers. But in the same way that virtual reality has never really taken off, neither have 3D floor plans, interactive walkthroughs, and other more sophisticated tools. When people buy a new condo, for example, they still buy it based on a floor plan.

    However, as the technologies get better–and perhaps as BIM supersedes CAD as the dominant platform for architects and designers–I think we’ll see these 3D tools become standard in the industry.

    And one of the things that I think it will allow us to do is be much more iterative in the way we design and build spaces. Right now it’s almost impossible to test different iterations of a building in the same way that, for example, a web developer might test different websites. Construction is a pretty permanent act. But 3D could open up that possibility.

  • Why constraints can be a good thing for design

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    I was reading the New York Times this morning and I stumbled upon an interesting article about Shubert Alley. I wasn’t aware of Shubert Alley, but I’m sure many of you probably are. It’s a 300-foot long pedestrian-only alley in the theater district of New York. It connects 44th Street and 45th Street and runs west of Broadway.

    And apparently it’s a big deal in the theater world – or at least according to Richard Hornby in 1991: “In New York, the desirability of a theatre is inversely proportional to its distance from Shubert Alley.”

    But what you may not be aware of is how the alley–which today serves as a public gathering space–was actually created. In 1913 when the Shubert and Booth theaters were built, the fire code dictated that theaters had to have separate fire exits on the sides of their buildings that connected directly to a main street. 

    Most of the time this led to blank sidewalls, but in this instance, the Shuberts and their architect Henry Beaumont Herts, decided to run an alley all the way through the block to serve as their emergency exit. 

    But what seemingly started as a pragmatic response to a code requirement, ended up creating what some people would consider the heart of the theater district. Sometimes constraints can be a good thing for design.

    Image: New York Times

  • Pop-up housing (it’s not what you think it is)

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    You were probably expecting some kind of temporary housing solution. Because that’s certainly what I was thinking when Big Ben Myers tweeted me this article yesterday. But it turns out that in D.C., “pop-up housing” has come to mean what you see in the above photo – a pencil thin house rising amongst a bunch of low-rise rowhouses.

    Local bloggers are calling it a “middle finger to taste and scale”, but it’s happening because of what appears to be a real housing supply shortgage in the District. And it’s been said to be hurting not only housing affordability, but also exacerbating income inequality. 

    However, it’s become a threeway debate. You have people worried about aesthetics, local homeowners and residents worried about their own interests, and you have people worried about the overall health of the housing market. As I’ve argued before here on ATC, too much protectionism is often a bad thing for housing markets.

    But policy makers in the District appear to be responding in exactly that way, by clamping down on pop-up housing, as well as on accessory dwellings such as nanny flats (which I’m assuming are similar to what we would call laneway houses here in Toronto).

    I can certainly understand the concerns, but I think that cities need to find that fine line between preservation and growth. Because banning pop-up housing is only addressing the symptom. It doesn’t address the underlying cause, which, in this case, seems to be a housing market in search of more housing options.

    Update: This post was updated to give credit to Big Ben Myers for the article.

    Image: Washington Fine Properties via Citylab

  • $12,000 pink umbrellas

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    Sometimes I like to start my mornings off by grabbing a coffee and walking down Jarvis Street to Sugar Beach and the lake. 

    I’ll find a Muskoka chair (Adirondack chair for you Americans) and position it underneath one of the iconic pink umbrellas. I mostly like to look out at the lake, but I also like the shade so that I can see the screen on my phone in case my Type A tendencies kick in and I want to check emails or mess around on Twitter.

    Oftentimes when I’m there–even early in the morning–there will already be other people at the beach. One time I came at 730am and a lady was there tanning in a bikini. I admired her dedication.

    Sometimes I need these moments. I like that sobering feeling you get when you take a time out from the everyday to just sit and think. It helps put things into perspective. And you could argue that great cities provide those kinds of spaces.

    But how valuable are those spaces? Can you put a price tag on it? Is it worth $1M? How about $14.1M, including $12,000 for each pink umbrella?

    Image: blogTO

  • The super-linear relationship between human interactions and city size

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    The MIT Senseable City Lab recently teamed up with a few other research groups to investigate the relationship between human interactions and city size. If you happen to be a member of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, you can download the full report here. But in true ATC fashion, I’m going to give you the Coles Notes version here.

    What the study did was look at billions of anonymized mobile phone data in both Portugal and the UK in order to determine how our real life social networks change with city size. And what they found is a pretty consistent relationship:

    [T]his study reveals a fundamental pattern: our social connections scale with city size. The larger the town you live in, the more people you call and the more calls you make. The scaling of this relation is “super-linear,” which means that on average, if you double the size of a town, the sum of phone contacts in the city will more than double – in a mathematically predictable way.

    What’s interesting about this finding is that it starts to explain how cities–and the clustering of people–can act as fertile ground for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The bigger the city the more people you probably know.

    But what I’m curious about (I don’t have the report) is if there’s some kind of upper limit. Presumably this “super-linear” relationship tapers off after a certain city size, because there has got to be limits to the number of people we can maintain productive relationships with.

    According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that number was 150 people.

  • Thoughts on real estate marketplaces

    The responses are still coming in from yesterday’s real estate marketplace survey, but I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to complete it. I really appreciate it. I was reviewing the responses this morning and I thought there were a couple of interesting takeaways.

    First, most people who own a home have at one point or another thought about selling that home. And even the people who haven’t thought about it, said they would be willing to sell under the right circumstances. That is, they would sell for the right price, for a better place, and so on. At the time of writing this, nobody said they would never ever sell.

    I think this is interesting because, even though the real estate market is a highly illiquid market, my hunch is that it could be made a lot more liquid with the right frameworks in place and if the barriers to selling could be reduced.

    And sure enough, many of the folks who said they have thought about selling (but haven’t yet), said it’s partially because it’s too expensive and too much work to sell. But in addition to these barriers, two other points emerged that I hadn’t given a lot of thought to before – but make total sense. 

    Homeowners also said that they haven’t sold because they’re too emotionally attached to their home and because they’re afraid they won’t be able to find another place to move into. 

    Because of how illiquid the real estate market is and because home transactions are typically asymmetric (that is, buying and selling are independent actions), there appears to be a real concern that you could sell your home and never find anything better.

    And since a home is such an emotion filled asset (as opposed to, say, a stock), people are naturally afraid of making the wrong choice. But then that begs the question: Are we, as real estate consumers, being left with suboptimal outcomes because we’re simply too afraid of the making the wrong choice?

  • Your thoughts on the real estate marketplace, please

    If you know me at all, then you’ll know that I’m a big proponent of introducing more technology into the real estate space. I think the industry is one that has been incredibly slow to embrace technology, but that it’s only a matter of time before it does.

    Two months ago I wrote a post talking about how entrepreneur and venture capitalist Keith Rabois is working on a home buying startup codenamed Homerun — now called Opendoor. Here’s how he recently described the state of affairs:

    “My friend [PayPal and Palantir cofounder] Peter Thiel suggested that I come up with an idea to innovate in residential real estate,” Rabois told VentureBeat in April. “It’s the largest part of the economy unaffected by the Internet. And that was definitely true then, and even with things like Trulia and Zillow, it’s fundamentally true today. But the process of [selling a home] hasn’t been transformed by technology.”

    What Opendoor is trying to do is really interesting, but I have a different idea. It’s called Unlyst. And today I’d like to ask the ATC community for a small favor. I’ve created a short home buying and selling survey (embedded below) that will take you at most 2 minutes to complete.

    If you could please take the time to do that, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve made the results public as well, so you’ll be able to see how buyers and sellers currently feel about the real estate marketplace. If you can’t see the survey below, please click here. Thanks for your help!

    [googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”forms/d/1bKvHYdSUfYH3AGX7LcLIK0_-i7nt7WIdTmHeaJ8P7pY/viewform” query=”embedded=true” width=”760″ height=”500″ /]

  • Cawthra Park revitalization

    I must have been living under a rock because I just discovered this weekend that Toronto is in the midst of hosting WorldPride. I obviously knew that it was Pride Week, but I didn’t realize that we had outbid Stockholm in 2009 in order to be awarded the event. 

    I also didn’t realize that Cawthra Park near Church Street & Wellesley Street was being revitalized in preparation for both WorldPride 2014 and for the Pan Am & Parapan American Games in 2015 – which Toronto will also be hosting.

    Here’s a site plan of the final design:

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    And here’s what the completed design looks like:

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    I like the pavers and I like the overhead LED lights. Those may not seem like big additions, but it’s amazing how those small little details can impact the way a space feels. I think it creates an intimate and inviting space. What do you think?

    Images: thinc design

  • Revisiting the urban farm

    If you’re a regular reader of ATC, you might remember that last month the team at TAS planted 100 EarthBoxes on the roof of our office building to grow everything from beets to hot peppers. Well it has now been over a month, so I thought it would be interesting to show you the progress that has been made.

    May 16, 2014

    June 27, 2014

    The area we’re occupying on the roof is probably around 400 square feet and many of the EarthBoxes have already been harvested a few times. So it just goes to show you how little you need to grow quite a bit of food. Now imagine what we could do if we transformed all of our urban rooftops.