What a beautiful day in Toronto. I love the heat. I took the above photo this morning from the 7th floor of Junction House. It is a view south toward High Park. More specifically though, it is the view from the second and upper floor… Read More
All posts tagged “construction”
Studio Gang in Amsterdam
Slate Asset Management, RAD Marketing, and the top producing brokers for One Delisle were fortunate enough to be able to tour a Studio Gang-designed project in Amsterdam today called the Q Residences. A huge thanks to the developers — Kroonenberg Groep and Neoo — for… Read More
Construction update: Junction House
This is a photo of Junction House that I took this morning after our weekly construction meeting. The team is currently preparing for the first concrete pour of level 4 (each floor has been split up into three pours). We’re now flying our forms, which… Read More
Lobby / co-working space at Junction House
It has been cold and snowy in Toronto lately, which is great if you’re looking to shred pow on a snowboard, but suboptimal if you’re trying to construct buildings. It pains me deep inside my bone marrow when we lose productive days to weather. But… Read More
The elbow suites
Last night as I was walking home, I came across the recently completed Yonge + Rich condominiums at Richmond and Victoria (I think they won awards for this name back in the day). I stopped to look up because I was curious about one particular… Read More
Why construction productivity sucks and how it might be fixed
We are living through an inflationary hard cost environment. In speaking with one of our cost consultants the other week, he was predicting that overall we could see another 9-10% increase next year here in the Toronto area. Now, who knows what will ultimately happen.… Read More
Zillow pauses algorithmic homebuying business
Zillow just announced that it has paused its (algorithmic) US homebuying business for the remainder of this year. The company acquired some 3,800 homes in Q2 of this year and, apparently, it now has a backlog of repairs and sales to work through. As a… Read More
Urban China’s empty homes
China Evergrande Group has been in the news lately for being one of the most indebted property companies in the world. The company is now looking to raise some $5 billion by selling a stake in one of its business lines. That seems like a… Read More
Construction is right-skewed and fat tailed
My friend Christopher Bibby sent me this article over the weekend. It’s by Brian Potter — who writes an excellent newsletter on Substack about construction things — and it’s about why it’s so hard to innovate in construction. To explain this, he starts by showing… Read More
Construction is messy
The typical way to build buildings is through a design-bid-build approach. The way this works is that you first design stuff and create drawings. You then ask people to price the stuff that you have drawn. And then you proceed to build what is on… Read More