The most expensive home in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood is currently under contract and is expected to close in the next few months (at least according to the WSJ). It is a 4,270 square-foot penthouse, with a 500 square-foot terrace, that occupies the full top floor… Read More
It has become tradition around here that at the end of each year I write down my predictions for the following one. And in 2022, I did that here. The overarching point of writing something like this down publicly is not necessarily to be right… Read More
Three quick and unrelated things for today’s post: 1. A handful of years ago, before the pandemic, Bullpen Consulting, Slate Asset Management, and AD HOC STUDIO started a somewhat irregular basketball meetup for Toronto’s development industry called City Builder Ball. It, of course, fell off… Read More
We have spoken a lot over the years about Opendoor. And for a period of time, iBuying seemed like a very good idea. Zillow go into it. Redfin got into it. Everybody was iBuying. But then this year everybody started losing money, mostly due to… Read More
Here’s what I can tell you this morning: Real estate development is a bit more fun when you don’t have to constantly worry about supply-chain issues, access to labor, high inflation, and regularly increasing interest rates. That said, if you just want to buy a… Read More
Matt Levine’s latest Money Stuff column does a good job explaining why a lot of smart people are trying to figure out a market-making model for homes (see companies such as Opendoor): People want to apply the market-making model to homes. This makes sense. Buying… Read More
This is a fascinating little experiment: From Oct. 12, 2020 to Jan. 3, 2021, Redfin ran an experiment on 17.5 million of its users across the US. As prospective homebuyers entered the site, Redfin assigned them randomly to either a group that was shown flood-risk information on each… Read More
Here is a chart from MetroSight that compares housing tenure in California in 2000 and then between 2015-2019: Two things you might notice immediately are that the number of renter-occupied households has generally increased and that the number of owner-occupied households without a mortgage (i.e.… Read More
If you’ve been following the Toronto housing market and/or following any panicky resale agents/brokers on Twitter, you’ll know that things have shifted over the last few months. Here’s what broker (and my friend) Christopher Bibby had to say about the market in his most recent… Read More
Last year was a pretty good year for people who own a home in the US (or in Canada and many other places). Current estimates peg the total value of US residential real estate at somewhere around $40 trillion. But of course, a lot of… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 