The big news this week in Toronto planning & development is the province’s decision to approve three downtown development projects using a tool known as a “ministerial zoning order.” The impetus for doing this was to speed up the approval and delivery of about 1,000… Read More
This is a chart from Knight Frank showing the average value of “super-prime” residential real estate transactions in 12 global markets between March and June 2020, and versus the same period last year. Knight Frank classifies super-prime real estate as having a value greater than… Read More
A team of researchers at UCL recently surveyed 2,500 households across the UK to see how the design of their homes and neighborhoods has impacted their experience during lockdown (May to June 2020). Perhaps most notably, the report, called Home Comforts, found that people living… Read More
Last week was the Vancouver Real Estate Forum. Benjamin Tal (chief economist at CIBC) opened things up, as he usually does, and he was pretty candid about what might be coming this winter. Here is an excerpt from a recent Globe and Mail article summarizing… Read More
Here’s some data from the Pew Research Center looking at the percentage of young people (18- to 29-year olds) in the US that live with at least one parent. It it based on an analysis of monthly Census Bureau data and is obviously interesting/relevant given… Read More
At the beginning of this year (which seems like eons ago), I wrote about a CityLab series that Feargus O’Sullivan was doing on the vernacular home designs of a handful of European cities. Cities like London and Berlin. Well, after a brief pause, that series… Read More
A new report was just published by Urbanation and the Federation of Rental-Housing Providers of Ontario (FRPO) arguing that the Greater Toronto Area is undersupplying rental housing to the tune of about 20,000 units per year. This number considers both purpose-built rental housing and condominiums… Read More
At a high level there are two components to the value of a house. There’s the value of the land and there’s the value of all the improvements. That is, the bricks, wood, and other stuff that form the actual house. When a media outlet… Read More
Here are a few things to consider. One, the home you live in was likely built by a person or company that was trying to make a profit. Two, when your home was being developed and built, it probably upset a bunch of people. Both… Read More
I was “on site” this morning for the installation of the helical piers for my laneway suite (that will be the topic of a separate post). More often than not, I’m in the office. But I like going on site because, well, building things is… Read More
