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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Tag: newsletter

  • Airbnb’s predictive abilities

    I recently discovered and subscribed to Packy McCormick’s “Not Boring” newsletter. So far it’s quite good, and so here I am mentioning it to you all on the blog. In his latest newsletter, he makes the case for why Airbnb and Zillow — the two largest residential real estate tech companies — should merge. Naturally this new company would be called Zillbnb. You can read all about why he thinks this is a good idea over here, but I would like to point out one thing that I found interesting.

    Packy makes the argument that “easiest-to-book, shortest duration reservations” are a leading indicator for changes in demand. In other words, platforms like Airbnb can start to tell you where people might want to live and platforms like Breather can start to tell you where people might want to work.

    To support this argument he uses the example of his Airbnb rental outside of New York City. Sure, demand initially fell off a cliff at the beginning of lockdown, but then it started to surge as New Yorkers sought refuge outside of the city. And while I think that this particular change in demand will likely end up being short-term in nature, a similar trend is being reported around in the world. Did we hear it first on Airbnb?

  • Would it be insider trading if Kylie Jenner traded on her tweets?

    Lately I have really gotten into Matt Levine’s daily newsletter about “Wall Street, finance, companies and other stuff.” Maybe that’s how I should describe this blog: Cities, real estate, design, and other stuff.

    If you aren’t familiar with Matt’s writing, here is an article that he wrote about Kylie Jenner’s recent tweet concerning Snapchat. You know, the one that wiped out $1.3 billion of market value because she revealed – using only 88 characters, I might add – that she was no longer using the app.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The article was spurred on by this question:

    “Would it be insider trading for Kylie Jenner to buy short term out of money put options on Snap and tweet out that she’s no longer using Snap?”

    And this is the start of his answer:

    Insider trading, as I am constantly saying around here, is not about fairness; it is about theft. It is not illegal to trade on your own nonpublic knowledge of your own intentions. Warren Buffett can buy stocks before he announces that he’s bought them, even though that announcement will predictably make the stocks go up. 

    If I did describe this daily blog like Matt describes his daily newsletter, this post would clearly fall into the “other stuff” camp. But maybe you too will find it interesting. If you do, you can subscribe here. 

  • 11 months in Antarctica

    I came across this tweet last night before bed:

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    I am late to the party on this one, but Dr. Christine Corbett Moran has been living in the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station since January 2016. She is “wintering” with the South Pole Telescope and studying Cosmic Microwave Background radiation with the University of Chicago.

    I don’t profess to be a student of CMB, but I am so intrigued by her settlement situation. She is living in a place where there is effectively one long day and one long night. There’s sun for 6 months and then no sun for 6 months. 

    I’m not sure how I would feel living in such a remote place with no sun for half of the year. I’m thinking about it now and it’s making me a bit anxious. I’m not sure if the remoteness would make me feel liberated or trapped.

    Thankfully, Christine has a newsletter where she shares her experience in the South Pole. I signed up for it last night and I’m looking forward to seeing what she publishes. If you’d also like to give it a go, you can sign up here.

  • New curated city building bulletin

    I have decided to spin-off the Architect This City identity into a weekly newsletter that I’m referring to as a “curated city building bulletin.” (This is as a result of the unbranding of this blog last week.)

    The inaugural issue went out this past Monday at 9am eastern with a collection of city building-related links. And that was it. This is not another blog. I’m not writing any new content for it. It’s simply going to be a collection of links to things that I think city builders would find interesting and/or valuable.

    Here’s why I decided to do this:

    It allows me to keep this new bulletin entirely focused on one thing. You’re not going to find me sneaking in a link about snowboarding, wine or something else that I’m interested in. It’s strictly about targeting city builders. (Of course, city building can be a pretty broad topic.)

    Keeping in mind what I wrote yesterday about saying no, I also chose this format because the additional workload for me will be minimal. In order for me to write a daily blog like this one, I have found that I need to keep a running list of reading material. But a lot of what’s on this list (stored in Pocket) never sees the light of day – there’s only so much I can write about. This new bulletin will be a quick way for me to share the rest of it.

    Finally, I’m also hoping it’ll be an efficient way for me to share the links, events, projects, and other things I receive from readers. In an ideal world, the bulletin will evolve into having a “links” section and a “from the community” section – which will be things that subscribers send me but today don’t get shared.

    So that’s the plan. If that sounds good to you, please subscribe at architectthiscity.com. 

    To kick things off, I’m going to be giving away 5 x free ATC t-shirts. (See photo at the top of this post.) To win one, just (1) subscribe and tweet out a link to this new city building bulletin, (2) tag @athiscity, and (3) tell everyone which city/town you live in.

    Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.