At the beginning of this year, a16z announced that they co-led a $175 million investment in the real estate company Loft. Based in São Paulo, Loft is doing in Brazil what Opendoor is doing in the US. They are bringing more liquidity to the residential… Read More
In 2011, Apple owned 584 acres of land. As of this year, and according to the Financial Times, the company now owns about 7,376 acres. Apple uses its “facilities and land for corporate functions, R&D and data centres.” The latter would include server farms for its… Read More
A friend of mine flipped me this New York Times article today talking about the rapidly growing interest in proptech and about Opendoor – a topic and a company that I have written about many times before on the blog. Here’s a snippet about proptech:… Read More
I just learned about the ongoing legal dispute on Martin’s Beach (south of San Francisco) through this New York Times article. To briefly sum it up, tech billionaire Vinod Khosla bought a 53-acre beachside village known as Martin’s Beach in 2008. On the land is about… Read More
Back when I was in grad school studying real estate, we used to refer to the below book as the “blue bible.” It is a comprehensive look at real estate finance and investments, and also development. But perhaps more importantly, it is written in a way that… Read More
The Guardian has just published a fascinating article about the reprivatization of property in Warsaw. This is the process by which previously nationalized property is returned to pre-communist owners, or their heirs. Not surprisingly, the government gets a lot of these sorts of claims, though… Read More
I just discovered an interesting new Seattle-based startup called Loftium. The way it works is that they provide down payment assistance (up to $50,000) to prospective homeowners as long as they commit to renting out one of the home’s bedrooms on Airbnb for 12 to… Read More
Last month Zillow.com launched a new feature called “Instant Offers.” Press real estate can be found here. It is: “…a way for homeowners to sell their homes quickly by providing them with offers from investors and a comparative market analysis (CMA) from a local real estate agent,… Read More
Lots sizes and dimensions vary from city to city, as well as from neighborhood to neighborhood. They come in many different shapes and sizes from long and narrow (common in Toronto) to rectangular or even wide and shallow. Charlie Gardner wrote a terrific post on… Read More
Today I spent the day at the Land & Development conference here in Toronto. If there was one running theme throughout the day, it was: “Holy shit, I can’t believe that X piece of land sold for $Y million. How will they (the developer) ever make… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 