Today is my forty-first birthday. I had aspirations of making it a slower day, but that didn’t really happen. I did, however, start my morning “on the Bench” for one of our development projects and that was pretty spectacular, especially with the weather we had.… Read More
I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t born and raised in Toronto if I still would have gone to architecture school and become a real estate developer. I mean, if I grew up in Paris, maybe I would have become a fashion designer. Or if I… Read More
I am not a lawyer. Nothing I write on this blog should be construed as legal advice. In fact, it is highly questionable whether anything I write here should be construed as any sort of advice. Still, Trump’s fraud trial is an interesting one for… Read More
Here is a recent post by Scott Galloway comparing Uber and WeWork. In it, he praises the virtues of asset-light business models: For most of business history, having assets was good, and having more was even better. However, one of technology’s tectonic unlocks has been… Read More
A friend of mine just sent me this blog post from the venture capital firm, Shadow Ventures. They specialize in the built environment (i.e. real estate and construction) and the post is called, “What McKinsey gets wrong about the built environment.” Here’s one of the… Read More
One of the things that cities often try and stamp out is speculation. Homes should not sit empty (enter vacant home tax). Storefronts should not sit empty (enter vacant commercial tax). And development land should not sit undeveloped. To correct this latter problem, one idea… Read More
If you happen to have made boatloads of money in crypto (which sadly isn’t me), one sensible thing you could do is put some of that money into luxury residential real estate. You know, to diversify your portfolio. According to this recent WSJ article, it… Read More
I was having coffee with a developer friend of mine this morning and we got onto the topic of asking a lot of questions. We joked that that’s what we do all day. Development projects happen because of teams of very smart people all working… Read More
I am moderating a panel at the Toronto Real Estate Forum later this year (it’s on December 2 to be exact). The topic is innovation in development. There is a great panel of speakers (more info here) and the plan right now is to cover… Read More
I was out for dinner this week with a group of real estate developers. And as you might expect, we spent the majority of the time talking about real estate and complaining about how long things take. But a good chunk of time was also… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 