Last week was “forum week” in Toronto. (That is, it was the Toronto Real Estate Forum.) And as is the case every year, Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist of CIBC, opened up the event with his usual macro view of the world. For those of… Read More
Reading Howard Marks’ investment memos is up there with reading Paul Graham’s essays. You just need to do it. Howard’s latest is about “taking the temperature” of the market and I think you’ll find the lessons invaluable for everything from equities to residential real estate.… Read More
The Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act — which came into effect in January of this year and bans foreigners from buying residential real estate in the country for two years — is weird. We can debate whether banning foreigners from… Read More
The Journal published a piece this past week talking about China’s $52 trillion residential property bubble. According to a recent study by Goldman Sachs, this is the current value of all Chinese homes (built homes and developer inventory). And to put this number into perspective,… Read More
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
It’s that time of year again. Time to get contemplative about the last year. Bloomberg recently posted this: 2017 – The Year in Money. Below is a capture from the real estate section. Here you can see the run up to the 1997 Asian financial… Read More
I’ve written about Opendoor.com a few times. As far as I can tell, they are the furthest ahead in terms of disrupting the residential real estate market. So I like to follow them quite closely. They’ve recently launched some new features, so I figured it… Read More
Every year for the last decade, Knight Frank has published something called The Wealth Report. I’ve written about it before, but it’s basically a look at “prime property” and global wealth. As part of the report, they have something called the PIRI 100. It’s their “Prime… Read More
A reader recently sent me a New York Times article talking about Chinese buyers flooding into the US residential real estate market. This is something that I’ve written about before, but I liked the “graphic” section called The Roots of China’s Real Estate Rush. Here are… Read More
Real estate is a local business. And this weekend in Philadelphia really reminded me of that. Here’s what I mean. The real estate story in Toronto is condos. We’re buildings lots and lots of condos. When my friend from Chicago recently visited Toronto for the… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 