Sam Zell, the billionaire real estate investor, died this week at the age of 81. That seems young to me. Or maybe I’m just being overly optimistic about life expectancy. This is around the US average. Whatever the case, if you work in real estate,… Read More
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) just announced a new 12-month degree called the Master in Real Estate (MRE). Here’s a short excerpt about the program: The MRE program is designed to train future practitioners to address new and urgent realities facing the built… Read More
The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design — my alma mater — has just launched a new initiative with Surface Magazine called the Surface Summer School at Penn. A fairly unique partnership between a media company and an accredited university, the goal of… Read More
The Penn Institute for Urban Research has just launched a new initiative called, Cities and Contagion: Lessons from COVID-19. The inaugural piece is a special edition of its Urban Link publication. But going forward, the initiative is planned to include not only publications, but a… Read More
My good friend Taya Cook (of Urban Capital) and her development partner Sherry Larjani were featured in the New York Times today as a result of their Reina project and their remarkable efforts to gender balance the male-dominated commercial real estate industry. I am thrilled… Read More
There’s a lot of debate within urbanist circles about whether or not supply alone can solve or at least mitigate housing affordability concerns. Richard Florida and others will say that, while beneficial, increasing supply isn’t the be all end all. We need to be building… Read More
According to Amazon’s recent annual 10-K filing, the company leased and owned (most of their space is leased) about 288,419,000 square feet of space around the world at the end of 2018. Of this number, about 80% is used for “fulfillment, data centers, and other.”… Read More
A bunch of people have asked me lately about what they should do if they want to get smarter on land use planning and on the entitlement process for development projects. It was specific to Toronto, but I don’t think my answer is specific to… 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
I was speaking with a Penn (my alma mater) student this evening about career options in development and he mentioned to me that he recently participated in the 2018 ULI Hines Student Competition. He also mentioned that this year’s “study site” is in Toronto. (It’s… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 