The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece about “Silicon Valley invading Toronto” is, in my view, describing a generally positive outcome. We are one of the largest cities in North America (the exact ranking depends on where you draw the urban boundaries). We have more enlightened… Read More
Last week it was announced that WordPress.com (which is what I use for this blog) had purchased Tumblr for around $3 million. This is, of course, after Yahoo had purchased it for $1.1 billion in 2013 and later wrote it down, having never figured out… Read More
The below chart from this morning’s Wall Street Journal is perhaps a good example of our ongoing transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy. Just four stocks — namely Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — have accounted for 19% of the S&P 500’s… Read More
The State of New York just enacted a new law (on June 14, 2019) requiring that 51% of existing tenants agree to buy their apartments before a building can be converted into a condominium or a cooperative. There was previously no requirement for anyone to… Read More
This recent NY Times article about crowd estimates for Hong Kong’s annual pro-democracy protest is a good follow-up to my post about the number of people who, allegedly, showed up to last month’s NBA Championship parade here in Toronto. For years, Hong Kong has been… Read More
Miami has historically had a volatile housing market because of its position as a second-home destination and because of its dependency on Latin American buyers. There is perhaps no other housing market in the US with the same kind of overall reliance on capital from… Read More
I have been writing about algorithmic home buying on the blog since Opendoor launched back in 2014. I don’t have anything new to report on that today, but this recent article from the WSJ is interesting in that it talks about why Phoenix, in particular,… Read More
This morning I was reading about Aman’s new condo and hotel project in New York, which is planned for the 100-year-old Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue. It will have 83 hotel rooms and just 22 homes, and be the first urban condominium for the… Read More
The percentage of single-person households in the US has been steadily increasing since the 1960’s (though the rate of increase has moderated in recent decades). As of last year (2018), 28% of Americans lived alone, according to the US Census Bureau. So about 1 in… Read More
$UBER went public on Friday. Notwithstanding the initial stumble, Uber will go down in history as one of the most lucrative venture capital investments of all time. The stock is down from its IPO price of $45 per share, but at that price, the initial… Read More
