Generally speaking my visits to LinkedIn are rare but not long ago I checked in for a few minutes and happened to see the following post (dated August 30th) made by a marketing person in the industry: “When rents surge and supply gets tighter (like it is now) it becomes easy to forget the paradoxical fact that renters are the… Read more »
One of the biggest frustrations with real estate consulting is having to wait to find out whether you’re right or wrong. Because most development projects, especially multi-unit rental properties, take years to get approved, built, and leased, if you as a consultant give advice to a developer you won’t find out for 3 or 4 years whether your advice was… Read more »
Charlie Munger is pretty much a household name in the finance and investing worlds, having made his name by becoming wealthy and being Warren Buffett’s investing partner for many decades. Apparently, he also has aspirations to be an architect. Read the article below. What can I say? To give credit where credit is due, his design is well suited to… Read more »
In my post last (last) week I talked about ‘trickle down’ supply issues and explained my reasons why I don’t think it results in increased affordability or increased access to affordable rents (some extreme situations excepted). One of the assertions I made was that rents in older buildings will keep going up, no matter how many new buildings—i.e. high-rent rentals—are… Read more »
There’s a recent article which has been making the rounds titled “How luxury apartment buildings help low-income renters.” I think it showed up first on a US website but it’s been republished in Canada. I’ve included a link to a US website below so you can read the article (I suspect that’s where the article was published first). https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-buildings-help-low-income-renters/ The… Read more »
For some reason the other day I started thinking about the risks and rewards of different types of purpose-built rental housing. Risk is a complex thing and varies from project to project and developer to developer, but, at least from a high-level perspective, it’s probably best defined as absorption risk (how fast will available rentals be leased?) and to a… Read more »
Altus recently released their annual report on construction costs in Canada and you can read REMI Network’s article discussing Altus’s report here. The overall gist is that construction costs for multi-unit housing projects are increasing across Canada and are projected to increase, in most markets, by 1% to 4% by the end of this year, but by 5% in the… Read more »