Category Archives for "Investing"

A FREE WEBINAR WITH THE NHL’S OTTAWA SENATORS FOUNDER, BRUCE M FIRESTONE, PHD, AND DAVID DUBEAU, RESULTS ENTERPRISES FOUNDER Bruce “making impossible possible” Firestone David “magnetic investor attraction” Dubeau Here’s the unvarnished, real time video of the entire webinar. Enjoy it!   When: March 28th 2018 Time: 3 pm ET, noon PT until 4:30 pm ET, 1:30 pm PT How to join in: IT’S […]

The future of suburbia is bleak unless towns and cities act to animate them by densifying and intensifying them to make them more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable places. Here’s the story of Hemet, a suburb of Riverside California. What happened there is that folks who can’t afford to live in LA have driven further […]

As expected, NIMBY (not in my backyard), BANANAS (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything or Anyone) and CAVE (citizens against virtually everything) people are torpedoing tiny home subdivisions as this AP article by Scott McFetridge makes abundantly clear.   Tiny houses are trendy – unless they go up next door.

Introduction If you are a developer, you already know that most cities expect you to build all the roads your new development/subdivision requires and then turn them over to them when completed for a dollar. We not only had to build all the roads around the Canadian Tire Centre (where the NHL’s Ottawa Senators play) […]

[This article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal in March 2012, https://www.obj.ca/bruce-firestone] The sky is falling, the sky is… Many observers of Ottawa’s tech scene seem to think it’s the end of Silicon Valley North but try telling that to David Ross, 90% owner of Ross Video. The other 10% is owned by family and […]

If you read this LA Times article carefully (https://beta.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-vending-rules-20171108-story.html), you will note that Los Angeles city councilors are about to allow pushcart sellers to become legal for the 1st time except not in certain areas. Which areas are excluded?  …they would be banned from doing business within five feet of driveways, bus benches, fire hydrants, […]

[Here’s an article I wrote in 2009 for a local Ottawa newspaper that is worthwhile re-reading today amidst talk of the Sens possibly packing up and heading to greener pastures (possibly Quebec City) due to attendance woes in the 2016/17 regular season and playoffs as well as subsequent years. I think a better idea would […]

(This article first appeared in OBJ,  https://obj.ca/article/opinion-coach-houses-open-door-better-urban-planning-ottawa.) As OBJ readers may already know, the city of Ottawa recently changed its bylaws to permit construction of coach houses on many existing residential lots. This is part of a worldwide effort to densify and intensify existing urban areas to make them more interesting, more diverse, and more […]

[This article originally appeared on Spirepoint.ca] The number of mega wealthy people on this planet (a class that includes billionaires and millionaires, the latter, however, must have a net worth greater than $30 million USD to be included) is a tiny percentage of overall population—just 0.004% of adults qualify according to Wealth-X. This group controls […]

The Cap Rate Most real estate professionals do not use IRR, internal rate of return, calculations—they use cap (capitalization) rates to compare one project with another. The cap rate is an approximate assessment of ROI, return on investment, as all financial measures are anyway. But they are more approximate than the IRR is, in my […]

I wrote last year that a visitable home has three overarching qualities– 1. it has a 0-step entryway (either at the side of the house or front); 2. wider doorways and corridors on the main floor; 3. a main floor bath or powder room and at least one main floor accessible bedroom. You can read […]

There are many ways to value your real property— by completing a CMA, comparative market analysis, yourself or asking a realtor to do one for you, using the DFCA (direct comparison approach)—comparing what other similar properties have recently sold for in the same general area within the recent past (aka using “comps”) 2.       by using a cost approach—that is, determining the […]