61 likes, 17 comments - wayne_hillier_rei on August 3, 2026: "CMHC MLI Select financing helped create a massive development boom in Edmonton, but investors overdid it. In 2024, Edmonton had low vacancy, strong rental demand and some of the best real estate investment opportunities in Canada. Then investors flooded the market and started building infill multiplexes everywhere. All that new rental supply increased vacancy and created downward pressure on rents, especially among similar new-build units competing for the same tenants. Just because financing makes a development possible doesn’t automatically make it a good investment. Edmonton real estate investors need to understand current supply, vacancy rates, realistic rents and tenant demand before buying or building. Do you think Edmonton’s multiplex rental market is oversaturated? #EdmontonRealEstate #RealEstateInvesting #EdmontonInvestor #MLISelect #CMHC".
Opinion | One City Might Have Just Cracked the Housing Crisis
A large real estate development in the middle of Vancouver, British Columbia, shows how cities can build more housing.
AI Economics for Dummies
“Xavier owns an apartment that he rents out at a loss of $1 billion/month. Seeing this success, he decides to make financial commitments to construct $850 bi...
The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class
Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research
Meredith Whittaker on Twitter / X
Now that even Goldman, Sequoia, and other major investors are calling it, it's good to remember that the shakiness of the AI market, and the mismatch between capex and ROI, has been clear for a long time to those of us who look closely at the political economy of AI. https://t.co/dLLNAcW5Sn— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) July 30, 2024
Building our way: Announcing our Series C - Linear
Today, I’m happy to share that we’ve raised an $82M Series C at a $1.25B valuation. The round includes both primary and secondary funding, led by Accel with continued support from Sequoia and 01A, and joined by new partners Seven Seven Six, Designer Fund, Indie.vc, TK Ventures, Soleio, Jeff Weinstein, Ilkka Paananen, and Lauren & Vlad Loktev.
Zitron: "Everyone Has Been Sold a Lie" on AI
Storeys
STOREYS covers the latest on the housing and real estate markets in Toronto, Vancouver, and the rest of Canada. Get all the latest real estate news from across the country.
Why does Canada not have more pre-seed funds writing first cheques? | Boris Mann posted on the topic | LinkedIn
Why does Canada not have more preseed funds writing first cheques? It’s (I think) a recognized fact that this is the case. Is it because we are so close to the US ecosystem that the massive number of preseed funds there effectively cherry picks our top founders? I have heard that Canadian pre-seed has the opposite problem. They have to wade through a lot of inbound in Canada (many low quality), but themselves have such small funds they deploy very little. I have been thinking about what I did at Full Stack. The ecosystem was smaller then. There was no institutional preseed. 9 deals in 6 months made me one of the top investors in Canada. I say that not to boast, but show how low the bar was (is?). I modeled smaller cheques with much higher velocity during the pandemic with Venture Scouts. Recently talked to Jesse Rodgers who is thinking something similar. The model I have in mind would be - across Canada - scouts in every community (diverse young people) - 10k - 25k lead cheques - don’t need to wait for a lead, we say yes first - scouts check the hygiene - legal setup, founders reverse vesting etc - syndicate every deal 50 - 100 deals annually? One of the experiments here is if one can find and execute on this many. Not all would be venture track, so slightly different IndieVC style deal terms might be needed. Overhead is massive compared to capital deployed. Not enough AUM for management fees to pay for much. What do you think? Let’s build ;) | 37 comments on LinkedIn
Capital Must Seek Delight
Too few people are experiencing the delights and serendipity of AI, causing capital misallocation
What Sort of AI Bubble Are We In?
Think broadband. Or, potentially, the 2008 housing market.
Communities Across the Nation Want to Add Housing. Which Metropolitan Areas Are Adding the Most?
Between 2020 and 2025, four Texas metropolitan areas—Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio—accounted for 13.3 percent of total US housing supply growth.
Information Salience and Mispricing in Housing
Making the purchase price fully salient to consumers has been shown to affect demand and equilibrium prices in various markets. Using a setting where part of the home acquisition price is in the form of nonsalient debt, we show this can happen in housing—a market where a typical household makes its largest acquisition. A regulation that made the debt and the total price salient for homebuyers eliminated a large mispricing caused by consumers’ inattention to the debt before the regulation. An average homebuyer would lose about $13,300 by acquiring a dwelling with one-standard deviation ($51,000)-higher debt, but this is nearly eliminated after the regulation. To shed light on the underlying channels, we use administrative data and show that young, financially inexperienced, and first-time homebuyers used to overpay the most. The results are not driven by rational channels based on liquidity constraints and adverse selection. Our findings imply that making all-inclusive house price and mortgage features salient at the time of advertising the sale can help avoid unintentional borrowing. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4253 .
What It's Actually Like to Build a Tech Company in Canada | Tyler Bryden
The honest version of building in Canada — the funding gap, talent reality, what's genuinely good, and what I'd tell someone starting here today.
Unpacking the Mechanics of Conduit Debt Financing
Understanding the pass-through financing model behind the AI infrastructure boom
How Elon Musk's AI Empire In Memphis Became A Cautionary Tale