Three quick and unrelated things for today’s post:

1.

A handful of years ago, before the pandemic, Bullpen Consulting, Slate Asset Management, and AD HOC STUDIO started a somewhat irregular basketball meetup for Toronto’s development industry called City Builder Ball. It, of course, fell off the rails during the pandemic, but as of this month we are officially back at it! We played over the weekend and I can’t tell you how much fun it was to run around a gym for an hour and play basketball very poorly — so much fun. The next meetup will be in January and if you’d like to join, drop Ben Myers of Bullpen an email to get on the mailing list. It is open to all.

2.

A few months ago I wrote about a passion project that I am working on with a friend, called Unlyst. The idea is to see if there is a way to leverage the “wisdom of crowds” to determine the current market value of housing. And the way it works is that we feature a home on the website, people (or the crowd) get 14 days to input what they think it’s worth, and then we come up with something we are calling an “unlysted value.” There’s a lot of evidence of this sort of thing working exceptionally well for other markets, so we’re very curious to see if it can work for housing. If you’re interested in contributing your home and/or just seeing how it works, check out unlyst.com.

3.

World Cup Finals. What a game! A huge congratulations to Argentina and, of course, Messi. I should, however, come clean and say that I know virtually nothing about football, I don’t know why the field is so big, and that my overall impression of the game used to be mostly consistent with this Simpsons’ take (albeit with more sensationalized flopping by men with faux hawks). But since Canada qualified this year, I felt it was my duty to watch — at least some bits and until we got eliminated. And since the finals are the finals, and since I have an open crush on France, I figured this would also be a good game to watch. Turns out I was right. And now, I am fairly certain that it has turned me into a true fan — or at the very least a “I could watch a finals game every 4 years” kind of fan. Who knew that soccer, I mean football, could be so thrilling?

Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash