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Andrew Gaucher

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Dynamic Constructors creates progressive built environments. Dynamic Constructors

Built Better with Dynamic Constructors

Dynamic Constructors creates progressive built environments. We integrate new technology, work processes and design thinking into each of the...

Dynamic Constructors creates progressive built environments. We integrate new technology, work processes and design thinking into each of the buildings we develop or construct. We are redefining what it means to create sustainable built environments and building a better standing into every new environment we create.

Each of the homes, mixed use or commercial buildings we construct will meet or exceed the following. A higher standard is the norm with Dynamic Constructors:

  • Energy Step Code 3 or better;
    • Superior air-tightness installation and quality control;
    • Triple Pane Windows;
  • Woods and plastics consumed in construction are replanted 2:1 or offset respectively;
  • Prewired and piped for future installation of solar photovoltaic panels;
  • Real wood window liners, casement and baseboard at high traffic entry doors;
  • “Bumper” casing along garage side walls to prevent drywall damage from vehicle doors;
  • Prewiring garages for electric vehicles and future uses;
  • Future ready integrated digital delivery drop boxes and drone ports;
  • Recycling and rubbish programs to reduce construction material waste;
  • Materials and technique choices to minimize carbon footprint.

We look forward to building a better future with you.

Techs’ disruptive march on real estate From the popular book “Innovators Dilemma”, Innovations fall into two general categories: sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.

Techs’ disruptive march on real estate

TLDR: there are many innovations affecting real estate these days, but the ones we are currently using in our homes and offices won’t...

TLDR: there are many innovations affecting real estate these days, but the ones we are currently using in our homes and offices won’t intrinsically change the market or the product. It will more likely be current innovations in adjacent industries which disrupt how we’ve used our homes and offices for the past century.

I research and think a lot about when real estate, or more generally any built environment will fall to a major disruption, like Netflix to Blockbuster or AirBnB with the hotel industry (to a degree) or WeWork to a traditional office lease approach. When thinking about these trends of innovation, we need to consider the different types of innovation and try to watch those which might evolve into something truly disruptive. Its an over used word in business and tech circles, but it is characteristic of the reality we are seeing with increasing frequency in most industries. As Marc Andreessen has said “software is eating the world” — if your company isn’t a tech company (ie. any company which is integrating technology into its core business model can be a technology company) then you might not be around in 5 or 10 years.

From the popular book “Innovators Dilemma”, Innovations fall into two general categories: sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation can be thought of as iterative improvements on products being created. An example of a sustaining innovation in real estate today might be increasing the efficiency of the HVAC system or designing a home to function with IoT devices and home AI such as Amazon’s Alexa. These are novel improvements, but aren’t going to drastically alter the industry or how we use a built environment. A disruptive innovation is a little more complex. It often starts in more entry level market segments, falls off the radar of incumbent businesses, but moves up market quickly (indeed, faster than the incumbents do with their iterative approach to improvement) eating up the market of those focusing on the traditional product.

Netflix is a great example here. As the famous last words of the then Blockbuster CEO said “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix …Netflix doesn’t really have or do anything that we can’t or don’t already do ourselves.” Netflix started with an inferior product (mail order to your house DVDs with a poor selection) and once established and worked out the kinks, quickly moved upmarket to take over that industry. The same Blockbuster CEO also turned down the purchase of Netflix for $50M…Netflix is now valued at over $80B.

Lets consider a few innovations that we are starting to see more frequently today that might affect various real estate products and markets:

Internet of Things (IoT) appliances and electronics. This is when your light switch can talk to your phone, and your phone can also look inside when fridge when you’re not at home, and you can lock, unlock and view your home from your smart phone app. IoT stands for “Internet of Things” and generally describes the connectivity of traditionally “dumb” appliances to the internet, allowing the user greater control of the appliances and further control when not at home. While this is a huge growth segment which will see much convenience added, I am not so certain that anything offered here will truly change the industry or the use of homes, offices, etc. I am more certain that we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t always have cool gadgets like the camera doorbell, however!

Home AI assistants are pretty handy, but in some ways are a glorified smart phone (Siri has been able to answer questions, order things, etc since its release in 2011) or online shopping cart. The Amazon Echo, Google Home and others largely act as statically located smart phones. They can connect to many IoT devices/appliances, order you food, order on Amazon, play music or podcasts, and other helpful interactions. Again, these are handy and are of increasing popularity, but aren’t revolutionizing home or office use.

Smart thermostats are a variation of IoT to a degree. Connecting your thermostat online allows you to control functionality from a smart phone app and generally allows for a greater depth of heating and cooling analysis. When should you turn down the temp? Turn it up? Many smart thermostats offer learning algorithms so that it can map the behavior in your home and cater the heating and cooling settings to your needs. Useful and probably going to be every thermostat in the next 2 years, the smart thermostat also doesn’t offer a vast upgrade to our homes or office spaces.

VR and AR are interesting solutions which are primarily being used in entertainment sectors at the moment. VR stands for virtual reality where the user, generally wearing a headset, is placed in a fully digital/virtual environment. Everything they see and interact with is graphically rendered. AR stands for Augmented Reality and generally renders digital elements within our real physical environments. While the uses are extensive in the video entertainment and gaming segments, an interesting use case with growing prevalence is viewing homes or offices from a distance, or before they are constructed. Built environments have long been rendered in three dimensions with architects and for project planning and design, so it wasn’t a huge stretch to beautifully render these and offer people the ability to view a home, virtually, from a great distance (different country) or to show someone what the home or office they are designing should look like in the future. This is a great use of the technology which I’d wager that will be used ubiquitously in real estate marketing in less than 5 years.

While these entertaining, and to some degree educating uses are visually educating, they won’t represent massive changes. But, I do believe AR and possibly VR will, in other ways, vastly change how we use the office space. More and more people are able to work from home, at least part of the time, commuting in to work for meetings and such. Well, what if you could be placed in that meeting from wherever you were, and the experience was close to actually being physically present? If virtual meetings were able to bridge the digital/human gap and make our telecommuting more connected and human then this will have massive impacts on office use. Performing administrative tasks at office will be all but extinct, and office use will be reserved for creative, high-EQ needs.

This could be disruptive.Ride sharing isn’t frequently thought of in terms of how it will alter real estate, but it should be. All of our modern cities have been shaped, almost exclusively, around the use of cars. With ride sharing hitting massive exponential adoption, we need to start considering how it will affect the shape of our cities, how we interact with our cities and neighborhoods, and parking! One concern to many smart growth enthusiasts is that ride sharing may remove an extensive amount of burden from commuters. Ride sharing significantly cuts the cost of commuting, and with future AI-driven vehicles, we will be able to work, sleep or be entertained for the duration of a commute.

Given this, there may in fact be a greater push away from city cores to outlying areas where housing prices are more affordable. Parking is another interesting consideration. On a slightly longer term horizon, many cars will be owned by ride sharing companies and piloted by an AI. This vehicle will continuously drive throughout the day, eliminating the huge waste of space of a car sitting unused some 95% of the day in your garage or office parking lot. This will free up considerable tracts of valuable land in urban and suburban locations alike, not to mention the additional uses garages could see for ground oriented dwellings. Big changes here — this in my view is a significant change which over the next decade will completely reform how we built — and use — our cities.

Prefab construction techniques are nothing new, but seem to be of increasing prevalence. I suspect there are certain technologies that are maturing to a place where prefabricated manufacturing facilities can be increasingly automated which drives efficacy and allows reduced resource use. Indeed, some jurisdictions such as Singapore require or enforce PPVC construction techniques. These and related technologies are one of my greatest hopes of bringing housing affordability more in line with median earnings in North America. Government intervention hasn’t shown much empirical improvement for affordability in any market, any where, and while I regard myself as a tech-optimist, this area does bear huge potential to drive down waste, time to construct, and cost (from a labor standpoint) of construction. If this guy can do back flips, why cant he be programmed to use a hammer! Imagine a work with with a dozen of these guys working 24/7…
Love to hear your thoughts, comments and predictions on where we should be watching incoming technologies and how they will affect real estate development and construction!

Many of us understandably feel like the center of the world. In a way, we are the centers of our own worlds. hyper natural

Hyper urban…hyper natural?

Many of us understandably feel like the center of the world. In a way, we are the centers of our own worlds. This centricity extends to where we live — our houses — and the cities in which we reside....

Many of us understandably feel like the center of the world. In a way, we are the centers of our own worlds. This centricity extends to where we live — our houses — and the cities in which we reside. While some of us might live/work in more than one locale, which would broaden your perspective, this isn’t the norm. Indeed, many of us consider the problems we increasingly face in our cities such as homelessness and affordability “the worst where we live”. The fact remains, however, that affordability isn’t a localized or rare problem. Its a global crisis.

The challenge with calling it — and treating it — like a crisis is that it feels like an emergency we need to immediately and perhaps rashly act on. When we react to an emergency situation, things are rarely strategic or thoughtful, considering second or third order consequence. We want to solve , as swiftly as possible, likely missing a lot of the potential solutions that a thorough fact based review might yield. A question I ponder is, if something is incredibly prevalent and persistent in terms of duration, is it still considered a crisis? There are reasons for this “crisis”, though, and those reasons are the trends of globalization and urbanization.

The term Globalization was popularized with Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book “The World is Flat”. Its a common word used in business circles, and for the past decade has felt like an inescapable tide. The rise of populism, however, might be reversing this trend to a degree — but that’s a whole different subject matter of discussion.

Many internet and technology companies have been benefactors of this trend, with Alibaba and Amazon becoming household names and harnessing some of this power, at a retail consumer level, over the internet. With the internet, it does feel like the world is flat. It feels like a smaller space when we can reach out, online, and connect with someone in virtually any country around the world, at the drop of a Skype call. For free. Who could do that even 15 years ago? No one. As the world feels smaller, we can feel at home, and connect with “home” from almost anywhere, increasing the ease of migration and movement of peoples globally.

With globalization has also come the rise of urbanization and the creation of “mega cities”. Mega cities are cities or contiguous urban metropolises that bleed together and contain over 10 million people. Fellow Canadians live in one of the least crowded countries on earth, at about 4 people per square kilometer. The converse to Canada, of course, is more people living in a smaller area. Hence, another term we are all too familiar with in urban centers: density. Simply, more concentrated human development means more density.

Urbanization is correlated to globalization and can be generally defined as the rapid trend of a populace moving to increasingly dense living environments, away from more historical rural areas. While the reasons for urbanization are numerous, ranging from chasing wealth to harboring innovation, the reality is that this is a primary culprit behind the prevalence of affordability challenges we are encountering in most any urban metro on earth. An interesting counter-trend which isn’t well documented, observed or discussed are those rural locations that are being all but abandoned over time with urbanization. An extreme example of such is Fukashima; after the fallout of the nuclear accident, it has been completely reclaimed by nature. Could hyper urbanization result in hyper naturalization of these rural environments over a longer horizon, say 50 years? Could this be a positive externality of human environments growing increasingly dense over time? Could it even be a positive consequences of anthropogenic impact on earth? One can hope.

Concluding by revisiting the question of the “affordability crisis” being a crisis given its global occurrence — and why we continue to be surprised that density and urbanization create affordability challenges when its been well studied, discussed and acknowledged for decades is confounding. With such a well known trend, I would have thought we could conclude on more pragmatic and effective mechanisms to build for and house everyone. That must remain a priority, and while we aren’t there yet, there are many bright minds working on that problem. The center of (y)our world depends on it.

Andrew Gaucher Follow 5,989 1,899

Real estate developer & builder. Creating amazing RE experiences. Fitness, longevity, nature, technology, accelerationism, progress.

GaucherAndrew
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Andrew Gaucher Follow 5,989 1,899

Real estate developer & builder. Creating amazing RE experiences. Fitness, longevity, nature, technology, accelerationism, progress.

GaucherAndrew
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