Interview with Brandon Donnelly, Architect turned real estate developer in Toronto, Canada
What do you find most fulfilling about your current job as a developer? I love how multi-disciplinary it is and I love that my work has the opportunity to positively affect the built environment. Developers often have a bad rap (I know from the comments on my blog), but for me development is that perfect middle ground. I never wanted to be an architect that designed beautiful but infeasible projects that could never be built. And I never wanted to be a developer that built terrible projects whose only goal was to make money. My goal is to be an integrated thinker and my mission is to make buildings both beautiful and feasible. How does your architectural training help you in your business. What specific skills are the most useful? I understand design, space, drawings, and the construction process. As a developer you have to be a jack of all trades, passing between things like design and construction and finance. And my view has always been that the more you can master all aspects of the development process, the better off you’ll be. Creative solutions often straddle multiple disciplines. Do you have any advice for architects who are interested in transitioning from architecture to development? Well, you pretty much have two options. You can either try to convince a real estate firm to hire you or you can go out and do your own small development project. In both cases, I think you should figure out someway to shore up your business/finance knowledge. That could be through just reading, online courses, or maybe even a degree in real estate. This is something I worked really hard at when I was in grad school – shaking the prejudice that I didn’t “understand the numbers.” To be honest, this is the most common question I get from readers of my blog. So much so that I’ve often thought about writing an eBook to help people get into the field. Development has historically been an entrepreneur’s game, and so there isn’t a lot of structure in terms of recruitment and entering the field. The barriers can be pretty high, particularly if you plan to start out on your own. But it’s definitely a rewarding career. Source:Archipreneur.com
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