Congratulations to Matthew, Nathan, and Alan on winning 1st place AND Best Design in the 2024 Expand Your Empire (EYE) competition!!!
Expand Your Empire is Canada’s largest undergraduate real estate case competition, and it invites schools from across the globe to compete in a 2-day in-person event. Delegates generally get 2-3 weeks to prepare a presentation deck and full financial analysis of the case study. This year, the prompt was to propose a new rental concept targeting post-secondary students and young professionals. Since these demographics are often in the lowest income bucket, the challenge was to make the development concept entirely affordable. This concept also needed to be scalable across the GTHA and they had to show our rationale as to why they chose a particular city and site for their pilot project.
The team (comprised of Nathan Lee in 4B Civil Engineering, Matthew Van Bakel in 4B Urban Planning, and Alan Mak in 4A Accounting & Financial Management), proposed a 25sto mixed-use residential tower in The Annex neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. They created floorplans and renders, put together market research on post-secondary enrolment and demographic research, and built a detailed financial model in Excel to forecast the entire development and operational returns. In terms of innovations, they proposed smaller, efficiently designed units that come fully-furnished, as well as a smaller batch of co-living studios where the residents share a larger kitchen, living room and dining area. The team ultimately presented their proposal to a panel of judges from CreateTO, Avison Young, and various other real estate developers & investment managers.
Thursday, February 1, 2024
