Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of this daily blog. (In August of this year, we'll enter the 14th year of this daily practice.) Exactly a Happy New Year A review of my 2025 predictions Brandon Donnelly Jan 1 ShareSupport Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of this daily blog. (In August of this year, we'll enter the 14th year of this daily practice.) Exactly a year ago, I published a post talking about what might happen in 2025. It was last year's prediction post. Today, let's see how I did. Real estate development: I admitted that I had been overly optimistic in terms of how soon the market would reset (specifically Toronto). But I did still argue that 2025 would be an important turning point in terms of people capitulating and more legacy assets/deals getting reset. I think we did start to see this. We looked at a number of receivership sites and came across many instances where a landowner would take 40-50% of what they paid. The problem is that the market still hasn't fully reset and we're still in the midst of absorbing our current housing supply pipeline. So while it sounds nice to buy something for $0.40 on the dollar, what do you then do with it? Return-to-office: I said that we would see the average weekly occupancy index in downtown Toronto reach 90% by the end of 2025 (it was 73% when I wrote the post a year ago). As of November 2025, it was 82%. Not quite. Autonomous vehicles: I reversed my position (relative to the prior year) and said that autonomous vehicles are way further along than most people thought, at least at the time. And boy, was 2025 a great year for Waymo. It feels like they're now in scaling mode. EU carbon permits: A year ago, they were priced at €71.98 per tonne of carbon dioxide, compared to an all-time high of €105.73 in February of 2023. I guessed that they'd be between €90 and €100 by the end of 2025. Right now they're at €87.28. Crypto: I thought that 2025 would be a good year for crypto given the MAGA movement's support for it. For a while, it seemed like that would be the case. But if I look at the price of Ethereum, it's down 15.21% year-to-date. So not what I predicted. But I continued to dollar-cost average. Web3: I went on to predict that we would see a breakout web3 consumer app in 2025. I also mentioned that I was impressed by NFT marketplaces like Rodeo. Well, Rodeo has gone on to mostly die and I'm not sure it would be fair to say that there was anything that crossed over into the mainstream. I'm going to give myself a zero for this one. But if I had to pick something, I would say that Coinbase's "Base App" represents meaningful progress. Base continues to dominate the Ethereum Layer 2 market. It's fast and cheap. I wish you all a healthy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2026. Cover photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash Support Brandon Donnelly The daily blog for city builders Show you appreciate this writer, help support their work, and share in their growth over time by buying their writer coin. Support SENT VIA PARAGRAPHYou're receiving this because you've subscribed to updates from Brandon Donnelly. 2010 El Camino Real Office 2350 Santa Clara, CA 95050 Manage your subscription