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*Winner - Best Tech Podcast - 2025 Quill Podcast Awards*
British Columbia is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. While addressing various aspects of the housing supply chain is essential, no single approach can fully solve the challenges we face in scaling housing production. So, what's the blueprint for growth?
In November 2023, DIGITAL — Canada's Global Innovation Cluster for digital technologies — launched its Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs. The program brings together collaborative teams of industry leaders to accelerate technology-driven approaches that are driving real, tangible growth for British Columbia's housing production sector.
Amy Vilis, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at DIGITAL, chats with innovators doing groundbreaking work within DIGITAL's Housing Growth Innovation Program to develop and implement technology-based solutions within British Columbia's housing sector across the full scale of end-to-end production. These conversations showcase how ideas are making it into the real world where they can become comprehensive, viable and, best of all, achievable solutions to accelerate housing production for British Columbians.
Amy Villis (00:02)
Welcome to Blueprint for Growth, Innovation and Housing. I'm your host, Amy Villas, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at Digital, Canada's global innovation cluster for digital technologies. In this episode, we're spotlighting a crucial part of the housing development process, technologies that impact due diligence. In other words, it's all about figuring out if a housing project can actually happen. We're speaking with experts about generative AI that can figure out the best use of a piece of land.
digital tools that help streamline compliance checks and financial models that help democratize investments. All done in the name of speeding up housing production and creating sustainable homes across BC.
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Amy Villis (01:12)
first guest is Dr. Ben Coorey the founder of Archistar a cutting edge prop tech company. Archistar specializes in generative design, helping property owners understand the potential of their land and streamlining compliance checks. He's currently collaborating with an exciting project with the Malahat Nation, a truly groundbreaking initiative, combining technological innovation with nation-led approach to master community planning.
For folks that may not be familiar, the Malahat Nation is an indigenous community and government that contains approximately 2,300 acres of land on the southernmost part of Vancouver Island. In our conversation, we'll explore the concepts of generative design, its application and master planning, and how it can be scaled for wider use in the housing sector. Now, before we get into this project, let's break down what generative design actually is.
So Ben, you're working alongside the Malahat Nation on a 3D generative design, the first of its kind in North America. Could you give us a generative design one-on-one for those who may not be familiar with it? How does it shake up traditional architectural approach?
Ben Coorey (02:18)
Yeah, no, I love to do that. And it's super exciting to be working on this project. And what we've been building up over the last 10 years is essentially technology around generative design for buildings. And it sounds complicated, but it's actually quite simple. It's just teaching the computer how to design 3D buildings that give you options. So what you do in traditional design is
You you look at a piece of land, you come up with ideas, you start drawing that up. This takes that to the next level because if you can program in the typical rules that you need for what a building design, you know, needs to include, the computer can start to come up with options. And that's super important because you can then start to make high level strategic decisions. So you can say, how high do I want this building? What's the setback?
What are the size of the apartment units? When you actually see how this technology works, it does blow your mind. If you take a single property and you generate, when we say we're generating designs, you type in, we quite often tell you what the maximum height is, what the rules are, but you hit generate and you'll get by 50 designs within 20 seconds. Like it's instant that you're getting those designs. And if you talk about master plan projects,
You could select 300, 500 sites in a community or an area that you want to develop up and you can set those rules. And you're getting that entire master plan designed up within minutes. You could probably get through 10, 15 iterations in a day, fully detailed out with all the data behind it, all the metrics and all the understanding of what's possible.
Amy Villis (04:11)
As someone who has been involved in housing development, I've seen firsthand how complex architectural design can be. And when I first learned about Arcustar's approach to generative design, I was fascinated by how you could take an intricate process like creating designs that meet professional and regulatory standards. Every city has its own unique set of regulations, and translating those into actionable design parameters is no small feat. It's like solving a complex puzzle where creativity meets compliance.
The most exciting part is how your platform allows designers to explore possibilities within regulatory boundaries. It's not just about following the rules, but it's also about finding innovative solution that push limits of what is possible. I see this approach being a game changer for how we think about housing design and development. So what specific advantages does generative design apply to planning a master plan?
Ben Coorey (05:02)
You've got to think ahead and say, should we rezone things? What happens if we put apartment buildings here? What happens if we put medium or missing middle density here? And I think those questions that urban planners, that cities often ask themselves and test out, it's similar to architect design buildings. It's a bit of a manual process. You're drawing on maps. You're using GIS. You're trying to figure out what that looks like.
When you bring generative design into that, you're doing that in 3D and you're visualizing it and you're getting the information straight away. So if you've already got the rules for how these buildings should shape up, what's the distance between these buildings? What's the size of the units? You know, this is good design built in, but then you process that at the scale of a master plan. So you're saying, what does a thousand drawings look like? What does 2000 drawings look like? What does 5,000 drawings look like?
You know, you can start to test those immediately, run through simulations and understand, does this work environmentally? Does this stack up from a feasibility point of view? You know, are we getting good design here? Are we creating the community we want? And it's risk-free because you generate that and say, okay, that was interesting. Let's try this, you know? And I think it's that iterative process where you can use the power of the computation to generate.
a lot more than what you could do in the past. And that is super exciting. And we're very excited to work with Amalahat on their particular project, because it really brings it to an area where I think we can add a lot of value. Quite often at this master planning approach, you're dealing with maps and basic massing. And you don't get into 3D details. This is going into
the individual units of an apartment block, know, townhouses, just seeing it come to life on the screen. And all of those have got analysis built in. How much sunlight are these dwellings getting? Is there cross ventilation? What's the overshadowing looking like? You know, all of that's built in out of the box. So it's not just how quickly do we get the designs out.
It's actually the analysis is built in so that every one of these you can determine is this a good design? Can we do better? What's the performance? It's actually mind blowing how fast and how much you can do using this technology.
Amy Villis (07:37)
We've all seen great ideas come and go in this industry. They make a splash, they get everyone excited, and then they fizzle out. But what I'm really curious about is the long-term potential here. How are you envisioning this particular Malahat project not just as a cool one-off, but a scalable tool that can really transform the way we approach housing development? Can you walk us through how you're planning to harness this technology and scale it up for widespread use?
Ben Coorey (08:01)
I think what we've been able to demonstrate is that you can scale these systems. You know, this is the first project that we're doing in North America, which is super exciting. You can adapt that to anywhere, you know, across North America, across the world, you know, actually. So what you, what we find is that demonstrating something and showing, you know, a really good example of the workflow, how it works, it then opens the door and people can see, okay, that's how it works.
You know, this is how we do it. And if we can make that in a way that it's accessible and people can understand that workflow and then, you know, anyone else who wants to achieve that, they can then start to use that technology and do it. It's important that it's accessible and they're available to do that. So I believe, you know, off the back of this project, you're going to start to see and show people this is how you can start to plan out, you know, master plans.
This how you can start to tie that process. And this is the savings, not only in time, but also in the quality of those designs. Because we use this, did we get a better outcome than going a more traditional route? And we really want to start demonstrating that to show just how powerful the technology is, but also everyone's under a lot of pressure to deliver housing. If you look at it, everywhere around the world we're in a crisis, we need to know where to put this housing. And I think the more that we can push out that message around there are tools to help on this. It's complex. It's very difficult to achieve what we need to achieve without looking at technology. So this is a really good showcase that will allow that to scale out.
Amy Villis (09:44)
Where do think we're headed in the next like five, ten years? What are your thoughts?
Ben Coorey (09:49)
You know, when you look at how fast things like TadGPT and all of these LLMs are coming out onto the market, you know, the speed of evolution of technology, it's crazy. Like what you saw last month is already old. I think you're going to see massive leaps in how fast we progress. If you look at generative design in particular, think we're going to get smarter, more detailed already with this project. gives us the opportunity to go from concepts to detailed design. What can you include in that?
How does that link to MMC and offsite manufacturer and modular design? I really see that once you unlock that, you start to open up a marketplace and you start to say, well, if we can do this with one architect, can we do it with a hundred architects? Can we do it with a thousand architects? How do you bring that industry in so that you're going from, we just said like mom and dad, what can I do on my land? Imagine at the click of a button, you've got access through generative design to
a thousand architects that you can pump in and say, great, I like that. I want to work with Architect X or Designer X and we're working with cities. Can you go from, I want to do something to, I love this design. Hey, this is compliant. Let me fast track this for an application and great, that's ready. It's a modular design that I can order from Amazon.
And, you know, like it kind of feels like, you know, futuristic, but I don't think it is that futuristic. That process seems achievable.
Amy Villis (11:24)
Our next guest, Steve Jagger, is co-founder of Addy, an online investment platform that's been making significant strides in democratizing real estate investing. Addy's mission is to make real estate investments accessible to everyone through their innovative fractional ownership model.
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Amy Villis (12:08)
Let's talk about how Addy has changed the game when it comes to assessing and funding housing projects, potentially opening up new avenues for addressing our housing challenges. Steve, it's great to have you here. I'd love to dive in and hear more about Addy's platform and the fractional ownership model.
Steve Jagger (12:24)
The purpose of the platform is to eliminate barriers to entry so that everyone can participate in the ownership of institutional commercial grade real estate. You know, the challenge has always been when real estate developers or real estate operators are trying to build properties, there's a whole bunch of requirements that they need to work through to be able to even get started of digging the hole and building the building from...
financing the building, getting bank financing, getting pre-sales if it's condos, getting pre-sales sold so that you can get your bank financing. But a big chunk of this world is raising capital from investors who are willing and interested in taking the risk on being a part of and financing the development itself or the property development itself.
Amy Villis (13:10)
I've seen firsthand how real estate development funding traditionally works and it's quite a different ball game from what we're seeing with an innovative model like Addie's. In the past, developers would personally reach out to an accredited investor with a straightforward pitch. They'd say something like, hey, I've got these three houses on the street. We're going to tear them down and build a bunch of townhouses and we need an X amount of capital to make it happen. But those minimum investment thresholds were sky high focusing on those big checks rather than dealing with a crowd of small investors.
It makes sense from a management perspective, fewer investors meant less time and complexity in handling those relationships. But it also means fewer seats at the table. Addy's platform is opening doors for a whole new group of investors and potentially changing how we approach housing development financing.
Steve Jagger (13:56)
What we did was we built a platform that enables the real estate developer to be able to lower that minimum so that they could have more investors participate for smaller dollar amounts and as well as remove a lot of the headaches that they might have or perceive from having hundreds if not thousands of investors in an opportunity. So that's what we set out to do. We've had 53 opportunities come onto the platform thus far.
We enable these real estate developers to break down those issuances down. Instead of having a $250,000 flyce of a property, we break it down into $1 increments so that regular Canadians across the country can choose to participate and participate for an amount that is prudent for them. So it could be $5, $50, $5,000, whatever. Whatever makes sense to them. There's no minimum that they're trying to strive for, stretch their way into. And then on the sort of the software side of it.
We've built all the technology to enable the real estate developer to eliminate the headaches of, you know, they have to do tax slips every year for their investors. And so our software automates the T5s and the T5013s. We automate the movement of money, right? So there's no dealing with wires. We move money in and out of the platform in an automated fashion every day. Thousands of transactions for any size can come in and out of the platform. We've automated investor updates so that they can do an investor update to one to many.
All of those aspects, all the pain points that the developer would have as to why they wouldn't want a lot of investors, we've eliminated and or automated so that those challenges are not a challenge anymore.
Amy Villis (15:30)
Yeah, and I love the opportunity for I keep bringing it up, but the unlocking the currently unusable land. I formally, city of Vancouver developed social housing, and I would have a lot of faith based groups or associations that had land holdings that were just couldn't get enough capital, they don't qualify for any BC housing support. And they found themselves kind of going, well, we've got this church site, we have enough money to do the church, but we want to add housing units for rental for
our staff or our folks in our neighborhood, or any of the associations tend to have land holdings as well. And I see this as a great mechanism and a shout out to them to say, hey, Adi, what can you do for us? So if I was an organization, an association like the Teachers Association had a lot of land just on commercial drive and how they could develop it for their teachers in the community, could you maybe speak to how...
I was one of those organizations how I could participate with you.
Steve Jagger (16:31)
So there's kind of two ways that they could look at it. One is to do what we call a private issuance meeting. They're going to make their opportunity available to a community, like a specific community, not necessarily available to the whole attic community, just to that, know, union members from that union or employees from that employer or community members in these postal codes or First Nations members from this First Nations or church members from whatever. And so you can do that. The system.
gives you the ability to run a private issuance, make it available to a certain community and fund your property that way. Or you could choose to do sort of that plus open it up to the Addy community as well where the rest of Canada can choose to participate in the offering alongside of those specific community members. So we see this stuff all the time. We've got different groups that are reaching out.
where we've got hospital foundations working to build housing near the hospitals where they want to then rent those new units to the young or new people coming into the hospital system so that they can live near the hospital, walk to work, not have to have a massive commute. We see lots of municipalities that are really struggling, constantly in the news, struggling to keep their ERs open because they don't have a doctor working at night. So they close the ER because...
dive into really what's actually the problem, comes down to housing affordability. The doctors that they've hired actually don't live in that municipality, live in a different municipality. So a lot of it keeps coming back to housing affordability. so now with the technology that we've built, these groups, these organizations can choose to capitalize their projects in a different way and enabling the community to participate in it. Especially like the nonprofit world, like you mentioned, there's a lot of restrictions on what they can and cannot do and how the money can work.
And there are some neat ways now where you can enable a specific community to participate in the development of a real estate property.
Amy Villis (18:34)
Maybe if you could talk a little bit about the work that you're doing in Kelowna and I know you've got some connections in Mission as well around unlocking some of that gentle density, you know, missing middle typology of housing. Yeah.
Steve Jagger (18:47)
So it's pretty neat. I can't think of another time or even topic where all levels of government seem to be aligned on doing something. In this case, seems to be, know, BC government saying to municipalities, hey, like we want this gentle density, we want these multiplexes or infill housing built. So they've sort of made the framework for the province to be able to do that. The vast majority of municipalities are saying the same thing. And Kelowna, would think is...
is one of the outliers and they've not only embraced the policy, they've gone further and essentially pre-zoned 13,000 single-family lots in the city of Kelowna. The sewage is ready, the street is ready, like there's a whole bunch of things that are ready to go. You won't need to wait a long period of time if you wanted to develop some sort of multiplex or infill housing. And then they also went and
made a handful of designs that developers could use. So if you are the developer, buy one of these single family lots, you want to build a sixplex, you use one of the designs from the city of Kelowna, they'll give you a building permit in 10 days. And so they're really working to speed up the development of these sort of that gentle density, which is great. Like lots of the costs in these projects are city requirements. Like there's fees involved from all levels of government.
There's the development contributions, then there's the big time delays of waiting for approvals. Like all of that time really can kill a project, make it too expensive, make it too risky so that the developer chooses not to do it at all because you're waiting too long. And so Colonus done a really good job of sort of saying, hey, we're ready for this. We want to do it.
Amy Villis (20:27)
Where do you see the innovation, whether it's digital technologies or not, moving in the next five to 10 years in your space? Like, what are you excited to see and grow into?
Steve Jagger (20:37)
Now we're starting to see the AI world come into it where this artificial intelligence can be really effective and really helpful in making platforms, making employees more bionic, just giving them more power and more sort of assistance in doing what they do. And so we're building functionality into the platform. We're starting with the tools around due diligence, enabling a real estate operator or developer when they're...
doing their due diligence on a property, there's a million things that go on and you can start to use AI now to chomp through these documents, chomp through the details, look for those anomalies and help the team who's doing the due diligence just make them bigger, better, faster.
Amy Villis (21:19)
I'd like to thank my guests, Ben and Steven, for their insights and their time today. As we've seen, innovation and AI-driven planning and new financial models are transforming the due diligence phase of housing development. These advancements are helping developers answer the critical question, is this project feasible? And more quickly and accurately than ever before, potentially saving years of time and millions of dollars in the process.
In our next episode, we'll be moving further along the end-to-end framework to explore the design and engineering phase. We'll examine how new technologies are tackling activities such as detailed architectural and engineering designs for mass timber and middle density ecosystems. Join us as we continue to uncover how technology is reshaping each stage of the housing production, bring us closer to more efficient, sustainable and affordable housing solutions for British Columbia.
Thank you for your time and especially for being interested. This podcast is just one way digital and folks you hear in these episodes are working together to accelerate housing production and position British Columbia as a leader in housing innovation. But there is so much more that we're doing. Digital's Housing Growth Innovation Program invests in mission-driven projects targeting key housing issues, as well as encouraging collaboration and information sharing through workshops, events, and more. We'd love to hear from you. Reach out through our website at housing.digitalsupercluster.org.
for more information. This podcast and Digital's Housing Growth Innovation Program are made possible with the financial support of the province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs.