-
How to Downsize Your Home and Upsize Your Income.
I had a great conversation with clients recently who were planning for their retirement. We chatted about their timelines and ways of planning in advance to set things up for their future. This ranged from selling their existing home and renting or buying, weighing the benefits of homeownership or getting out of the housing market…
|
-
Real Estate Hacks- Increasing value by $50,000
Is it possible to increase your home value by up to $50,000 by investing as little as $5,000? Let’s take a look and see if it is possible. I have narrowed down a few items that Buyers will pay for when they are looking at resale homes, but first how about we tour a model…
|
-
How Low Can Mortgage Rates Go?
Another month, another Bank of Canada rate drop. Unless you missed it, the rates were cut by ¼% last week. This followed a rate reduction last month, adding to a drop of ½%. The impact of these two rate cuts will reduce a $100,000 variable rate mortgage by $28/month. This may not seem like a…
|
-
How Big of a Deal is a 1/4% Rate Cut?
Let’s be frank – given the fact that rates jumped about 6% in 10 increases, how much will a ¼ or 1/2% rate cut do for Real Estate Buyers and Sellers? In a nutshell…. a lot! If we look at the average home in Oshawa, Whitby and Clarington and given the average selling prices, we…
|
-
Show Me the Money
It seems like chat around the office water cooler or photocopier always seems to revolve around Real Estate. A question that commonly comes up is that given the state of our economy in Canada, “Where is all of the money coming from for people to buy houses?” Mortgage, loans and lines of credit rates are…
|
-
Homes in Durham Region — Where are the Buyers Coming From?
It has been 3 weeks since the Bank of Canada decreased their lending rate by ¼ percent and thought it would be a good exercise to see how the market has reacted. From Whitby to Clarington there are currently 888 detached homes for sale. At the beginning of June, the inventory was 725, an increase…
|
-
What Upgrades Pay off?
I met with 2 groups last week, one a potential Seller and the other a Buyer I had been working with. After meeting with them, I reflected on how different the two experiences were when it came to valuing Real Estate. The first was a Buyer who I had been working with for the past…
|
-
Has $599,900 become the most common asking price in Oshawa?
Yes, we appear to be heading back “there.” “Where?” you ask…. Well back to the craziness of placing homes on the market at ridiculous low prices and having Buyers bid the prices up. In the past 10 days there have been 50 homes sold in Oshawa. Of those homes sold, 9 were listed under $700,000…
|
-
Durham Region Real Estate Rental Report
I spend much of my time reading reports on Real Estate and most articles and blog posts discuss Buyers, Sellers and the state of the market as it relates to mortgage rates. What I rarely see is information about how the rental market is doing in Durham Region. I thought it would be worthwhile to…
|
-
Are we in a Buyer’s Market or a Seller’s Market?
I had a conversation with a newer agent over the weekend who did their best to convince me that we are in a full-on Buyer’s market. The number of homes for sale is up, prices are flat, and the selling times have increased. I simply nodded thinking to myself, “this agent may have never seen a true Buyer’s market.”…
|