With the kids back to school, and the social media deluge of first day photos mercifully over (who started that trend anyway?), we are entering the time of the year when the real estate market typically awakens after the sleepy summer months. I stress typically because recent times have been anything but atypical, but I’m writing this entry with an eye on both the past 12 months and the 12 months to come. Looking both ways is making me dizzy, [...]
Some quick cuts and random thoughts from the cottage dock, as we sit in the dog days of August with the Fall market and sub zero temperature rapidly looming. The Real Estate Market Has Hit Rock Bottom Like the hopeless alcoholic chugging cough syrup at 7 am in the Shoppers Drug Mart parking lot, I believe the real estate market has hit rock bottom. The average GTA price came in at $1.074,000 for July, down from the peak of $1,334,000 [...]
For most of the past decade, real estate stories on the sale side have been nothing but an endless party. Wild tales of out of control bidding wars, sales stratospherically over the asking price, houses selling within an hour, and 20 plus offers on even the shittiest of properties. 2022 rolled in and the party raged on, only weekend long bender harder. We were drinking it up and boy did it taste good. The Ides of March brought record prices. [...]
In life we spend so much time, effort and mental real estate chasing elusive “opportunities”. Some opportunities are relatively easy to identify and define - think of a career advancement or promotion, or an athlete getting called up to the big team. Other opportunities are much more elusive, or “unicorn like”. Think of hitting on the next big crypto project, or the Chess Club Captain scoring with the Prom Queen in high school. Without a doubt, however, the biggest “unicorn” [...]
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” - William Shakespeare. I’ve always been fascinated by names, for as long as I can remember. More specifically, bad or funny names, certainly not ones that smell like a rose. I still laugh out loud at the scene from The Wedding Singer where Drew Barrymore realizes her married name will be Julia Gulia, and her tool of a fiance can’t see why [...]
“Wrong way on a one-way track.” - The legendary Soul Asylum. One of the most surprising developments of the Pandemic has been the unstoppable price growth of GTA real estate. Imagine fire on a gasoline trail with some kerosene thrown in for good measure, and that’s how fast prices have gone up. With the benefit of hindsight we now know why and how we got here, but I can tell you that on the ground level this unprecedented price growth [...]
In this entry I want to explore one of the more treacly, and in some instances controversial, practices in real estate. I’m referring, of course, to the good old letter to the seller from the hopeful buyer. These letters almost always are essentially the same (and I’ve read dozens of them). A nice couple gives a bit of background information about themselves and their jobs, rave about how much they love the house, and then conclude by saying how excited [...]
“The best fighter is never angry.” - Lao Tzu “Do or do not. There is no try.” - Yoda 2021 wasn’t kind on many levels, and that was particularly evident if you were attempting to buy real estate in the GTA. It often resembled a piece of meat being dropped into a loaded piranha tank, a frothing stew of blood and guts. That’s what happens when you put 10 people in a bar with only a single beer available. It [...]
I was going through some of my old blog archives the other day, and I came across an entry from September of 2016 that caught my eye. Entitled “Holy Bungalow!!”, it detailed the meteoric rise in sale prices of bungalows on Lankin Ave in East York. I had made this the topic of a blog at the time because we had just had a hugely successful sale on the street, and to top it off the sale was for the [...]
Dearest Mr. Debt, You have been with me as long as I can remember. Even though my parents gave you the cold shoulder, let’s just consider it a generational diss. You will always have a special place in my heart. At first things were rocky between us. We were first introduced in my early twenties when I obtained my first credit card, to embark on a career playing online blackjack. Things turned out as badly as could have have been [...]