You may have seen this new billboard if you were cruising around Spadina Ave and Queen St W after May 17th. As sarcastic as it is, having your parents help you with entering the real estate market is the new norm, particularly here in Toronto. Wealth is beginning to shift generationally as parents help their children with down payments and, in some cases, even paying the mortgage.
Covid-19 has affected every aspect of what was once our normal lives. Across the world, the pandemic has reshaped the attitudes and habits of everyone in their personal, professional and public lives. The real estate market is no different and many young Canadians have reassessed and re-evaluated their approach to home ownership.
In continuation of our coverage of the election topic of housing in Canada, the Green Party’s platform for housing has a major focus on affordability and addressing the homelessness crises across Canada. Beginning with the basic premise that adequate housing is a fundamental right, the Green Party proposes a bold platform that is quite different from the main parties’ platforms.
The dream of home ownership has been slipping further and further away for many Canadians. It was once a rule of thumb to aim for a home that was roughly priced less than or equal to four times your annual income. However, with skyrocketing home prices and property values, this is an incredibly outdated rule.
The Canadian Real Estate Association recently released the white paper, titled The Homeownership Dividend for Canadians which details the benefits of homeownership beyond only financial advantages by studying and collecting data from across Canada, the USA, Europe and many other places in the world. The results are not surprising. The benefits and advantages of home ownership go beyond finance, particularly for lower and middle income families and households and this phenomenon exists across the world.
Toronto’s real estate market has been characterized by its intense competition, lack of supply and soaring prices. The pandemic has further exacerbated the market, pushing more and more buyers out. Millennials and younger Canadians, seniors and those on fixed incomes, and young families without the luxury of generational wealth are feeling the brunt of such a market.
OSFI has proposed new changes to the mortgage stress test in an effort to cool an overheated real estate market. Markets such as Toronto and Vancouver have been exploding over the past twelve months despite the pandemic. It brings the question of whether this will have the desired effect or will simply be a temporary solution to an ongoing problem.
Selling your home is a lot of things: exciting, stressful, rewarding and a lot of hard work. Getting your home ready for sale is something that all sellers need to be prepared for and every house has a different level of intensity in this endeavour. You want your home to be absolutely stunning to wow potential buyers as well as get your desired sale price. Home improvements can be a great way to achieve this but sellers beware, there are many pitfalls when it comes to these renovations for your soon-to-be sold home. If you’re not careful, you may find you cost yourself more on improvements than adding value to your home. Here are 6 home improvements you’ll probably want to avoid when preparing your home for sale.
Competition has been a defining trend in Toronto’s real estate market for decades now. The supply is never enough for the constant demand for housing. As we’ve mentioned many times before, this has driven the prices in Toronto sky high forcing even fiercer competition and regular bidding wars on many properties. With so many buyers vying for their new home, it’s common to lose on offer night. An occurrence that often repeats for many buyers. How is it possible to stay positive in such a fierce and competitive market?
Cohousing is a fantastic opportunity for young families to grow and live in a beautiful close-knit community. For children, it can be a fantastic place to make easy friends and develop their social skills as they age. There’s plenty of benefits for kids and young families in cohousing that we’ve come up with today.
December 2020 marks the closing of an unprecedented and unpredictable year. Despite the global pandemic, competition for residential real estate is still as heated as ever in Toronto and the wider Ontario markets. Today we decided to have a look at Ontario’s different real estate markets and see how 2020 fared amidst a tumultuous and challenging year.
We are experiencing a transitional time not just in real estate and the workplace but in a broader cultural paradigm. A metamorphosis of sorts. It’s hard to predict what our landscape will look like at the end of all this as it is unlikely to go back to what we perceived as normal. As we look to the future, we can only speculate what the new normal will be.
Single family homes are a treasured and coveted staple in Toronto’s real estate market. Not only are they a popular abode for families, they are also in massive demand for their investment potential. With high demand, comes high price. Prices for single family homes have continued to skyrocket in Toronto despite the negative aspects that such homes bring. In this article, we’ll go through the rise of the single family home and why, perhaps, it's time for a change.
The process of co-ownership in real estate can be complicated. When it comes to multiple owners who don’t have previous relationships, there can be perceived difficulties when it comes to the legal arrangement of the living situation. In general, the two legal arrangements that are often chosen in real estate are tenants-in-common and joint tenancy. In this article we will discuss these two arrangements and explain why tenants-in-common should be your choice for a co-ownership arrangement.
Social isolation is becoming one of the most prominent issues facing today’s Canadian seniors. Canada’s population over 65 years of age has exceeded 6 million and is projected to exceed 9.5 million by 2030. In 2016, the number of people over 65 exceeded the number under 15 years of age. As one of the fastest-growing demographics in Canada, seniors face a number of issues that need to be addressed both now and in the future in order to succeed in attaining a satisfactory quality of life. The question is, how can we prevent social isolation from impacting seniors’ quality of life?
Partnering with Picnic Design, we have a look at some architectural designs for co-ownership homes. One of the great things about co-ownership and cooperative real estate is that there is no single cookie-cutter house. Co-ownership allows you to tailor your home and dwellings to your own desires. Whether you want a single-family home, a multi-residential building or prefer a building where you can make drastic renovations, you can make it work for co-ownership.
Toronto is at a pivotal point in the year 2020. Actions and policies over the next decade will shape the city. The success or failure by 2030 will depend on how we tackle workforce housing. In this article, we’ll take a look at workforce housing, why it is such a contentious issue and what can be done to ensure Toronto will succeed in the future.
