Today is Thursday March 24, 2016. This is the 12th episode of the Marshall Report. Welcome to the Podcast.
In this episode:
1. Spring real estate
2. A question from a realtor
3. Great news for cyclists
4. Places to grow in Ontario
5. Commuting
6. Sleeping in a tree
7. Average real estate prices
8. Ketchup
9. Rule #100
10. Cats
Spring real estate and the pent up demand
With real estate, we never know exactly what is going to happen. I try to spot trends. I read and write about real estate everyday, publish what I’ve learned once or twice a week, podcast weekly now too, but even with all that I’m often surprised. Since my last podcast two things happened that tell me that the market is a little nutty right now.
The first, I listed and sold a two bedroom condo in one day. At the seller’s suggestion, we listed it for $10,000 more than the comparable sales and history indicated we should have. But it sold, just like that. Boom. Gone.
The second, I saw what I thought was an ok property, priced right. My client put in an offer right away but we ended up competing with 3 or 4 other offers and losing out, even though we offered several thousand dollars over asking price $10,000 over asking price to be exact.
I’ve noticed through free home evaluations and listing presentations that the average seller wants to price his home $10,000 too high. Maybe that’s not true anymore.
Spring is here now. Maybe we will get a lot of new listings to satisfy all this pent up buyer demand.
Some updates since last week:
Last week I was talking about CaliBurger, the new high-tech gourmet burger place in Waterloo. One of my favourite food bloggers wrote about it. Here’s a link.
Last week, I was also talking about all of the ATM thefts in the area. Here’s a link to the map.
Last week, I was talking about the shadowy side of real estate and receiving unsolicited offers to buy your home. Guess what. I got one on a house I have for sale on Dietz. It says,
“we are currently working with a buyer who’s been unable to find a home in your area. Your home has many of the features our buyer finds desirable. If you have any interest in selling your home, we would be more than happy to arrange a one-party showing of your property.”
This looks legitimate to me. There is only one problem. The house is already currently for sale.
Weird. Here is a picture of that letter
Question of the week:
I got an email from a realtor I know. He said,
“a client of mine was searching on her own for homes, and sent me a listing, dumbfounded why I didn’t send it to her. So I go on Matrix (that’s our realtor platform – the back end of the MLS) and can’t find it in anywhere. I finally figured that it was not on our local system as it was probably entered on TREB without the Connect option.
Just to show you how great some agents are and how well they serve their clients. But more importantly, it makes our job even harder as we now need to monitor public MLS sites to see all the listings or risk appearing like we are out of touch within our area of expertise. How do you explain to your client why she can find a ‘perfect’ listing but you can’t? “
I love this question.
In the old days, Realtors were the gatekeepers to information. Over several decades, we built the MLS and we fought and are still fighting to keep it ours. But the world has changed and information about homes for sale is in a lot of other places now too, but those other places are mostly other local real estate boards. That’s where most of the information about real estate for sale starts. So what happens, an agent in Toronto lists a home for sale in Kitchener. He has to list it on his home board, one of the arcane rules about real estate, but he fails to list it on the local board. So now it does not appear on the local realtors’s radar and as we don’t go to realtor.ca that’s the consumer facing site, we don’t see it.
But clients see it. Shopping online for homes is a hobby enjoyed by many. It is actually like an addiction for some us. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a 12-step program out there somewhere which weens people off of this.
Anyway, to answer the question, I always tell my clients that realtors are no longer the gatekeepers to the MLS. I know that my clients are going to continue searching on their own and I encourage this. If you ever google a home for sale on your street, you will see how much information comes up. The house listing comes up on: realtor.ca, many brokerage websites including but not limited to the brokerage with the sign on the front lawn, other real estate portals, kijiji advertisements, directories, online real estate publications, blog posts, Google+ posts, youtube videos, virtual tours…the info is fragmented and that I tell my clients that they should continue doing whatever they’ve been doing.
I tell them, “We are no longer gatekeepers. We are now sherpas.”
When I hear, “I found the house, not my realtor”, I say. “Hey buddy, you’re behaving like it’s 1999.”
As an aside. If it was 1999, I would be buying as much Toronto real estate as I could. Just saying.
What’s NEW in KW?
Great news for cyclists
The province has pledged nearly $1million dollars to the region to improve bike paths. The stipulation for getting this $1million dollars is that the municipalities must match it. That means we are getting $2million dollars put into improving our local bike paths.
I’m a big fan of the Iron Horse Trail. I can hardly wait to get out on my bike. Now that spring is here, that should be soon.
The Spur Line Trail – our newest bike trail, is looking good too.
A place to stand. A place to grow.
When we first moved back to Canada and to Waterloo Region, we would marvel as we drove through the local countryside at the rolling hills and the farms and sheer beauty of the rural Ontario right on our doorstep. It’s beautiful.
It’s beautiful, but personally, I hate the country. I could never live there. It is too inconvenient. I could never live in Wellesley or St Clements. I’m urban and KW is just big enough for me. Actually it is the perfect size to live and raise a family and that’s why we chose it 16 years ago.
There was a story in the news last week about growth in the the towns and villages on the outskirts of Kitchener Waterloo. The problem isn’t growth but surprisingly the lack of growth. According to the newspaper story:
In 2005, the province of Ontario introduced the Places to Grow Act. The legislation emphasizes intensification in city cores and the protection of rural countryside, a philosophy supported by many rural and urban residents.
It reinforces a long-held policy of the Region of Waterloo to restrict growth in the villages to protect agricultural land but also because extending sewer and water services would be too costly.
But the unfortunate consequence is that villages like St. Clements are mostly limited to growth in their existing small cores.
According to Statistics Canada, nearly a third of the community’s population packed up and left between 2006 and 2011.
The population dropped from about 1,792 to 1,261.
During the same period, the number of residents in the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo census metropolitan area and Ontario’s population increased about six per cent each.
One of the factors driving the exodus is a shortage of homes and no room to build more.
Thats interesting and unexpected.
Commuting
It is well-known that a lot of people are moving to Waterloo Region from Toronto. They are also moving to Hamilton, Aurora, Guelph, Georgetown and Whitby, to name a few.
Many are moving so that they can buy a home, and raise a family in a nice and quiet community. Toronto homes are simply too expensive for many people. If you can’t afford to buy a home for $1million in Toronto, maybe you can buy one for $350,000 in Kitchener.
What this move to the communities outside of Toronto suburbs means for many is commuting into the GTA.
There was a story in the Globe and Mail last week stating that cost of commuting from these outside communities is only about $3,000 a year. And if you can save $300,000 on a home, in terms of money at least, that is pretty great. It will take you 100 years to spend what you save on a house on commuting costs.
Of course, there is time. Time is money. You are going to lose 2, 3 or 4 hours a day with commuting. I did it for less than a year and it was exhausting. But that was more than a decade ago when we didn’t have podcasts, the GoTrain option and when working remotely was not really considered to be working at all.
I meet lots of people who move here and commute for at least for a short time before becoming a full-time Waterloo Region resident.
I love big cities, but I also think it is so worth it, once you have kids to settle down in a community like ours. If you have to commute for a few months or years, I think its worth it.
Missing the obvious.
This is a captured thought.
When I was backpacking around Australia many years ago, I met a guy who lived in a tree. He was a backpacker just like me but he had it all figured out. He said people never look up and he had a bright red hammock high up in the trees in a Sydney park. He climbed up every night and slept, free rent.
I’m not suggesting that we live in trees.
The point of this story is to look up. Look around. You might be missing something obvious.
Averages continue to go up
The Canadian Real Estate Association last week told us that the average home in Canada now costs over half a million dollars.
In Canada, in February, prices were up 16 percent from the same month a year ago. Toronto and Vancouver are driving much of those numbers but here in KW, we are on trend and ahead of the Ontario average for price increases.
For the record, the average price of a single detached home in KW is about $400,000
And here is an interesting statistic, when you take the GTA and Lower Mainland are out of the statistics, the average Canadian home price is $355,235, not over $500,000. That makes Kitchener Waterloo pretty much average.
Ketchup
Last week you might have heard was a bit of ketchup social media mini-war. It happened when Loblaws, citing low sales, stopped stocking a certain line of French’s ketchup.
Who cares right? Do any of us have French’s ketchup in our fridges. I don’t.
Well, social media cares, because French’s was believed to be produced in Ontario. It’s not. It’s produced in Ohio. And Loblaws did not stop stocking all of French’s ketchup. It only stopped stocking the regular flavour ketchup.
But a facebook post went viral and we all lined up behind it without knowing the truth. It is the power of social media, an unchecked power.
Call to action: Rule #100
This week’s call to action is to be nice to your neighbours. That is actually Rule #100 of my 365 Rules about Real Estate. Being nice to your neighbours doesn’t cost you anything but will benefit you somehow, sometime in the future.
Parting thought
I’ll leave you with this parting thought: All cats look grey in the dark.
