Affordable Kitchener, Suing your builder and Salt. This is the Marshall Report

marshall report

Kitchener in Top 10 Affordable Canadian cities

According to the recently published Desjardins Affordability Index, Kitchener, along with Kingston, Windsor, Montreal and Thunder Bay and five other Canadian cities are considered “affordable”, in terms of the financial capacity of a household to purchase a home. That’s good news for our local housing market, for both buyers and sellers.

Across Canada, the average home price has increased 5.3% since last year, much of this in the big Toronto and Vancouver markets. House prices are up in KW as well. Average sale price was up 7.1% in October and 7.7% in September.

 

What do you do if the developer is late?

You have initialed and signed 50 pages of “builder forms”, given your deposit, waited four or nine months for the builder to deliver your beautiful new unit. You have talked to your lender, your lawyer, your realtor and everything on your side is ready to go. But the developer delays, he delays again. Your move in date has been pushed into the future and now you have to scramble to find a place to live.

What is your recourse?

One student recently took Schembri Property Management to the Landlord and Tenant Board, and won.

The board determined that Schembri collected or retained deposits “in a manner that contravened the Residential Tenancies Act,” adding that the company “did not give vacant possession of the rental unit to the Tenant and is not entitled to retain the deposits.”

Unfortunately, this is a “default judgement”. The paralegal was unable to attend. The developer will be appealing.

 

Winter salt and cozy slippers

Last winter was long and cold. Remember the ice storm at Christmas time? Remember the snow in April? It was a tough winter.

In the average winter, the city of Kitchener spreads about 15,000 tonnes of road salt. Last year it spread 21,000. Waterloo and Cambridge were similar.

We are into the middle of November now and as sweaters and cozy slippers are on my mind, the municipalities are stocking up on salt.

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