Today is March 3rd, 2016. This is the ninth episode of The Marshall Report. Welcome to the podcast.
In this episode:
1. More than 100 downloads and a podcast correction
2. Good neighbourhoods for investment
3. Northfield Landing and the new Sobey’s
4. A glut of student housing units
5. House styles
6. Living in a foreign country
7. Canada’s housing performance since 1984.
8. An urban legend
9. A call to action
10. Nautical adventure
100+ downloads
I don’t know if this is good or not, but it is kind of exciting. I have had more than 100 downloads of this podcast so far. 122 to be exact.
It reminds me of the early days of blogging, when I would get a comment. I’d be so thrilled, thrilled to know that someone had read what I have written.
With podcasting, for me at least, it is new and fun and unknown.
And I’m podcasting because these are things I want to talk about, things going on in real estate, in Kitchener Waterloo and in my life, but not worthy of a full three, five, eight hundred word blog post.
ELFS
I received the following text from a podcast listener.
I saw your blog/podcast thingy. Good stuff as always. Thought you might want to know that elfs are standard terminology in Toronto. Almost every listing has them. Stands for electric light fixtures. Wasn’t sure if you know that and wanted to make a joke or it it is not common around KW to use the term. In any case, I though you might want to know.
Well, I didn’t know. But now we all know.
Seems kind of funny though. Where the average price of a home in Toronto is about a million dollars, buyers have to specify that the sellers can’t swap out $100 lights for something cheaper.
Postcards
I got another postcard from another realtor.
This one says, “Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation”.
That’s a quote from Seneca, a Roman Philosopher, statesman and all around good guy, deep thinker and pontificator. If he was alive today, I’m sure he would enjoy seeing his deep thoughts next to a door knob.
In the mail, I also got a coupon for a pulled pork sandwich, a brochure for a tax preparation place and a flyer for a factory authorized clear out of a foreign model of car.
Good Investment neighbourhoods
I got a note sent to me over the chat widget. When the widget is on, it pops up and asks if you want to chat. When it is not on, it just sits there at the bottom passively asking to ‘Chat now’. Pop that up and I get an email. Anyway, this is it:
Hello,
The Real Estate Wealth Magazine has Kitchener Northeast as a good investment neighbourhood. Any inside why?
Thank you
Kitchener northeast
For those of you outside the Region of Waterloo and for many of us here, north, east, south, west, are confusing and often ambiguous directional aids. So we are starting off with bad markers for this question.
The second part of the problem is Kitchener Waterloo. Where does Kitchener end and Waterloo begin? I sold a house a few years ago on Mary Street in the lovely Mary Allen neighbourhood. The home was in Kitchener, except for about 300 square feet in the corner of the backyard. Every year, the owners got a municipal tax bill from the City of Waterloo for $17 (or something like that).
But let’s say for the benefit of Real Estate Wealth Magazine that Kitchener northeast is the North Ward. What we call the North Ward is north of Victoria, east of King. King and Victoria is really ground zero for the new and quickly improving KW. If this is Kitchener’s northeast, It includes: Google, the Go Train, a major hub for the LRT, the intermodal transportation hub, which was in the newspaper last week. If this is Kitchener’s northeast, then it is midtown the natural place for much of Waterloo Region’s development to happen. Kitchener downtown and Waterloo UpTown, like a Venn Diagram, will merge into one and here is where that will happen.
So far, beside Google, we have the Midtown Lofts, One Victoria, and Victoria Commons all developing in this area. I’m sure there is more to come.
Northfield Sobey’s
I visited the new Sobey’s on Northfield.
I was up that way delivering a status certificate to a lawyer and I, on impulse, stopped in to have a look.
The old Sobey’s across the street must have started out as something else. It had an awkward design. The new Sobey’s is fabulous. I bought some bread and bananas and for the novelty of it, a few cans of beer. I don’t usually drink beer in the winter, but I couldn’t resist. It is the first place I’ve seen beer for sale in an Ontario grocery store. What we they think of next? Home delivery from the LCBO?
So I mention this not only because of the novelty and newness but because I think this area is a great great place to buy real estate. It has all of the important influencers: near shopping (Conestoga Mall, Sobey’s, St Jacobs Weekend Market), Transportation (Conesgota Parkway, LRT.), nice mature neighbourhood with tree lined streets, houses on large lots, good schools, near amenities like library and rec centre) It’s a good one folks. Northfield.
Glut of student housing
Remember last week how I was going on about Toronto area investors building and buying all the student condo units around the University? Well, there was a story in our own Waterloo Region Record saying that it is even worse than we think.
According to Colliers International,
Currently, there is an oversupply of nearly 1,200 beds, but when new developments that are in the works are included, the surplus increases to 8,321 beds
The report also says that
the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University and Conestoga College are forecasting low single-digit growth in enrolment
And with so many projects in the works the article says
When those buildings are completed, the supply of beds will overshoot the market by 20 per cent.
House styles
If you’ve ever wondered how house styles have changed over the years or what the difference is between Colonial Style and Victorian Style or what Renaissance Revival vs Spanish Revival looks like, not to mention Cape Cod, Tudor or Craftsman, Mental Floss recently published a great graphic of house styles put together by pop chart labs.
Living abroad
My daughter is in Taiwan for six months. She took a semester out of Laurier and joined an internship of some kind. My daughters were both born in taiwan, but we moved back to Canada when they were of school age. Anyway, she sent a picture from our old neighbourhood the other day and I’m feeling nostalgic.
I was reading an article about an American living in Finland. I think everyone should live abroad for a few years. It changes the way you think about things. It makes you question, why we do things the way we do them. This American living in Finland learned that we make small talk to fill the silences. The Finns are ok with enjoying the silences. If you work in an office, we like to greet our coworkers or at least acknowledge them everytime we see them during the day. For the Finns, one ‘hello’ in the morning is enough. Also, we say things like, ‘we should get together’ when we don’t really mean it. People in Finland would never do that.
I lived in Taiwan for about ten years and although I adapted to new situations and routines and learned to enjoy new comforts, living abroad gives you a new appreciation for everything — things that you wouldn’t usually notice or pay attention to. Living in another country is like living in a parallel universe, things are the same but different and that’s a lot of fun.
I work with a lot of different people from a lot of different countries and I always enjoy what I learn through them. China and Hong Kong, Venezuela, Equator, the USA, Oman, Kuwait, Egypt, Vietnam, Russia and Ukraine are some of the countries my present or past clients have come from.
Canada’s housing performance
Since this is a leap year, the people over at the Huffington Post thought it would be fun to examine Canadian Home Price growth using four-year intervals. The results are telling. These four-year windows show some staggering appreciation.
From 1988 1992 the average price of home in Canada increased by 16%. They increased by only 1% between ’92 and ’96 and then by 9% between ’96 and the year 2000.
Then things get interesting.
38% 2000-2004
34% 2004-2008
Prices slowed down between ’08 to 2012. They grew by only 19% and finally 21% between 2012 to 2016.
It is important to note that in every four-year period since 1984, prices have gone up. It is important to take inflation and other factors into effect. But, a house that costed $76,000 in 1984, today costs $442,264. That is kind of staggering.
Dressing for success
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about this next story. You know how I love the audacity of scams. I don’t admire the culprits or condone their bad behaviour but I do admire their audacity.
So here it is. A thief dresses as a Walmart worker and walks out the door with four HDTVs. That’s audacious. Four. They caught him, but only on surveillance video. He loaded them into his minivan and drove away.
This reminds me of that old urban legend about the guys who walked out of a K-Mart with a canoe. They got caught when they came back for the paddles.
Buy and wait
This week’s call to action is ‘don’t wait to buy real estate, buy real estate and wait’. You saw in that story above that since 1984, every four-year period saw an increase in the average home price, sometimes by more than 30%.
I’ve been a realtor a long time now and I still sometimes hear people say, “I’m going to wait until prices go down before I buy”.
I wonder when that will be. One of my 365 Rules about Real Estate is that you cannot time the market.
A nautical analogy
I will leave you with this thought.
We get it wrong sometimes. Realtors list houses at the wrong price all the time. Correctly pricing a home is really very difficult. There are lots of factors to consider. What’s on the market? What recently sold? What’s happening in the local economy? We do our best, but…there are sometimes just too many factors.
And some homebuyers use the list price as an anchor. That is not right.
List price is not an anchor.
List price is not a life raft.
List price is the night sky when you are alone on the high sea
A glimpse of the shoreline is much more useful than the list price.
