Toronto Real Estate and Neighbourhoods Blog | Move Smartly

How Important is Parking to Toronto Condo Buyers?

John Pasalis in Toronto Real Estate News

There were a couple of interesting stories in the press yesterday.  The Toronto Star reported on a TD survey that found 71% of condo buyers would not buy a particular condo if it had no parking.  In contrast, the National Post reported that "young condo dwellers are ditching their cars to spend more on the finer things in life"

So which is it?  Are condo buyers still insisting on a parking spot or are they ditching their cars for the finer things.  My personal experience has been that many buyers are more willing to part ways with their cars.  Services like Autoshare and Zipcar have made living car free much easier.

What are your thoughts?  Would parking be a deal breaker for you or your clients?

John Pasalis is a sales associate at Prudential Properties Plus in Toronto and a founder of Realosophy. Email John

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Media Roundup - May 9th

Media Roundup

Canadian construction declines in March

New transit lines will drive house prices

Past condo sales shore up sagging housing starts

Developers decry 'alarming' fees for new condos, houses

Podcast: Are condos the answer, or a recipe for disaster?

Forest Hill mansion sells for $2M over asking price

Almost 39% would own condos purely as an investment: poll

Economy shows further signs of cooling

Is there a rocky road ahead?

Addicted to that Toronto real estate porn

In some neighbourhoods, Toronto's real estate market is as hot as ever

Trinity Bellwoods

Jesse Fleming in Toronto Neighbourhoods   

A friend of mine named her dog after it.  Former Sault St. Marie band Treble Charger wrote a song about it.  The neighbourhood of Trinity Bellwoods seems to leave an imprint on those who reside and spend their leisure time within its borders (check out Realosophy’s neighbourhood profile for housing and school stats).  One fine day I decided to visit the area that Toronto Life referred to as “the epicentre of Toronto cool”, hopped on the 63 Ossington bus and headed into Trinity Bellwoods.

Toronto’s Gallery District runs the stretch of Queen Street West beginning west of Ossington Avenue and continues roughly to Trinity Bellwoods Park.  Art galleries and showrooms, including the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, line this leg of Queen West; the MOCCA is situated beside Robert Burley’s impressive building-side mural.  The city’s Fashion District continues along the eastern leg of Queen West, up to and beyond Bathurst Street, Trinity Bellwoods’ eastern boundary.  Independent restaurants and cafes, along with varied retail amenities, dapple Queen West; however, I could not resist the siren song of Starbucks at the corner of Claremont and Queen.

Title Insurance Won’t Always Protect You

Rachel Loizos in Legal

I will relay a sad story about how a home buyer got swindled by an unethical vendor in a resale transaction in the City of Toronto recently.  In August of 2007, a purchaser closed a real estate transaction and bought a very cute little bungalow in the east end of the city.  Unfortunately, the vendor did not pay the water bill.  The arrears did not show up on a search and the fact that the account was overdue was only discovered after the transaction closed.

At the request of the bank, the purchaser was required to get title insurance and did.  The policy of title insurance stated that it would cover water arrears, but ONLY if they were the kind of arrears that would be revealed by a search.  Unfortunately for our purchaser, these were the kind of arrears that are not revealed by a search, and thus not eligible for compensation under the policy.

Water arrears, like tax arrears, will be registered as a lien against the property – meaning that the unsuspecting purchaser foots the bill when the unscrupulous vendor flees. 

Certainly small claims court is an option, but it will be difficult to collect the funds even if the purchaser is successful in their suit because the vendor has moved to another country.

This story made me particularly annoyed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that when you use someone's utilities without paying for them it is called stealing, plain and simple, and I have no tolerance for it.

The moral of the story?  If you are purchasing property being sold under a power of attorney, protect yourself and ask your agent to insert a clause allowing for a reasonable holdback for utilities.  The same can be said if you know the vendor intends to move to another province or country following the closing.  Unfortunately, there is no way to ensure you will find out and it is almost impossible to collect these funds after closing.  Truly, buyer beware.

Rachel Loizos is an associate lawyer at Sotos LLP in Toronto. She practices in the area of real estate law.
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Related Post:

Why Home Buyers Need Title Insurance

Violence and the City: Toronto the Helpless?

Urmi Desai in Urban Issues

It seems that a week in Toronto is no longer complete without that criminal act which appears to define the word ‘senseless’ as we understand it: the mundane day at the store or walk to the subway punctuated by the violence of strangers.

Yet in spite of the headlines, Maclean’s recent Canadian crime rankings (based on 2006 Stats Can data) underscore what the experts have been telling us – while Toronto is not squeaky clean, it may not be the lawless jungle that the media likes portray.  Out of a list of 100 major cities (with populations greater than 5,000), Toronto ranks 26th in terms of overall violence (from homicide and sexual assault to break-ins), well below Vancouver at 9th and Montreal at 19th.  While homicide rates climb in smaller urban centres in Canada (Winnipeg tops the list), the reverse is true in the US where large urban centres are home to the highest rates of homicide.

What’s more, a 2006 Stats Can report reveals that 83% of murders in Canada are committed by at least one known to the victim.   And more of these crimes, say police forces across country, involve gang activity.  While Toronto may not be experiencing a crime wave, the increasingly sensational nature of gun crime in the city – bloodying icons such as the Eaton Centre and the TTC – has made its mark (according to Maclean's, Toronto accounts for one-fourth of the nation’s gun crimes).  In response, the Mayor has launched a campaign to ban hand guns in Canada.

Toronto Real Estate Prices and Inventory Rise In April

John Pasalis in Toronto Real Estate News

The Toronto Real Estate Board released their sales for April 2008.  It wasn't much of a surprise to see that sales declined 7% in April over the same time last year.  The average home price for the GTA in April was up 8% 5% over last year and the number of homes available for sale increased by 7%.

Correction(May 5, 2008): An astute reader pointed out that TREB made a mistake in their recent press release.  Prices in the GTA rose by 5% in April, not the reported 8%. 

It was interesting to see that sales in the City of Toronto were down 10% compared to a 5% slowdown in the 905 region.  It appears as though TREB is slowly building their case against the City of Toronto land transfer tax.

Download the complete Market Watch report here.

Here are the latest numbers from the Toronto Real Estate Board:

Road Access Critical When Buying Cottage in Ontario

Bob Aaron in Legal, Home Buying

The most important question for anyone buying a cottage property is always, "How do I get there from here?" After all, there's no point spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a recreational home if the only way to get to it is by helicopter.

Access to cottages was the issue in a case heard by the Ontario Court of Appeal last year. A group of cottagers live year-round on the shores of Lake St. John in Ramara township. The cottage sites are on reserve lands of the Mnjikaning First Nation, and the cottagers pay the Crown an annual rent of $1,400 to $1,500 each.

The only existing motor vehicle access to the cottages is over a road located on an adjacent lot, purchased in 2003 by a numbered company owned by the Mnjikaning First Nation.

The previous owner of the adjacent lot charged the cottagers a $500 annual fee for the use and maintenance of the access road. When the numbered company bought the lot, it advised the cottagers that they would each be required to pay $2,000 annually, but only for seasonal access between May and November.

It wasn't long before the corporation owned by the First Nation band sued two of the cottagers for trespass by snowmobile, and a group of cottagers sued the First Nation corporation for an injunction restraining them from interfering with road access to and from their cottages.

The case involves the interpretation of Ontario's Road Access Act, originally passed in 1978 to resolve disputes that occur when the property of one neighbour is landlocked, and the only vehicle access to it is over a road on property owned by another neighbour.

Forecasting Toronto’s Real Estate Market a Tricky Business

John Pasalis in Toronto Real Estate News

Last Friday I was invited to answer questions about Toronto’s real estate market in a live online discussion on globeandmail.com. I enjoyed the format because it allowed me to briefly touch on many of the issues that have been on my mind lately.

One issue I have been meaning to write about was raised by a reader named Marg who pointed out that economists and experts have been forecasting a slowdown in Toronto’s real estate market for years, but prices continue to rise. This of course raises a couple of important questions. Firstly, why have economists and experts been unable to accurately forecast Toronto’s real estate market, and secondly, why is this forecast for a slowdown any different from previous forecasts.

FlexHousing™ Brings Adaptable Housing Options to Canada

Rachel Loizos in Real Estate Trends

A recent article in DreamHomes & Condominiums magazine highlighted one of the most interesting trends in real estate that I have seen in awhile.   The trend is in what are called Flex-Homes, which as explained on the CMHC site, comprises a concept in housing that incorporates, at the design and construction stage, the ability to make future changes easily and with minimum expense.  The intention of FlexHousing™ is to allow homeowners to occupy a dwelling for longer periods of time while adapting to changing circumstances and meeting a wider range of needs. Similar concepts are referred to as Universal Housing in the United States and Australia and Lifetime Homes in the United Kingdom.

The CMHC site also goes on to list the myriad of ways that this style of housing is beneficial for everyone because of the ability of the home to grow with you.

Is 'Torontoness' the Answer to the Canadian Identity Crisis?

Urmi Desai in Urban Issues

Over the weekend, Tom Kent's widely-read piece on Canadian citizenship, "Canada is much more than a hotel," appeared in the Globe and Mail.  Kent, a former assistant to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, argues that Canada's citizenship and immigration laws require updating.  Kent raises some important points which deserve an honest vetting, but - typical of the genre - his conclusions are ultimately confusing.  One can't demand loyalty, but can "encourage it" through taxation and obligatory citizenship.  Loyalty, in turn, serves to strengthen our flagging sense of identity, a weakness that is "our special Canadian problem."  Only when we believe ourselves to be Canadian - and only Canadian - can we make a difference in a complex and interdependent world.  Less interconnectedness apparently goes further in an interconnected world.

Several weeks ago, I attended a Maclean's debate featuring New Yorker writers Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell on - wait for it - Canadian identity.  As we settled into our seats, a sense of giddy apprehension pervaded U of T's Convocation Hall.  One has to wonder if a society that readily commits to congregating to discuss identity problems (even paying for the pleasure) doesn't share the same masochistic loyalty of couples chronically in therapy.  Perhaps Mr. Kent need not worry.

Thanks to Maclean's attempt to engender a livelier debate by recruiting "new voices" - those of Canadian writers who haven't lived here for the past ten years or more - not much was added to the cannon familiar to debating clubs across Canada.  With such threadbare material, the debate was ultimately one of style.  While Gladwell offered buzz-word theories to admirably distill complex ideas into uncomplicated Kool-Aid, Gopnik relied on his gifts of close observation (read people-watching) and lyrical oration.  Ultimately, Gopnik held us in rhythmic sway, describing his recent ascent of Montreal, where he saw not a city, but a kaleidoscope of contributions made by individuals with strongly-hued identities of their own - shards of brightly-coloured glass that together mesmerize and inspire us. 

It was only later when I tuned into the weekly broadcast of Laurie Taylor, BBC's sociologist of the people, that I realized that I had failed to observe something key about the debate. Gopnik's crowning moment - to which the audience responded with the loudest applause of the night - wasn't about a country, it was about a city.