Toronto Real Estate and Neighbourhoods Blog | Move Smartly

Move Smartly Blogger on Globe and Mail Live Chat

Realosophy Team in Realosophy News

John Pasalis, our resident real estate blogger, will be participating in a live chat on the Globe and Mail website on Friday, April 25th at noon.  You can submit your questions to the Globe now or join in the chat on Friday.

John will be speaking to growing concerns about Toronto's real estate market, as well as sharing some insights into recent market developments in Toronto's neighbourhoods.

We hope that you will be able to join John on Friday.

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Bloggers Wanted

As we move towards our first anniversary, the team at Move Smartly invites you to consider blogging with us.

From our blog's bio, here is what we blog about and how we do it:

As writers, we are fascinated by the big questions—urban planning, city politics, real estate industry developments and lifestyle trends, as well as the more immediate ones—getting onto (and up) the property ladder in Toronto.

Each of us writes from a different professional background, but we all write first and foremost as consumers and citizens.

We believe that all of our readers, when given the straight goods rather than jargon, can and should understand the economic, legal and lifestyle implications of Home Buying decisions.

If interested, you would contribute to our blog on a monthly basis (more frequently if desired).  No compensation is offered; however, professionals have an opportunity to engage with a diverse readership and build experience. 

If you like the Move Smartly approach and are interested in blogging about real estate, homes, neighbourhoods or our city, please send an email to our editor, Urmi Desai, at urmi@realosophy.com.  Don't forget to tell us about your professional background, your particular interests and your writing experience.

We look forward to hearing from you!

 

Using Demographic Data to Bring Toronto Neighbourhoods to Life

John in Realosophy News

After months of work, I’m excited that the Realosophy team has added some great updates to our site. One of our goals when we first started was to help home buyers really understand what it might be like to live in one of Toronto’s many neighbourhoods.

While there are plenty of websites and yellowed guidebooks describing the delights of Little Italy or Cabbagetown to browse through, many Toronto neighbourhoods have since moved past their monikers. Toronto has also become much more than its iconic neighbourhoods. We sought to update our knowledge of well-known neighbourhoods and shine a spotlight on those that were lesser known.

If we were going to introduce demographic data to our site, it would have to be consistent with Realosophy’s principles of providing real insight to consumers in a straight-forward and easy-to-use way. What would we want to see before we bought a home? It turned out that it was easier to agree on what we didn’t want to see–rows of numbers and complicated tables. Rather than just being tossed a myriad of Stats Can data, we wanted to be able to zero in on the bottom line. Rather than being told everything about an area, we wanted to know about the key things that truly made it unique.

In addition to clearly charting everything from average incomes to mode of transportation, we set to work figuring out how to tell users what made an area unique. To come up with the right algorithm, we identified members of various different communities, backgrounds, income brackets and ways of life belonging to a single area. Then we compared these numbers to those of other areas in the province. From this, we could tell when a group was disproportionately represented in a specific area and more likely to make an impact. Looking at the data this way provides a new and interesting vantage point. The issue is not whether or not Richmond Hill is home to a high number of management professionals (it happens to be), but whether or not it is notable for it. When compared to other areas in the province, it turns out that Richmond Hill has a higher share of these professionals, making it distinct.

Happy Holidays!

The team at Move Smartly would like to thank you, our readers, for a wonderful first year.  We look forward to bringing you more original analysis and stories about your HomeBuying quest in the city we love to call home.

Since blogging and egg-nogging do not mix well, we will return in the New Year.  Until then, we wish you all safe and happy holidays and a positive start to 2008.

Urmi, John, Rachel and Jesse

www.movesmartly.com

Why Toronto Needs a Consumer-Focused Real Estate Website

John in Realosophy News, HomeBuying

The absence of consumer protection in the real estate industry was one of the main reasons our team started Realosophy.  HomeBuyers are the most vulnerable party in the real estate transaction and yet they lacked their own space, a place to come and get educated about issues that matter.

Traditional real estate websites are more focused on getting your e-mail address than they are on educating you about things like fake multiple offers. The websites of provincial real estate authorities such as the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) can be confusing at times, since they are geared to serve realtors rather than consumers. 

To illustrate, let's examine how a visit to RECO’s website may leave a buyer feeling a tad alienated.

As you know, we at Realosophy are big advocates of Buyer Representation agreements (also called Buyer Agency agreements). We encourage HomeBuyers to sign a Representation agreement with their agent because if they don’t sign one, their agent is legally obligated to represent the best interests of the seller, not them.

RECO also talks about Representation agreements on their website, raising the following question: what if I don’t sign one?  Interestingly, RECO doesn’t tell consumers that the HomeBuyer’s agent would be legally obligated to represent the best interests of the seller. Instead, they offer this:

The Code of Ethics clearly states that loyalty ultimately rests with the client and that a broker or salesperson must protect and promote the clients best interests.

Most buyers reading this would probably conclude at this point that even without a Representation agreement, the salesperson (a.k.a the agent) I'm working with is ultimately loyal to me, the client, and must protect and promote my best interests.  So why sign on a dotted line?

It appears that a little information service start-up called Realosophy is diverging from the expert advice set-out by our provincial regulator RECO by insisting that buyers adhere to a stronger standard - so who's right?

Realosophy Launch

Welcome to realosophy.com!  We hope that you are as excited as we are about our new Toronto HomeBuyer’s website.

We are a group of young consumers and professionals who once wondered why HomeBuying wasn’t more fun, open and easy to understand.  Then we decided to do something about it—something we call Realosophy.