In Toronto, Fall puts a Chill on a Sellers' Market

The fall market is a weekly market,” says Thomas Neal of Royal LePage Estate Realty. “Some weeks it goes and some weeks it doesn’t.”
It’s also a market that’s winding down in the dwindling days of November. Few new listings will arrive on the market in December. Those sellers who do list now have likely already purchased another property.
“If you don’t have to sell I think you’re going to wait until the spring,” says Mr. Neal, who concentrates his business in the Beaches neighbourhood.
As for those sellers whose condos and houses are already lingering on the market, Mr. Neal predicts many of those people will be taking down the “for sale” sign by Christmas.
“People who don’t sell in December will be back out on the market in February,” he says.
But as much anxiety as the current torpor is causing sellers, the market shift creates some interesting opportunities for buyers, Mr. Neal adds.
Sellers are worried and buyers are under no pressure to buy.
“It’s a totally different market than a year ago.”
Mr. Neal says buyers have more bargaining clout now. Meanwhile, asking prices are staying flat or – in some cases – drifting lower.
“There is an adjustment going on,” says Mr. Neal. “Prices aren’t dropping but they’re coming off of the levels that were inflated to begin with.”
What he means is that the hyper-active bidding wars of last spring have evaporated. Buyers are facing fewer rivals and therefore they are not driving up selling prices by crazy amounts.
The change in the broader housing market is part of a trickle-down effect from all of the condo building, Mr. Neal explains.
While people are still coveting single-family houses, those move-up buyers who already own a condo are more hesitant to purchase a house because they don’t know how long it will take to sell the condo. That’s a change from the dynamic of the last eight years or so when condo owners would often list the unit first, reap more than they expected in a bidding contest, and then in turn funnel that money into winning the competition for a house.
“Now they’re not buying first; they’re selling first,” says Mr. Neal. With that shift, he explains, the number of buyers out there is cut roughly in half.
For those who do plan to list soon, Mr. Neal recommends that they listen to their agent’s advice about setting a realistic price. If homeowners interview a few agents and one suggests a significantly higher asking price than the others, Mr. Neal cautions that the agent should be able to justify that price.
Otherwise, he says, the most sanguine agent may just be trying to win the listing by telling homeowners what they want to hear.

This article is from the Globe and Mail published November 29/ 2012, written by Carolyn Ireland

5 Ways To Get Ready To Sell

To stage or not to stage?
 And if you do stage, do you admit to it? Submitting to this relatively new whim of real estate agents (do you think your parent’s ever staged their home?) somehow implies that the home you’ve been living in quite comfortably isn’t actually good enough for everyone else. The truth of the matter is that we can all learn a little something from professional home stagers. The good news is that many of these things are easy to do and budget-friendly to boot!    

Declutter and Get Organized
The number one rule of home staging is to get rid of all clutter. The best way to do that is to have a designated place for everything whether it's file boxes in the office or storage jars in the kitchen. This task can seem daunting (which is why there are probably companies you can hire to do this for you) but if you think of tackling one room per weekend you could have a well organized and clutter-free house by end of summer.    

Freshen Up with Paint
Home stagers will tell you that in order to have the best chance of selling your home you should choose neutral paint colours that appeal to a wide spectrum of buyers. I don’t know whether or not I absolutely agree with that but there is no denying that a freshly painted house seems cleaner, brighter and more welcoming. If it's been a few years (or decades!), you might want to consider a touch up. You’ll be amazed at what a difference a little paint can make.    

Rearrange Furniture
Oftentimes, all it takes to revitalize your home is a simple reshuffling of the existing furniture. Don’t be surprised if your home stager tells you to move some of your items into storage and distribute what's left around the house. In order to create more space and flow you might want to remove some of the chairs from your dining room and add them to your living space. Conversely, you might take an occasional chair from your living room and place it in the hallway. See what rearranging your own furniture can do for your space.    
Add Decorative Touches
The role of a good stylist is to add those small decorative touches that turn a ho-hum space into something intriguing and dynamic. Take a look through your closets and see what accessories you have that could make your place look a little more pulled-together. Look for items that are either all in the same colour palette or the same shape. Repetition is key!

Create Zones
Potential home buyers like to imagine their life in your space. By creating distinct zones of eating, relaxing, studying, playing and working, you allow them to envision a harmonious day-to-day routine in their new digs. Take the time to walk around your house to see if there are any spaces that are not being used to their full potential. Try to think as a stranger -- what would bother you if you weren't already totally used to it?    

This article is taken from HGTv.ca's online article database.

Competing with Multiple Offers: Five Key Tips

In a sellers’ market buyers will frequently find themselves in competition with other buyers to purchase a home. Obviously this is great news if you are the seller, but it can leave the prospective buyer in a fear-driven flummox.

In these circumstances, a property’s asking price and its selling price can vastly differ, where the actual selling price can be well above and beyond the original listed price.

Often in this scenario, homeowners strategize with their real estate agent to under-price a property in order to generate a lot of interest and ultimately create a bidding war. The seller chooses to consider offers on a certain date, in a timeframe that works for them. This allows the property owner, in conjunction with their agent, to hold open houses on the weekend so that many prospective buyers can see the home at once, and then they deal with the offers several days later.

This positioning of a property to garner multiple offers creates anxiety and can make a buyer feel less in control. Logic tends to go by the wayside in multi-offer situations. As a buyer, you need to be prepared, by doing all of your homework upfront with a strong understanding that you may not get the property in the long run.

The seller will obviously want to get the best price they can for their property, but the offer they choose or not choose could also have to do with subjects and conditions that go along with it.

If offers are withheld until a certain date, here are a few things you as a buyer can do to feel in control of the situation and will assist you in your bid:

1. Make sure your home financing is secure.
2. Make sure the property title is in order. If you know in advance there aren’t any easements or rights-of-way that exist, it's one less "subject" you have to include on your offer. Fewer subjects make more appealing offers to sellers.
3. If you can, do an advance home inspection. The buyer could consider your offer more readily, if it doesn’t include a “subject to inspection” clause.
4. Work with your agent and to assess the competition. Are you competing against one family or a dozen? This will help you gain perspective on the situation.
5. Establish the price you are willing to pay and just how much you want the home, so you make an offer you feel confident about. Then if you lose the home by a mere $1000 you won't agonize over it afterwards.

If all else fails you might want to consider a bully offer, where you present your offer via your agent before the indicated date. The hope when doing this is that the seller will consider your offer without seeing any other offers that may come forward on that date.

If you decide to make a bully offer, we suggest that you make an enticing offer with few, if any conditions. Know that bully offers are risky as you may end up paying an unnecessary premium for the property -- what if it ends up that you never had competition in the first place? You’ll never know. You can also risk alienating the seller, as they may not be impressed by your aggressive approach and direct you to submit your offer on the day they originally chose.

Finally make sure you get everything in writing. Don’t engage in oral agreements. Write everything into the contract. Your offer to purchase a home becomes a binding contract when the seller signs and you need all of your terms and conditions within in.

Home of the Week: Groundbreaking design stands the test of Time

51 ROXBOROUGH DR., TORONTO
Asking price: $6.5-million
Taxes: $16,426.52
Lot: 37.5-by-166-feet
Agents: Donna Thompson and Nick Thompson (Harvey Kalles Real Estate Ltd.)

The back story
Lawrence and Mary Wolf knew they were challenging convention when they commissioned a house of glass and steel. They didn’t know they would be living in an architectural landmark.
Mr. Wolf pulls out a copy of House & Garden from 1975 and points to the weeping fig tree, which has grown several feet taller, in the same spot in the living room – facing the exterior courtyard.
The Wolf House, built on stilts facing a Rosedale ravine in 1974, has won many awards and international acclaim for architect Barton Myers.
The Wolfs hired Mr. Myers after they visited another famous house of his design – his own residence on Berryman Street in Yorkville. “We saw what he did with his house and we were blown away,” Ms. Wolf says.
The Wolfs were young advertising mavens in the 1970s who would build Wolf Group Integrated Communications into a cross-border powerhouse. Mr. Myers was a Toronto-based architect who would go on to world renown for his urban planning, museums, theatres and concert halls.
The well-connected modern furniture retailer Klaus Nienkamper made the introduction.
Mr. Myers, who currently practises at Barton Myers Associates in Los Angeles, caused a sensation in Rosedale with the Wolf House.
Not all of the attention was positive in such a staid neighbourhood. But the Wolfs had no qualms about building a precedent-setting house.
“Either you can relate to it or not relate to it,” Mr. Wolf says simply. “We were into what was new – what was forward. A lot of people are wowed by it and there are people who would love to live here.”
The steel structure and the mechanical and electrical systems are all exposed. A bridge overlooking the courtyard connects the front and rear of the house on the upper floor.
Mr. Myers was inspired by his early career in the U.S. Navy to try out new space-age materials. In designing the Wolf House, he was experimenting along the way, says Mr. Wolf, who adds that there was no convention for treating the steel and other industrial materials. “We demanded a level of finishing for which there was no tradition.”
It’s obvious the architect cherishes the project to this day: The Wolf House is featured in Mr. Myers’s 2005 tome 3 Steel Houses.“This residence, sited on the edge of a wooded ravine in Toronto, employs off-the-shelf industrial materials in an elegant way,” Mr. Myers writes. “Although the area of the house is a modest 3,000 square feet, the effect is one of unusual spaciousness.”
Architectural Record selected it as a Record House for 1977. Mr. Myers notes the honour on his website. The house won the Prix du XXe siècle from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 2007.
The Wolfs loved the all-white interior and the high-tech components. The elegant, simple lines, Ms. Wolf says, keep the design contemporary and fresh.
“When you come home to a house like this, it’s very uplifting,” Mr. Wolf says. “The exterior is almost incorporated in the interior.”
Ms. Wolf says the couple was fortunate to obtain a piece of land in Rosedale that had been severed from a large estate. And they had no idea at the time they were commissioning a residence from an architect who would become so celebrated.
“Sometimes you just get falling down lucky,” says Ms. Wolf.

The house today
Mr. Myers’s creation remains substantially the same, but the Wolfs have made some changes to the interior over the years.
Because the house was built on stilts, the Wolfs were able to slide a glass box underneath to create a garden-level living room in 1983. A home office on the same level can be enclosed behind panels or opened up to views of the garden.
On the upper level, the kids’ area at the front of the house has been reconfigured to create a guest bedroom and a home office.
“In the late nineties, the family grew and changed,” Mr. Wolf says. “Our sons were older. Then when they moved out, it changed again.”
At the rear, the master bedroom was transformed by interior design firm Yabu Pushelberg. Warm wood furniture built-ins define the space. A new ensuite bathroom features dramatic gold leaf tiles and an oval freestanding tub with views of the ravine through floor-to-ceiling windows.
In 2008, New York-based Heather Faulding of Faulding Architecture was brought in to reconfigure the kitchen and redesign the glass living room. The original galley kitchen was inspired by Mr. Myers’s time in the navy, Ms. Wolf says. That vision translated into a very industrial look.
The work by Ms. Faulding and Yabu Pushelberg has created a kitchen and main floor with cabinets and built-ins of golden pear wood. Outside, the landscaping surrounding the inground swimming pool was designed by Walter Kehm to take advantage of the ravine and rolling terrain.

The best feature
The Wolfs feel very fortunate to live on the edge of a ravine. With his design, they say, Mr. Myers was almost able to incorporate the exterior into the interior.
“We had this incredible lot. We wanted to take advantage of it.”
Mr. Wolf takes pride in another feature: A glass door opens to a terrace at the same level as the kitchen. The outdoor dining area overlooks the pool.
He says he had to press Mr. Myers to build the terrace because the architect thought the protrusion would ruin the lines at the rear of the house. But Mr. Wolf says he is glad he was able to persuade him to find a way.
“This is the most glorious dining room in all of Toronto.”

-Article from The Globe and Mail

Guy-Friendly Design: How the Man Cave is moving out of the Basement

When the residents of a new Toronto condo take the elevator up to the amenities on the second floor, they will be entering a dude dreamland. Plans for the INDX condominium, set to begin construction in the city’s financial district early next year, include a video golf simulator, Bulls vs. Bears Room, where there will be billiards, a big-screen TV and a foosball table, Benjamin’s Poker Room and The Bank Lounge for kicking back. 
It may not be to every guy’s tastes, but still, it’s a dude-centric layout. That man-friendly aesthetic will permeate the building, from the shoeshine station in the lobby through to the look and feel of each unit, which are just a few degrees removed from Ron Burgundy’s ideal of leather-bound books amid the smell of rich mahogany.
“We’ve used very deep, rich earth tones, very sleek finishes,” says Andrew Hoffman, president and founder of CentreCourt Developments, which is co-developing the project. All but two of the building’s 798 units have been sold, a clear sign of its appeal.
The building is geared toward the young, busy professional who works in the city’s core – man or woman – Hoffman says. But the marketing campaign for the building was inspired by Barney Stinson, the carousing womanizer played by Neil Patrick Harris on the television show How I Met Your Mother, he points out. So you know what gender is top-of-mind here.
In fact, look at popular design trends, from rough-around-the-edges reclaimed furniture to industrial-style restaurants, and you may see how a guy-centric aesthetic now informs so many spaces. There is no straight line from the metrosexual trend from the mid-1990s to here, but the interests that gave rise to the man cave have moved up from the basement and are taking over the whole house. As designers and decorators point out, we are all – both men and women – hyper-conscious of design. With men playing a more active role in the choices of how to outfit their living spaces, the market is responding to their interests.
“There’s definitely been a trend in Scandinavian design and some of this Old World European stuff that’s big, that’s heavy, and it does definitely have very masculine feel to it,” says Laura Stein, founder of the Toronto-based Laura Stein Interiors. “Guys have been more involved in the decision-making when it comes to the design of their home.”
Thanks to the proliferation of design media, “people are so much more aware of it,” Stein says. “It used to be that women sought it out and found it. And now it’s everywhere, so men are more exposed to it than they used to be. … They’re becoming a little more design-savvy. They have opinions about things.”
Jonah Takagi, a designer based in Washington, D.C., wanted to tap into this growing niche market with Field, a guy-centric housewares collection that launched in September. “I feel like the world of interior design and mainstream product design can be a little bit feminine,” Takagi says. “Guys are spending so much more attention to the aesthetics of their personal products.”
The Field collection includes a cylindrical pen pot made from reclaimed yellow pine, a stainless-steel bottle opener that is gorgeously dude-tastic in its simplicity and adherence to a function-is-form vibe, soapstone bookends and a copper paperweight.
What is guy-centric design? Really, what makes a paperweight masculine or feminine? Think clean, modern lines, an absence of frill or unnecessary ornamentation, with wood, metal, leather and canvas all used as popular materials in pieces that are chosen and arranged according to a functionalist philosophy.
When it comes to understanding how many men value function in their homes, pillows are a good place to start, says Michelle Miazga, co-founder of Port + Quarter, a Vancouver-based interior-design company that launched in April and specializes in design for men. Many women may like to stack throw pillows on their couches for no other reason than that they look pretty, she says. Men, not so much.
“Pillows is kind of an issue that we always laugh about with guys,” Miazga says. “They look fantastic on a sofa. But a guy needs to be able to put his head on it or lie on it,” she says. “That’s something we always think about: What’s the function of what we’re putting in a room for a guy?”
The company initially carved out a target market of men 25 to 45 years old who are professionals and first-time home buyers, but the clientele has proved to be much more diverse, Miazga says. “We thought we would have a market with divorced men and single men, but we are finding that we are getting a lot of couples,” she says.
Miazga’s company is part of a wave of businesses that are courting men, from design companies to spas. “In Vancouver, it’s a huge industry now,” she says. “People are just catering more to men.”
But while design that has a guy-friendly vibe is increasingly popular, it is hardly exclusionary, says Neil James, managing partner of Stylegarage, a furniture and accessories retailer with stores in Toronto and Vancouver.
James points to industrial-style restaurants kitted out with concrete and lit by Edison bulbs and the style of furniture and home furnishings offered by Restoration Hardware as examples of “masculine” design that now enjoy widespread popularity. “It doesn’t necessarily make it just for guys. I think a lot of women like that look,” he says, adding that pieces are not created with conscious thought about gender preferences. “Good design is good design.”

this article is from the Globe and Mail's Real estate section from the issue dated for October 17/2012.

We Are Back and Better than Ever in 2012

                Hello everyone,

                As you can guess we are back to updating our blog.  We have been having an exciting month so far!  We currently have added two new members to our team Josh DaLuz a Buyer Specialist and Skyler Cleeves, Marketing manager with plans to become a Real Estate Agent.

                In addition to these new members we are very proud to announce that we now have our own stand alone office, and it is a thing of beauty.  We are adjusting still but we now have all of our boxes unpacked and are ready to do what we do best, which is helping YOU with any and all of your real estate needs.  Our  new office location is 640 Riverbend Drive in Kitchener, Ontario.

                Stay tuned for more news and updates!