By Rebecca Wissink

Selling your home can be stressful for sure, but there are certain steps you can take to minimize your stress by creating the conditions that lead to a faster sale. If you implement the seven best practices listed here, you will be giving yourself the gift of having the best chance for a quick sale at top dollar! The key here is to get through this checklist before you list your home, not after your home has been on the market for a month. In order to work through this list, you likely need a few months to prepare your home for sale, depending on your personal schedule and how much labour you are willing to pay others to do. In no order, we recommend you follow as many of these seven practices as possible: 

Have Your Home…

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By Rebecca Wissink

You’ve probably heard the age-old adage – buyer beware. At no time is this advice more prevalent than in scorching hot housing markets. Buyers might be going up against multiple offers, or the threat of multiple offers, and feeling pressured not to put any conditions on their bid, such as a home inspection. Data from industry insiders reveals that in some of the hotter markets in BC this past year, “more than 70 per cent of offers” were presented without conditions. It is very risky to skip a home inspection when one is considering buying an older home in the price range of half a million dollars plus. Would you consider investing $500,000 into a stock without researching the company first? Buying a home is the biggest purchase…

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By Rebecca Wissink

When you’re selling your home, preparation is everything if you want to get top dollar for the property, and your Realtor® can help with much of this. Preparation can include, at minimum: decluttering; giving the home a deep cleaning; attending to the aesthetics of the home (repairing paint scratches); working with a professional stager; having the photos digitally staged if necessary; and, having fabulous photos that showcase the best of the property. But have you considered obtaining a home inspection as part and parcel of putting the best version of your home to market?  

Home inspections have become commonplace in recent years and serve an important purpose: they inform a potential buyer of any major repairs the…

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By Rebecca Wissink Patterns in luxury home buying in Canada are not only influenced by economic factors, but also by demographics and generational characteristics. There are three successive generations that compose Canada’s luxury real estate market - Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y. As most Baby Boomers enter retirement, and Generation Y is just getting going, Generation X is entering the prime of their lives.  Individuals belonging to Gen X as they are commonly called, are those born between roughly 1965 to 1979 (different researchers will use slightly different years) with ages ranging from about 42 to 57. This generation is considered the Bust generation, given they are a small cohort and lost between two massive…

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By Rebecca Wissink

If you click on the Globe and Mail’s real estate page what you primarily see are articles detailing a housing market gone mad. Multiple headlines from various communities state this home has sold over list, attracted multiple bids, sold with no conditions, or sold on the first day. Perhaps the most ludicrous headline reads “This midtown Toronto home sold for $505,192 over asking despite busy street” (March 17, 2022). But wait, I can beat that with a Facebook status from a Kingston, Ontario Realtor® on March 21, 2022: “A house in Kingston sold today for $550,000 over the asking price of $800,000.” In Calgary, a home sold in February 2022 after four days on the market for two hundred thousand dollars over list. Ross Pavl reports one…

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By Rebecca Wissink

The Calgary Herald reported recently what Realtors® specializing in luxury real estate already knew first-hand – the luxury market has exploded over the last year, particularly between the price points of 1 million - 1.4 million dollars. Luxury real estate expert Ross Pavl reports “the luxury market in Calgary is doing really well, and mindful buyers who are not forced to panic buy to avoid increasing interest rates are snapping up homes that tick the right boxes, like those with a good location, or that back onto a green space.”

There is no denying that Calgary’s market is hot and breaking records. The Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB) has reported an astonishing 222 percent growth in sales, year-over-year, for homes listed over 1…

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By Rebecca Wissink

When I read anything that links Calgary’s current real estate market to the conditions of the market in 2006-07, alarm bells go off in my head. Rumours of bidding wars and offers over list price have come to Calgary. Inventory is tight and sales are up between 66-109% depending on the home type. The Calgary Real Estate Board (CREA) reported on March 1, 2022 “the benchmark price reached $596,400, which is nearly $50,000 higher than prices seen at the end of 2021 [a few months ago!] and over $90,000 higher than February 2021 prices.” I’ve written elsewhere for Ross Pavl that Calgary’s boom came later than most markets in Canada, not really taking flight until the winter of 2021. I remember what happened to real estate in Alberta in…

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VR in Real Estate

By Simon Rose

Virtual reality or VR is a kind of technology that’s been around for a while now. With VR, a person can view a three-dimensional image or perhaps an entire environment and even interact with it. VR is able to create and resemble how things will or do look in the real world. Alternately, VR can create a completely different fantasy landscape or an alien planet for one to explore. It’s been predicted for quite a while now that virtual reality would be the next major technological development. Historically, its been widely utilized in things like video games and the entertainment industry. Today, VR is being used notably in the real estate business. The ongoing pandemic and restrictions on people meeting in close…

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By Rebecca Wissink

From coast to coast, real estate records were smashed across the nation in 2021. Some markets saw insane price increases of 25-30%. For example, the Greater Montreal area gained 27.45%, Ottawa gained 23.3%, and Vancouver gained 18.62% (year-over-year benchmark prices from 2020 to 2021). Calgary and the surrounding communities of Airdrie and Cochrane did not see these astronomical surges. So, how did Calgary's real estate market fare in 2021? Calgary was late to the party, but in late 2021 when most markets settled down a bit, Calgary was just catching fire.  

Calgary’s market broke records of its own last year, and the area rings in 2022 with some of the tightest conditions observed in over a decade. The number of homes sold,…

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By Rebecca Wissink

The word suburb, suburban, and suburbia are all short for a “sub urban” area, meaning they are contrasted to the inner-city. Suburbia is the result of an economic explosion that occurred in North American post-WWII, along with the resulting social changes that followed. In America, returning veterans were able to get housing loans with low interest rates and small down payments for standardized homes being built en-masse outside of the city. Suburbia was partly enabled by Henry Ford’s cheap automobile, automation and cheaper goods, and by public transit, railways, and highways that allowed people to commute into the city from these new housing developments. These new areas of housing were necessary due to the baby boom that occurred…

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