The market continues to perform in mysterious ways! As you can see from the data, some market segments are performing in a more “normal” market pattern and some market segments are softening.
Download Calgary and Area Real Estate Statistics – May 2015
If you are curious about the current market value of your home, or market conditions in general, please feel free to contact us.
Hope this helps!
Susanita de Diego
The data clearly shows that the buyer “fence sitters” have jumped off the fence! This is possibly because anyone who buys property during this market cycle has the good fortune of incredibly low financing rates and also because we have seen a decline in the Benchmark Prices.
Download Calgary and Area Real Estate Statistics – April 2015
However it looks like the Seller “fence sitters” have jumped back on the fence! Perhaps this is also because of the decline in the Benchmark Prices.
In most reported market segments both sales and the absorption rates are up from last month and the months of supply are lower.
If this pattern continues, balanced market conditions will soon follow.
If you are curious about the current market value of your home, or market conditions in general, please feel free to contact us.
Hope this helps!
Susanita de Diego
Hooray! The sky is NOT falling! Please note that the absorption rates for detached properties in most of the reported market areas are over 22% AND in most cases the absorption rates have increased compared to February numbers.
Download Calgary and Area Real Estate Statistics – March 2015
Because 2014 was a “Boom” sales year for Calgary Real Estate, even without the drop in the price of oil, the absorption rates in 2015 would have been lower.
The data over the last five years show that in many of the reported markets we are not far off 2011 or 2012 absorption rates.
In fact, the March absorption rates reflect a “normal” Calgary and surrounding areas market.
For all of us who are involved in the residential real estate market, we know that a portion of our population will always marry divorce, have children, downsize, move up or away or move to Alberta, so there will always be demand.
Anyone who buys property during this market cycle will have the good fortune of incredibly low financing rates making this a great time to purchase an investment property.
If you are curious about the current market value of your home, or market conditions in general, please feel free to contact us!
Hope this helps!
Susanita de Diego
I was at a business event discussing real estate marketing, and my discussion partner posed the question of the top few things someone should think about when they want to buy real estate. Here is what we came up
with:
1) Rent or Buy?
First of all, I guess you should ask yourself if you really want to buy property or continue to rent. Consider that over time, real estate is typically a good investment—for the long term. Those individuals who purchased in 2006 or the first half of 2007 and had to sell a year or two down the road lost money. Conversely, those who purchased at the bottom of the cycle could potentially make their money back, but remember the closing costs when you sell. If you’re thinking that you only want a place for a couple of years, continuing to rent might be the best option. No, you’re not creating equity, but unless you plan to try to sell your home yourself, you save the money you would have spent to pay a Realtor to sell your home.
Also, home-ownership comes with other costs that you might not factor in, like home insurance (which increased quite a bit since the 2013 floods), taxes, repairs and ongoing maintenance, and utilities. Can you afford that $500 gas and electric bill in the winter months? What about the water and sewage costs in the summer when the sprinklers are going? What happens if your furnace breaks down—do you have the funds set aside to pay for repairs? Renting suddenly sounds easier and cheaper!
2) How Much Can You Afford?
Once you have decided that you do want to buy, go to your bank or mortgage broker and get pre-approved for a mortgage. Getting pre-approved is very different than being pre-qualified. Pre-qualifying really just tells you the amount you might expect to get IF you are approved for a mortgage, but in no way does it guarantee that you will actually be approved. Pre-approval means that the lender has done a credit analysis and verified your employment situation, and has given you a letter stating that you have a certain number of dollars guaranteed at a specific interest rate. However, this approval is often guaranteed for only a few months, so once you do have that pre-approval, your next step is to get shopping.
3) What Do You Need versus Want?
Define your NEEDS in a home versus your wants. Needs include type of home—do you want a condo because you live downtown, or do you have children and pets so perhaps NEED a yard? Do you have individuals in the family with special needs or mobility issues, so perhaps need wider doorways or ramps? Do you need to be close to schools because transportation might be difficult? Do you have a home-office, so need that extra bedroom or main-floor den/office space? Most condos do not allow you to run a business, so a single-family home would be necessary. Do you play a musical instrument? Condos also have noise restrictions, and if you have frequent gatherings of individuals, the parking could be an issue, not to mention the noise impacting neighbours.
You need to decide what area of town you want to live in. If you work downtown (and we all know what a headache commuting is), and you don’t need a single-family home, there are many apartment-style and townhouse condominiums, and for first-time buyers, a condo is a great place to start because they are more affordable (providing the condo fees aren’t too high).
4) Explore!
You should go to a million open houses. Well…maybe a million is a slight exaggeration, but the more properties you can see, the better informed you become. You can go to a lot of weekend open houses (but don’t feel compelled to work with the agent there), and also drive, cycle, or walk around neighbourhoods that you think you might like so that you can explore them and discover their positives and also their draw-backs.
5) Choose a Realtor
Once you have this information, you’re armed with a lot of knowledge – we applaud your initiative! Now it’s time to work with a Coldwell Banker Realtor™ to seriously investigate some properties. (Check out How Do You Choose a Real Estate Agent for some tips!). We can set you up on a search from the MLS system so that you can see when properties are listed that conform to your needs list (so that you don’t waste a bunch of time looking at listings that just won’t work). We can return with you to some of the properties you saw at an open house, as well as visiting many more that you see in the MLS listings that we send you. When you decide on a home, we can help you craft a solid offer that makes sense.
Don’t delay – call Coldwell Banker Complete Real Estate at 403-686-1455.
I was at a networking and business mastery event, and the first person with whom I spoke asked “how do you choose an agent?” I thought, what an excellent topic for a blog post, so here we go.
As you may know by now, in Alberta a buyer is now required to sign an agreement to work with a realtor to purchase property. Agreements have long been used when selling a property, but this is a new requirement for buyers, and, frankly, it’s scary for some. There is a lot of information in the blogosphere and real estate websites about Buyer Agreements, so I won’t go into it here, except to say that for whatever type of agreement you sign, you are entering into a trust relationship. You have to really feel, instinctively and intuitively, that the agent you sign the agreement with will work well with you, and for you. So, that’s one way – trust your gut. We tend not to these days, though, because we try to think and reason things through. We have forgotten how important our instincts and intuition are– we should be heeding them.
Your prospective Realtor should be asking you key questions so that she can locate the listings that best match your search criteria. Our database has excellent search capabilities so that you receive properties that are a good match for your requirements. We are here to help you and to save you time, and if we’re not doing that, we’re not doing our job.
From a practical and educational perspective, though, you want to know that your agent has not only the street-cred to help you, but that she also continues to hone her skills and augment her education. Calgary Real Estate Board, RECA, and AREA have many optional courses that we can, and should, take to supplement our knowledge and upgrade our skills, in addition to our yearly required course component. Take condos, for instance. This is not a purchase to take lightly because you are not just buying a home, but you’re buying into a corporation. You should be asking your prospective agent if she has her Condo Specialist Designation so that she knows some cost-saving methods for obtaining the condo documents (as a seller), and things to watch out for (as a buyer).
Before I became a Realtor, I used a couple of different associates for my purchases and sales, but neither of them took the time, I see now in hindsight, to really explain not only the contract, but things like the Real Property Report and neighbourhood statistics for recent sold properties. I never had a realtor actually go over the RPR with me, and never once did I receive a market analysis of the area I was buying into, or leaving, and that’s absurd. The statistics are easy to obtain and should be automatically provided to assist the client in her decision-making.
If we can help you with any of your Real Estate needs, please contact us at 403-686-1455 or email: info@cbcalgary.ca.
When you’re house hunting, it’s a great idea to know the amount of mortgage you qualify for, your monthly payments, and that your interest rate will be held for a specified
period of time i.e. 120 days. This way you can shop within your price range, you don’t have to worry about rates rising, and both realtors and sellers will know you’re serious. Be realistic though and make sure you can afford that pre-approved amount.
Keep in mind that not all pre-approvals are the same, and that a pre-approval is not a mortgage approval. Some are just a simple rate guarantee subject to lots of conditions and a later approval. For a full pre-approval you need to submit your application and documentation so the lender can qualify you, and even then it’s a good idea to have a financing condition in your purchase offer because your property will need to be assessed by your lender. Be sure to not make significant changes after getting the pre-approval i.e. changing jobs, adding debt or missing payments, co-signing another loan, or using your down payment money.
Article courtesy of:
Cam Brown
Accredited Mortgage Professional
(403) 650-5509
INVIS “Canada’s Mortgage Experts”
www.mortgagealberta.ca
cambrown@invis.ca
I was speaking with a neighbor the other day, who related that her Realtor® advised her to paint her whole house cream, and replace all of her carpets with hardwood. And then sell. And then sell???
Why would a homeowner want to put all of that time and money into doing some fairly expensive renovations just to sell? Having done renovations myself, and moved into homes that had been renovated, I do not give my sellers that advice at all.
Here’s my point of view from a purchaser’s stand point. My husband and I moved into a house that had just been painted and re-carpeted. Seven years on, the carpet looked like it had been down since the house was built in 1984 because the individual purchased the cheapest builder-grade carpet she could. It didn’t last, and both my husband and I hated it. Additionally, the whole house had been painted masking-tape yellow. Blech! I would have preferred to pay less for the house (and there’s the rub…) and put my own decorating taste and renovation dollars into it. We would have purchased a higher quality of carpeting that would have lasted longer, been a better colour for us (NOT an insanely light cream!) and not ended up in the landfill after such a short time. The former owner only applied the lipstick in order to get the date! Of course, you could ask why we purchased…well, at the end of 2006 in Calgary the market was hot, and houses didn’t last long. There were, and are, an awful lot of awful houses on the market that are not cared for, not clean, and don’t show well, so when we found a nice house, we had to move on it. We waited for as long as we could and put up with frayed and pulled carpet that we couldn’t keep clean because we couldn’t justify changing something that we knew was, well, new!
As a seller who has done renovations and then ended up selling, and then found out that the new carpet I had installed had been removed for hardwood flooring, I felt bad that those resources were just thrown away, both monetarily and physically. The carpet was perhaps 2 years old when I sold, and it was decent and clean carpeting and underlay. So, essentially, the money I spent ended up in the landfill. I had also moved the washer and dryer out of the garage, and joined a small bathroom with another separate small room to make a decent-sized laundry room/bathroom combination. This was all undone too, and a shower put in. Well, ok. Previously, the house only had 1 bathroom with bathing and showing capabilities, so that makes sense.
What advice would I give to my neighbor then? I would advise her to paint. Good quality paint is still a bargain, especially if you can do the painting yourself (and do a good job). Even hiring a painter is not a huge expense. A couple of coats of paint go incredibly far to making your home look spruced up and cared for. Tired and dinged walls get fixed, and the marks get covered over. Suddenly, the home looks sparkling clean. I also would say to this individual to not just go white or cream on the walls. Pick a neutral, certainly, and something not too dark, but something that has a bit of life in it and that works with the other colours. If there is tired old wallpaper, remove it and paint! Chicken-themed wallpaper in the kitchen is not going to appeal to anyone.
She should also do some repairs to things like sagging screen doors, doors that don’t work properly. Don’t defer the maintenance, because that gives the impression that nothing in the place is cared for. She could also de-clutter. She’s moving anyway, right? So why not get some boxes and do some packing. Less stuff will make the place look more open, hence larger, and the depersonalization will allow the new purchasers to envision themselves there.
If the carpet is old, but still in decent condition, I’d suggest this neighbor get it cleaned, and that’s it. I would suggest she NOT remove it only to put hardwood in. Who knows what the next buyer is going to like, or be like? If they have allergies, they’re likely to remove the carpet, but then look for a product that won’t react with their allergies. Is a seller likely to do that? Nope. Whatever is cheap and adds the lipstick is likely to be the choice, and then those products end up in the landfill prior to their life cycle just because they don’t work for the new owner.
I would also advise her to clean, clean, and then clean again. Clean behind the fridge, under the stove, the hood fan, get the cobwebs out of the top corners of the rooms – dig deep! If it’s sparkling clean, it shows well.
A seller can price her home accordingly, so less than others that have had expensive and extensive renovations, but then put the renovation money into the home she is going to be in for a while. She will get to enjoy the renovations herself, rather than just renovating for somebody else.
What an exciting time to be involved in Real Estate in Calgary! As mentioned in our Calgary Real Estate Stats for April 2014 article earlier this week, there are homes in certain price points that are literally “flying
off the shelves!”. Multiple offers are quite common and in fact, just this week, we had one situation where 9 offers were being considered for the same property!
As the buyer, one of the most exciting, yet stressful parts of the entire home buying process is negotiating an offer. Many of us have spent a fretful few hours, or even a sleepless night, while an endless series of questions filled our minds: Will the price be appealing? Will the offer be accepted? Can we come to terms about conditions? Will the deal go through?
While price is most certainly a major – if not the major – factor in whether or not an offer gets accepted, there are still a number of other considerations that all play a part in the decision-making process. This is particularly true in cases where multiple bids are being considered. Offers aren’t just about the price and how savvy a buyer is when putting one together can make all the difference.
Of course, having the right real estate professional to negotiate on your behalf is another major factor that could mean a difference of thousands of dollars in your pocket, or even whether the offer is accepted at all. Here are a few points that may help to improve your negotiating position:
•Choose a sales professional with a proven track record of success. You’ll benefit from the experience of a representative who has already negotiated the sale of similar homes in the same area.
•Be open, direct and completely frank with your sales representative . After all, they’re representing your best interests! To do it well, they’ll need to clearly understand your needs, your goals and your limitations.
•Make your offer as free of conditions as possible. There are many conditions that can be eliminated with a little advance planning. For example, if you pre-qualify for a mortgage, you won’t have to include a condition that allows you time to set up financing. Your Coldwell Banker professional can counsel you about the many options available to you.
•Keep the terms of your offer as close to the listing as possible. Remember, all things in an offer have value. The closing date or certain exclusions may have tremendous importance to the seller, but not to you. The closer your offer ‘mirrors’ the listing, the more appealing it will be.
Hope this helps,
Susanita de Diego
It’s been all over the media, the Calgary Real Estate Market is currently in a “Seller’s Market” pattern.
What does this mean for Buyers?
Well, it depends on which of the following categories the Buyer is in;
1.Wants to buy. This category represents a Buyer who will buy if the right property comes along but they are not in a hurry. Perhaps they are currently renting or they currently own a home but can afford to buy their next home without having to sell the home they are in.
2.Needs to buy. This category represents a Buyer moving to Calgary from somewhere else who has a limited time in which to find their home in Calgary. Also included in this category is a Buyer who has already sold their home, or a renter whose lease is up and must vacate their rental property.
If a Buyer is in the needs to buy category, this market can represent a lot of frustration. The properties that come on the market that represent good value do not stay on the market long and are often sold for over the asking price with multiple offers.
Not only does the Buyer need to view the property almost as soon as it hits the market, they then have to make what feels like an incredibly quick decision about making an offer, and to make matters even more stressful, they have to decide the maximum amount that they would pay for that property without regretting that price one way or another down the road. Some Buyers will even decide not to include important conditions in order to improve the odds of getting their offer accepted by the Seller.
So what is the best strategy if you are in the need to buy category? First and foremost know your position. Have you been pre-approved? Do you know how long your lender needs for the financing condition? Do you need a subject to financing clause? Based on the condition of the property do you want to have an inspection as a condition or can you include the inspection as a term, which would allow you to have an inspection but you would make any necessary repairs after you take possession. Are you qualified to make that kind of decision? If you are planning to live in the property for a long period of time, how much over perceived “market value” are you willing to pay if you are in competition with another Buyer or Buyers? Try to align your offer with the Seller’s inclusions and possession date. And last but not least, if you are in competition, make sure you are with your Realtor at the time they are presenting your offer. Your presence allows you to make quicker changes if necessary.
If you are in the wants to buy category, and you do not want to utilize any of the above strategies, you might want to consider holding off your purchase until the market has changed. No one can definitively tell you when this change will occur, and the prices will likely have gone up, but the process will be less stressful.
Hope this helps,
Susanita de Diego
With spring and summer months fast approaching in Calgary, many home owners are planning home improvement projects that may include finally getting around to building that new (or larger) deck, 
or…tired of brushing snow off the vehicle, perhaps you have decided to build a detached garage or car port so you are ready for next winter!
Whether you are a “do-it-yourselfer” or are hiring a professional, one of the requirements of your home improvement project may be to acquire a building permit. Although considered by many to be an added inconvenience and expense, building permits are actually important safeguards that help ensure you get sound workmanship and good value for your money. As well, if you are considering selling your home in the future, not being able to produce building permits could potentially spoil a deal, or at the very least, cause a significant delay in the closing.
You should check with the local authorities in your city or municipality prior to beginning work to see if a permit is required. Applying for a building permit ensures that your project conforms to local building codes and other regulations. Your project will be inspected by a qualified building inspector to confirm that the project follows the plans submitted for the permit. The inspector also ensures that appropriate materials and construction methods have been used for the safe usage of your project. For example, if the beams on your raised deck won’t support the maximum weight or the wiring is inadequate to safely run the lighting system you’d planned, the inspector will point this out and then return to verify that the appropriate remedies have been made before approving your project.
These measures are all to your benefit. After all, who wants to find out after you’ve already built a new deck that’s it’s too close to your neighbour’s property? In such a case, they could require you to remove the offending structure at your own expense. As for ensuring that your project used the correct construction materials and conforms to safety standards, the benefits are obvious.
Even if you’re working with a professional contractor, it’s to your benefit to ensure that a permit is obtained, so your contractor’s work will be scrutinized by a ‘pro’. Building permits are always required if you’re making any structural changes to your home, are building an addition onto an existing structure or adding a new improvement to your property. While regulations vary within municipalities, other types of projects may also require permits, particularly if electrical work is required. Some less than professional contractors may encourage you to initiate work without bothering with a permit. Be warned! This will simply allow your contractor to do substandard work without any unbiased party there to ensure that the job has been done to code. If the contractor implies the job will be cheaper without the permit, you should ask yourself why that is so.
Don’t proceed under the misguided assumption that if you do the work yourself, a building permit isn’t necessary. Not so! You’re responsible for ensuring that any home improvements conform to local regulations. That means you’re also liable for any costs that may be incurred to correct a problem, either during or after construction. If you’re in doubt, contact your local authorities before you start.
For Calgary residents, visit the City of Calgary Permits (Building Permits) page for detailed information on requirements for basement developments, detached garages, car ports, decks and many other home improvement projects.
Good luck with your home improvement projects!
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