Insights · Blog
Notes on Buying, Selling & Investing
Straight talk from someone who has spent 20 years on both sides of the table.
Straight talk from someone who has spent 20 years on both sides of the table.
Most buyers walk into a home and ask “can I see myself living here?” That’s a fair question — but it’s an incomplete one. After twenty years of buying and holding rental property, I can’t turn off the second question: “what does this property actually cost to own, and what does it protect against?”
That doesn’t mean every home has to pencil out like a rental. It means a few habits are worth borrowing from investors, whether you’re buying a starter condo or your forever home:
Price the carrying cost, not just the mortgage. Strata fees, property tax, insurance and maintenance don’t show up on the listing headline, but they show up on your bank statement every month. Know the full number before you fall in love with the place.
Think about resale before you buy, not after. Layout, parking and location drive resale value more than finishes do. Finishes are the easiest thing to change later; a bad floor plan or a bad location isn’t.
Don’t skip the inspection to win a bidding war. Every investor I know has a story about the one time they waived it. It’s rarely a good story.
If you’re weighing a purchase — whether it’s a home to live in or your first rental — I’m happy to run the numbers with you before you write an offer.
The number in the advertisement is not an offer. It is the best case, for the strongest file, on the narrowest product. Most buyers find that out late, usually after they have already told…
Most buyers cannot answer this question in one sentence. They say "we need more space" or "it feels like the right time", and then they spend three months touring homes that have nothing in…
Buyers walk into a home and react to the counters, the flooring and the light fixtures within the first minute. Those are the three things in the house that cost the least to change. The…
A buyer decides how they feel about your home before they reach the kitchen. They decide it on the walk from the car to the front door, and in the first few seconds inside the hall.…
A buyer cannot notice a feature they cannot see. The big window is behind a closed blind. The hardwood is under a rug. The dining room is an office, a craft table and a place the bikes…
A showing is the one time the street is staged. It is booked for a quiet hour, the seller has moved the cars, and the buyer spends thirty minutes inside and thirty seconds outside. Then…
Every listing is "close to everything." That phrase means nothing, because everything is not where you go. You go to eight or ten places, over and over, and the only location that matters…
Most buyers scroll past the floor plan and study the photos. That is backwards. A photo is taken with a wide lens from the corner of the room that makes it look largest, and it is chosen…
Most buyers walk into a home and react to the finishes. The counters, the flooring, the light fixtures, the colour on the walls. A year after you move in, none of that is what you notice.…
When you buy a condo in British Columbia you are not only buying the space inside your walls. You are buying a share of a corporation that owns the building around it, and you are agreeing…
Amenities sell condos. A gym on the listing sheet, a rooftop deck in the photos, a guest suite mentioned on the tour. Here is the part that does not make the brochure: every one of those…
A townhome is a compromise, and that is the reason it works. You get your own front door, usually a garage, usually some outdoor space, and stairs instead of neighbours above and below you.…
A townhome shows well because it is bright and easy to walk through in ten minutes. Four things decide whether it works for the next ten years, and none of them are in the photos: the…
A detached house is the only kind of home where nobody else has a say and nobody else has a bill. No strata council votes on your windows. No bylaw tells you what goes on the patio. No…
A yard sells a house on a sunny Saturday in June. Then you own it, it is August of the second year, and you are cutting grass you never walk on. Outdoor space is the one feature buyers…
Most people start looking at rental listings before they have decided what the rental is supposed to do for them. That is backwards, and it is expensive. The purpose is the thing that tells…
Every rental spreadsheet ends in a number, and the number always looks solid. It is not. It is the output of seven or eight guesses stacked on top of each other, and if two of them are…
Almost nobody moves because they felt like moving. There is a reason underneath, and it is usually personal before it is practical. A job that started or ended. A baby coming. A separation.…
The first months in a new home are when the routines set. Where you park, which door you use, whether the kids walk or get driven, whether you cook or pick something up on the way home,…
Most first meetings with an agent are one-sided. The agent presents, the client nods, and nobody establishes how the next several months are actually going to work. That is a wasted…
A move looks like one transaction with one agent in the middle of it. It is really six or seven people doing separate jobs on a shared clock. Almost every deal I have seen go wrong went…
A house does not fail suddenly. It fails slowly, in a place nobody looks, and then it presents the whole bill at once. I own and manage rental units, which means I have seen the same small…
"Will it add value?" is the question I hear most when a homeowner is thinking about a change. For a home you plan to live in for years, it is the wrong first question. The right one is…
I host open houses most weekends, and I watch the same thing happen every time. Visitors walk in, look at the furniture, comment on the counters, photograph the view and leave. They have…
A buyer does not buy the home you live in. They buy the home they walked through on a Saturday afternoon between two other appointments. That walk-through, from the moment they look for…
A housing headline is a single number standing in for thousands of separate transactions, spread across a whole region, across houses and townhouses and condos, across neighbourhoods that…
Most of what people call research is reading about the market. That is the least useful kind, because you cannot buy the market. You buy one property, with one history, one set of documents…
I came to Canada from Mexico, and I chose Langley. Not a province, not a general idea of the West Coast. A specific place, for specific reasons, after seeing what the alternatives actually…
The move takes a day. The community takes years. That gap is the part nobody plans for, and it is the reason some families love a home they were unsure about and others are quietly unhappy…
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