Archive for category: Real Estate

The boomerang generation – a title freely used to describe most people who were born in the late 80’s and early 90’s, who are now in their 20’s, have gone to college or university, then moved straight back home. One of the main causes of this ‘boomerang generation’ phenomenon are the lack of available jobs in combination with the lack of affordable housing to these young people, who generally go broke from paying for school to get a degree that didn’t even earn them a job after-all…it’s a vicious cycle to say the least.

How do we break this cycle that’s causing such a distinct divide in the availability of social opportunities for our children? By sticking out our hands and helping our kids off the ground. It’s not really their fault they can’t afford a house or a car or their education…our generation sort of made it that way. We’re the ones with all the jobs and houses, so it’s no wonder there isn’t any room to share with our kids, unless we initiate their launch into the spectrum of social and financial responsibility.

Most of these boomerang victims are working enough to afford to pay rent, so instead of letting them continue to walk down the never-ending path of dissipating rent money, why not fork out for a down-payment for their first home? It sounds crazy, and it sounds like a lot of money, we get that, but when you look objectively at what it is – an investment – then there’s no need to panic. Position your family into a more financially stable and achievable situation by securely investing your money (especially with the market barely starting to recover from being bottomed-out), while pushing your kid into the real world by putting their name on the deed to a house and initiating the responsibility of mortgage payments to benefit their credit rating and social standing. After all, if you left it up to them to come up with a down-payment, let’s face it, they’re just going to hang around and wait for their inheritance, and nobody likes the sound of that.

A way to take this step even further would be to make the same investment if your “kid” is going to school abroad. Regardless of where they’re going, this same secure investment can be made to benefit both of your finances. They’ll be guaranteed a stable place to live throughout the course of their schooling while you make a secure investment.  The reason this is a secure window of time for the property’s value to raise to achieve profit on the re-sale once they return home from school with a pristine degree in their hands, is that their schooling can take anywhere from 4 to 10 years (or more) to complete, depending on the degree. Considering the current market prices, don’t think too much about it and just make the investment! The market’s about as close to bottoming out as it’s going to get, so the time’s never been better to take advantage of the next few years of growth and cash in, and to give your kid a fighting chance at entering ‘the real world’.

For more real estate and environmental news, be sure to check out the rest of our Blog and follow us on Twitter.

image courtesy of jollyjump

People have a problem with change. No need to gasp, this isn’t exactly a new concept – and frankly, to some extent, fearing change isn’t a big deal. If the change you don’t like is relative to your obsessive-compulsive resembling schedule, daily routine, or something personal that doesn’t affect those around you, then we can probably let that slide. The real problem is people who fear change and exercise their fear in situations where they impede progress or conflict with those around them. Look at climate change for example. We talk about this quite often – people are in denial about the concept of climate change because they fear the changes they may need to make to either a) prevent the issue from growing, or b) the changes they’ll need to make once their lives have been affected by climate change as a result of global negligence of the issue and its preventative measures.

But today we aren’t actually directly talking about climate change. We’re talking about how the fear of change directly impedes progress – the fear of change derived from stubbornness, “old-school” mentalities, and people being straight-up stuck in their ways. Getting to the point of all this, here’s the opening portion of a C|Net article we read that sparked the creation of this post:

“Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and his wife were trying to find a nice San Francisco neighborhood for their young family to call home. A year and half ago, they found what they were looking for, a 6,300-square-foot lot occupied by an early 1900s home that they now want to demolish to make way for a new house.”

Now, this article goes on to explain the intentions of Williams’ need for demolishing this early 1900’s home – to re-build the home as a zero net energy home.  His plans for the home include solar panels, a green roof, and sun-friendly glass. If you ask us, the demolition of this beautiful, yet very old home, is  not that big of a deal considering that its replacement would have less impact on the environment. This is where we come full-circle to the issue of change. Before Williams even submitted his plans for this newly purchased home, over 240 complaint were filed by surrounding neighbours.

This is exactly what we’re talking about where people, in the same instance as global warming, want things to stay the same for personal benefits rather than supporting the greater good of society or the environment. The sad part is how ill-informed the people submitting these complaints are, especially when looking at exemplary quotes like “TEAR DOWN is NEEDLESS, WASTEFUL, POLLUTION, DISRESPECTFUL,” which was written on a hand-written flyer and passed around by some long time residents of the neighbourhood to every house around; hence the overflow of complaints. It seems really unfair that based on personal opinion, stubbornness, and inconvenience, that one of the most progressively and sustainable houses the area is yet to encounter, is receiving so much negative attention and having unnecessary “road blocks” created for the project.

The moral of this story is that fear of change is detrimental to the social and environmental progression that we need to save our planet from a climate disaster. If people want to tear down archaic houses and place a new, socially and economically friendly property on its foundation, why not support it? We need to change our ways and progressively work toward a greener future, and yes, that will involve replacing a lot of buildings for ones that aren’t going to be detrimental to the environment. It’s just the way it has to be…

Tell us what you think about demolishing for the purpose of responsible re-construction, or any other feedback on Twitter.

image credit:  CNET

Calling all agents – we have a situation on our hands. A recent website, http://bidcomhomes.com/, has taken the real estate world by surprise, and is changing the structures of how you guys are making your commission.

Once upon a time, Giorgio Lupinacci asked some of his real estate agent friends if they’d lower their commission rate when he was looking at selling his property. To his surprise, none of them agreed to his proposition, so he took matters into his own hands and started bigcomhomes.com – a website where agents bid their commission rates on user-submitted listings in hopes to find an agent who’s willing to provide their clients with a more discounted rate than the standard format in BC: “seven per cent on the first $100,000 and 3.5 per cent on the remainder of the sale price”.

This website’s concept is raising some pulses in the real estate game, as it’s directly threatening the more or less monopolized MLS system, and the accustomed livelihood of many agents. Agents, we want to know what you think of this game changing website. Will only “certain types” of agents be using this service, or could this lead to the creation of an even more competitive market? Does this platform show potential for expansion? How would you feel about commission rates being more competitive altogether, should this concept catch on?

Let us know your answers on Twitter by using the hashtag #commissionproblems, or by commenting below. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

photo courtesy of CarbonNYC

Okay, so a month ago canadian mortgage laws were announced to be changed in a very drastic way. We even wrote a post about it –> http://www.realestateaccountingsoftware.ca/industry-news/buyers-beware/. Read it. You know you want to. Anyhow…when we originally wrote this post we did so in the form of a warning, with even the title being Buyers Beware. However, our warning, nor any other warnings, seem to be reaching the public on a large enough scale, which is a concerning notion.

The impending changes were announced June 20th, and when a survey took place between June 29th and July 4th, it unveiled that only 45% of Canadians are aware of the changes taking place. Not even half the country’s aware, which is quite upsetting…maybe the government needs to give our marketing guys a call to help get the word out when things this important happen. You’d think that there would be bigger efforts put forth to see that these changes were broadly understood…but apparently not.

To give you guys a re-cap, on July 9th, the maximum amortization length has been shortened from a 30 year maximum, to a 25 year maximum, with lenders also being limited to only providing home equity loans that cover 80% of the home’s value, as opposed to 85%. These little increments of 5 are a lot scarier than you’d think, especially for new home buyers, who are (those who know about these changes anyways) in relative awe at how much these changes will affect them. Not only do new buyers have to come up with an extra 5% for their down payment – which, if you were looking at purchasing a $500,000 home, your down payment down payment amount just increased from $75,000 to $100,000., and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it – but they also need to pay back this amount 5 years faster than before. The whole situation’s frankly sticky, especially since the government’s reason for doing this is to attempt home ownerships from being drawn out and to aid citizens in achieving their long-term goals…which is seemingly ironic, considering that these new laws will inhibit people from even beginning to reach their long term goals.

Feel free to share this article with fellow Canadians to ensure that the word is out about these changes to that buyers can be prepared. If you have any other comments we’d love to hear them, so join the conversation with us on Twitter.