The cat.

I didn’t want you all to think the cat’s got my tongue, so I offer proof that he’s quite empty-pawed.  Everybody’s pretty much settled in here now, and enjoying the new home more than our apartment life.

It’s hard to guess if our timing was right on a macro-economic level.  Even after we’ve bought the house, I still read a lot of the Canadian real estate blogs.  Garth Turner’s The Greater Fool, being a regular one, even though a quick Google search will reveal he has a lot of people disagreeing with his take.  He’s very cynical of the housing market – and I largely agree with him — but his warnings tend to be more directed at unfunded first-time buyers and baby boomers who risk losing everything before heading into their mythical retirement.  (In defence of my hypocrisy, we bought under budget with a large downpayment we’d saved – with some left over – and even moved across the country just to take advantage of better valuations for the money.)

A fun read is FML Listings, which, as the acronym suggests is a Tumblr blog which collects real estate listings from Toronto where the author finds themself hopelessly priced out, despite being what society might still consider to be a healthy middle class contributor into the economy.  Together they really illustrate how house prices, especially in major markets, have risen beyond the average wage earner’s ability to pay.  Garth crunches the numbers and FML offers that exasperated interpretation of their absurdity.

Yes, there are a lot of positive voices out there on the real estate market.  I don’t tend to listen to them.  For one, we’ve seen bubbles burst all over the world as a result of the same (or even lesser) root causes we’ve created here.  I’ve also sat at an editor’s desk for a few years and I know where most of the positive press comes from.  It’s not from fair or balanced analysts.  It’s all just real estate industry press releases that get bombarded into editors’ inboxes and across their fax machines – and the mainstream media swallows them up.  These, along with the NDP commenting on recent government policy, and chiropractors looking to write free health columns, represented the three pillars of wasted paper cluttering my desk.   As an editor, you don’t want to run partisan pieces for one of the parties ahead of the others.  I already had columnists covering wider health topics and couldn’t devote the space to a new columnist who would be so specialized.  That leaves the real estate blasts, and when an editor has column inches to fill and wants to find something “positive” to print — because the MSM is constantly fighting the accusations of being nothing but doomsayers — they drop the cheerful little morsel onto the page and go to press.  Afterall, there’s always a massaged statistic to back it up and an actual real estate agent to take credit for it, as a qualified expert.  It’s either that or you milk the latest police briefs for last minute material, and who wants to read about another mugging or how many drunk drivers got picked up on the weekend.

Jim Flaherty’s budget is due out March 29.  There are cuts anticipated.  There might be some bones in there to throw the dogs off the scent of the robocall scandal.  One of the other inclusions is rumoured to be another poke at deflating the housing bubble that the Tories created in earlier budgets.  Insured amortizations are expected to drop again to a maximum of 25 years (down from the high of 40 that Flaherty put in a few years ago to really the this mess entrenched.)  There could be increases in required down payments although I haven’t heard as much about that.  Little by little, the market has to be scaled back before too much blood is scented in the water and the whole thing comes down.

As first-time buyers, it would have been good for us to take advantage of the ensuing collapse.  But, we didn’t.

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 We had six weeks now, to get everything sorted.  Our closing was right after New Year’s in the first week of January.  We were referred to a building inspector before we left.  My father took a second trip down on the Tuesday after we’d negotiated the sale, and he walked through with him.  We were quite happy with the outcome.  Nothing major needed to be changed right away and we were told that the building was excellent structurally, well insulated and well-wired with enough amperage leftover for a hot tub (once my mid-life crisis hits full swing.)

After that, there was a lot of waiting followed by short gaps of rushing.  The very basic sales agreement we’d signed directly with the sellers needed to be rewritten more properly, then signed and forwarded to the bank and back and forth.  We tried to get our parts done immediately and whether it was the banker or the lawyer or nervous sellers, everyone always told us to hurry — then as we got everything back, they’d sit it on it for a week, waiting for another party to sign something or send something.  Our banker sat on the official mortgage application for about two weeks, until I called and pressured.  Turns out, he thought we were still missing documents even though we’d had them to him the next day.  A local notary in Cooksville finally made everything official.

My wife interviewed nine moving companies.  Some were typical domestic carriers and some were local Korean firms.  They all wanted an arm and a leg even though we only had a couple of big pieces to move.  We were planning to sell or trash our TV and sofa, and being hitherto apartment-dwellers, we had no major appliances yet.  The average quote was double what we paid to originally move up to Toronto from Halifax — and that had been in 2008 at the peak of gas prices.  We eventually found a great Korean company at a very affordable price.  My wife had a good impression of the owner right away and it served us well.  He brought over some boxes and we (mostly my wife) started packing.  I finished my last few weeks at work in the Mississauga office, hoping to get loose ends tied up and be ready for a fresh start as soon as we landed in our new house at the beginning of the year.

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It was off to Halifax. We hit the road the second week of November, 2011. The first stop was with my parents in New Brunswick who were cautiously thrilled with the news. We knew we had to maximize our searching over a short period of two to three days, while we finished the journey to Halifax and stayed in a hotel. It was a very different mood that settled on us. From the moment we entered the city, we felt the familiarity and it encouraged us that we’d made the right choice.

We could also afford to be a bit choosier with what we wanted, although our budget was now scaled back to account for any eventualities here. With the local economy being that much behind Toronto’s, we didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew should our situation change over the longterm. While houses were cheaper, salaries are lower (should I ever need to switch jobs) and the cost of living is generally higher. ( Once everything was settled, our first couple of grocery bills would give us pause.) The other big problem for us is that 90% of the homes here are oil heated and I detest oil heat. Not only are fuel prices at a four-year high, but I’ve heard too many horror stories of the oil deliveryman sticking the pump in and not getting it firmly in the tank. Basements get ruined and if it leaks outside you’re on the hook for environmental clean up. It’s just not worth it. We liked the natural gas in Ontario but very few houses here have it implemented yet. The only one I saw that offered natural gas was a fifty-year-old home that had undergone the upgrade.

Having spent so many years here I have a bit of a network already. I tracked down my old banker for a new, local pre-approval. She’d moved on but referred me to a good mortgage agent at her new branch. They in turn referred us to a local realtor who went around with us for the two days we were in town. He’d prepared some listings at first but since we were well-versed with the MLS website, left it up to us after that. It may have been the case, but travelling with a small infant sometimes means that while you have the skills, you don’t have the time.

We looked at about a dozen houses, I suppose. Our price range and the neighbourhoods we were open to caused us to look first at Timberlea, which was a little far out and the newer constructions didn’t seem too solid from the examples we saw. We saw a couple of listings in Bedford in our price range but they were oddities, perched high up on rock faces. Normally Bedford would be the go-to place for a middle class family like us, but I didn’t want to be on the hook for the extra $30-40k it would likely cost us above budget. I liked the thought of living near the ocean in Eastern Passage but it’s a bit removed from city services and some of the area has a bad reputation. We were about to look at Sackville, but while driving with friends we ended up going through the newer part of Colby Village and quite liked it. We decided to focus on that part of Dartmouth.

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We’ve passed all the major hurdles now, and I’m happy to report that we are enjoying this Sunday evening, sitting back as homeowners now — well, so much as being mortgagers constitutes ownership.

It’s been a real wild ride, especially over the last week, and I’d like to recount a lot of what happened. It’s suitable for several posts and I plan to look at the issues of househunting and homebuying from our persective and recent experience.  I don’t think we are the only ones with buyers’ anxiety these days.  There is a lot of talk of the Canadian real estate bubble bursting, and I’d certainly preached of it happening for the past few years, but we lept in regardless. 

We did it in ways that a Chicken Little like me felt reasonably comfortable.   We saved for a number of years and managed a significant downpayment – so even a “worst case” downgrade in property values wouldn’t put us in an underwater mortage.  We bought through a private sale, and went through a lawyer friend of mine, so we saved significantly on the middleman fees.  We set a strict budget and came in under it for the purchase (which is good because various other spending to get things ready came out higher than we’d budgeted.)  We also picked up stakes to move back east, feeling much more comfort once we focused on finding a house closer to family, and living in a city that both my wife and I had found to be friendly and beautiful from our own experiences.  Sure the economy is rough in the Maritimes – but it’s even rough in Ontario these days – and a real important element was that I am able to continue work for my Mississauga-based company via a home office.

That work resumes tomorrow, so I’ll end this post here and will be off to get some sleep soon.   Over the next short while, I’ll make a point to elaborate on those parts of the story I rhymed off above, so check back in.