We have seen a rash of purchase plus improvements…
In the last few months we have seen a number of young people trying to get into the housing market by buying lower priced houses that are in need of a bit of TLC.
I did this when I bought my first house way back when LOL and lost a bit of money. I thought my husband and I could get into the Edmonton market on the cheap and buy in a poorer area and fix it up.
Long story short, the house sucked us dry as we could only really handle the mortgage payments and every cent (other than the sardines) went into the house. Several years later we realized we should have listened to our then real estate agent’s pleas to wait and buy in another area. Our thoughts that if we fixed up our house, others would follow suit, never came to light and we could not sell the house when we wanted to move our son to a better neighbourhood. We were stuck with a rental in an area that only low quality tenants would live in. It only took two years of rentals and it was in worse shape than it started in. We had to count our losses and sold for about half of what we had into it.
Please read the article “STAY PUT” from Ben Tal re: the Ontario housing market.
The more expensive houses in the better areas are growing in value nicely but the mid to low end houses are not growing at all.
