What do you look for in a house?

By Shawn Lackie

Over the last 22 years, I have had more than a few clients looking to buy a new (to them) home. Some have been easy to please. Some not so much. But for the most part, it was an enriching and rewarding process. I take great pride in matching the right buyer with the right house.

That’s not always easy. In fact, it is seldom easy, for a myriad of reasons. Wrong size home. Wrong size lot. Don’t like the area. Needs too much work. Why is that street light there? Yes, that was one question.

On the whole, most buyers head into a search looking for the best home to suit their needs at the best price available. Forty years ago, that would have been fairly easy. In the last two decades, not so much. Today’s buyer is not interested in any kind of what I call sweat equity. That would involve buying a dumpy home and fixing it up so when you sold in a few years, you would make a substantial profit and put that new money into your next purchase. In most cases, a larger home in a more desirable area. If you could see the future, you might be able to predict which areas were the next hot market. Before the days of mass gentrification.

The first home we bought was in a seedy, somewhat run-down neighbourhood. Known mostly for its proximity to the Beaches, the main Post Office and Canada Metal. We found out AFTER we bought that the soil in the yards in the area may be contaminated. Nothing quite like raising a kid in a lead-poisoned yard. Then along came gentrification, and voilà, the trendy Leslieville was born.

There was a very cool eatery in the area, which we would frequent with our newborn. Fun times, but after two robberies in the area, it was time to move on.

I guess what I am trying to say, in a most circuitous manner, is that there really is no exact science to this whole process. I have always maintained that you don’t find the house, it finds you. I can’t tell you how many times I have had buyers out, wandering through multiple houses. Just when I thought this would never end, I hear the wowie moment. Takes the breath away, and you can see them light up and say, yes, this IS the place.

I had a client who was a star quarterback in the Canadian Football League, and I was taking him around to multiple listings on weekends when he, and later his wife, would fly in from Calgary. They were starting to get frustrated, and I had heard he was considering finding an agent through an ex-teammate. I knuckled down and prepared a game plan for that weekend. With the playbook and everything. We got to the seventh home that Saturday, and she just went 'oh ya'. We drew up an offer, and they accepted it. It just showed me, you just never know. So what you do is put your client in the best possible position to buy. Funny how that works out.

Feel free to check out this story and more on my blog site at: https://slackie14.wixsite.com/buy-sell-and-more.