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Archive for the ‘Property’ category

Finding a Good School for Your Kids

June 1st, 2010

We are currently planning to buy a house in Ontario, Canada. One of our criteria is, of course, location. It has to be closed to a good school. Although we don’t have kids yet; we are planning to have ones in the near future. It would be nice to have a house near a good school; so that our kids can just walk to their schools.

After doing some research, we found a good web site that provides school rankings in US and Canada, called CompareSchoolRankings.org. Unfortunately, not all states and provinces are available. For Canada, it provides rankings for schools in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario provinces. It’s good enough for us since we are based in Ontario.

There are a couple of things we can do on CompareSchoolRankings.org. The most obvious one is displaying school ranking in our areas. For example, the following table shows the school rankings in Greater Toronto area.

We can also display a map displaying schools in certain areas. It has legend showing which schools are good (green color) and which ones are not that good (red color).

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Posted in Property

Tags: british columbia elementary high school kids ontario Property real estate school

Average Home Price in Toronto Surge 20%

April 21st, 2010

In our last posting, we had a rant about our house in Vancouver area. The property market seems to have fully recovered there, the average home price has even reached all-time high.

Today, we checked the property market in Greater Toronto Area from Toronto Real Estate Board. The chart looks pretty much the same. The average home price also has reached all-time high recently. What is more interesting is the fact the the price has jumped about 20% in the last 12 months.

Is the trend still healthy or is it in bubble yet? Let’s check chart below and apply Rule 72. The current price is about $450,000, and we have the half of that price, i.e. $225,000, in year 1998. It means it takes about 12 years to double the price. Using Rule 72, we can conclude that the annual price increase is about 6% (72 / 12). It looks that the trend is still healthy.

Note that the calculation above is just approximation. First of all, we just used the chart below without knowing the actual numbers. Secondly, Rule 72 itself is also an approximation.

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Posted in Property

Tags: gta home price house Property toronto

Property in Vancouver is Still Bubble?

April 19th, 2010

For those who don’t know, we used to live in Vancouver area, British Columbia, for a couple of years. We bought a town-house there about 3 years ago. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay longer because of the recession. I almost lost my job because my company was in trouble. We had to move to Ontario where the jobs are.

Although we move to Ontario, we still keep our town-house. The property market in Vancouver area was really bad when we left. We didn’t want to sell it below our purchase price. So, we decided to rent it out.

A couple of days ago, we received an assessment letter from BC Assessment. Our town-house is assessed with the value of $336,000. It is far below our purchase price, $382,000. We were a little bit shocked for a moment. As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, Canadian housing price seems to have recovered from its low.

Then, we checked MLS listing to see if any of our neighbours are selling their houses. Yes…, there is one neighbour who is selling their house. Their model is pretty much the same to ours. Their assessment value is also the same to ours. Guess what, they’re listing it for $469.000! We had another shock. Why is it far above our purchase price now?

We checked another source of data, i.e. Plunge-O-Meter. The chart below shows the average house price in Vancouver area since 1999. As you can see, there is a significant dip in late 2008 and early 2009. Then the market recovered quickly starting in mid-2009 to continue its long-term trend, moving even higher.

It makes more sense now. BC Assessment assessed our property value on July 1, 2009. This is where the market is bottoming. Since then, the price has gone up significantly, it’s now even higher than the previous peak in early 2008.