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Archive for the ‘Properties’

My Favourite Money Mistake

November 27, 2007 By: The Financial Blogger Category: Miscellaneous, Properties 7 Comments →


The funniest part about taking your time and energy managing your personal finance is that you become more inclined to make money mistakes. The idea behind all this is fairly simple; the more you know about finance, the more you want to make things by yourself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Today’s post is in related to Canadian Capitalist 3rd year anniversary contest where he was asking bloggers about their money mistakes. I thought it could be interesting to write about how I dilapidated ten thousand dollars a few years ago. Yes, I lost ten thousand loonies in a single decision at the age of 24 when I decided to sell my house with a real estate agent.
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house cash

Selling in a hurry

It all started when my wife and I fell in love with a house in our neighbourhood. We visited the property and made an offer the very same day (and we got late for our Easter supper with my parents!). The next morning, we put our own property for sale in the hope of a fast sale. We put it in the newspaper, on the internet and even tried the TV! After three weeks, we had about five visits and several phone calls but no offer yet. The owner of the house we wanted to buy we still having visits and phone calls as we only made a conditional offer. After a month, even though we already spent about $1,000 in ads, we decided to accelerate the process and give the mandate to a real estate agent. Big mistake!

No results whatsoever

I wrote in my introduction that I have a tendency of doing things myself when it comes down to finance. Well I should have done it in this case! We kept having the same rate of visits per week and most of the time, the potential buyers were coming from other agents, not even ours! In the end, it took him four additional months to sell our property and he convinced us to drop our asking price by a couple of thousands in order to make sure we don’t scare the people away.

How much does it cost?

Since he “sold” my property, I had to pay him a pretty fat commission. 5% of the selling price were making 10K that I could have keep for myself. Instead, the agent simply created additional miscommunication between all parties. In result of this communication breakdown, I had to pay an additional $600 in interest penalty to the buyers. This fee could have been easily avoided if communication were related to each party properly. As we have no right (or so every agent is telling us) to contact the other party without going through any real estate agent, it just creates a big mess.

The reason why it is my favourite money mistake is because even if I loss 10K out of this story, I learned a lot from it:

#1 The use of a real estate agent does not accelerate of your property

#2 They cost way too much for the service they provide

#3 They add more confusion and miscommunication as the buy and the seller can not talk to each other directly

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Buying A Better House : The Location

November 23, 2007 By: The Financial Blogger Category: Properties No Comments →

While I am refinancing my property, I had this flash in the bus yesterday: Why do I love my house so much? There must be a tons of reasons, right? I have lived in fifteen houses so far, maybe I could determine what are the things to consider when buying a property in order to not only make the right choice but also to benefit from a great appreciation in value. I think it could be particularly interesting as the housing market is going down in USA and is stabilizing (except for Alberta and British Columbia) in Canada. house
Why the location is so important?

The location of your property is really important as you have little control over it once you have moved in. If there is a commercial center in your backyard, chances are that you will hear trucks loading and unloading goods all day long. No matter what you do and how many petition you have signed, the commercial center will stick in your neighbourhood and you will have to live with it. Therefore, you must establish in what kind of environment you wish to live before looking for properties. If you do not determine this factor upfront, you may fall in love with a property in a wrong location.

Think about the others too

Most people will live in the same property over a long period of time. I rarely sleep in the same bedroom more than three years. My parents used to buy, renovate and sell properties as a living. I guess it is now stuck in my blood as I lived at three different places in the last five years. When you buy a property, its location is not only important for your needs but also for the time that you will sell your property. Others’ perception is really important when you want to sell your house.

I bought my first house at the end of a street. I really liked it because I did not have neighbours behind my house. My backyard was ending on an empty field. I liked the fact that it was more peaceful and quiet. However, when I put this house for sale, I noticed that many people were reluctant to buy a property without neighbours around. They were asking about possibility of having rats or were asking how was it during winter time with the wind and the snow.

The worst part is that I thought it would be more peaceful based on the fact that I had only two neighbours. I was shocked to realize that it was a quite busy area. In fact, every single person with a dog in my town was going there to take walks. They were leaving their puppies running free in the field. Almost everyday, they used to end-up in my backyard or my front yard doing what they do best (just think about Paris ;-) ). The other things that bugged me is that many teenagers were going back in forth at the of the street to trade w..e..e…d…. or hockey cards maybe?

My latest purchase

I bought the house live into about a year ago. It is in a new area with neighbours surrounding my house. Believe it or not, this neighbourhood is much quieter than the field. All this because people mind their own business. I must admit that I had to pay a higher price to live in this area but it worth every penny! My street is about 40 houses and I am less than 10 minutes walk from the bus stop. I definitely might stay longer in this one!

Some key points to look at:

- Transport proximity (bus, metro, train)

- School proximity (5-10 minutes would be perfect, you do not want to have a tons of kids right beside your house either!)

- Neighbourhood quality (just by looking at their yard, you will have an idea of what is going on within their walls;-))

- Electric lines (we don’t know yet if it dangerous or not, but one thing is sure is that it’s ugly!)

- Be close to a boulevard or a highway (then again 5-10 minutes would be perfect. You can easily get out of town but you are not in the middle for the street noises)

- Look at newer development (in general, properties in those areas will gain in value over the next ten years after their creation)

- The city itself (a young city will gather all the newest and coolest stores and the infrastructure will be in a much better shape)

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Selling my House, Quite an Experience Part 2

July 25, 2007 By: The Financial Blogger Category: Properties 5 Comments →

Before reading this post, you should turn your eyes a little bit further on the right and have your mouse pointer follow. Then, you will notice a big orange button… CLICK ON IT! If my “persuasion technique” does not work on you, well please just sign up for this blog RSS Feed by clicking on that orange button;-) Then, you’ll get my daily post in your email everyday!

In my previous post about selling my house, I explained my experience with Realtors of this world and how it got more complicated and longer than solving a 10,000 pieces puzzle. Today, I will be writing about how fast an easy it was to sell to of my parents’ property and complicated to by the next property with a real estate agent. According to my opinion, with little researches and little money, anybody can sell their house without an agent.

First things, first, a little bit of my parents’ history in the housing market; since the early 80’s they have bought and sold about 12 properties. They used to buy a house, renovate it, live in it for about a year or so and sell it. They were getting the biggest part of their income from this process. With the first 10 properties, they were dealing with the same real estate agent. A great complicity had grown up and they were all making good money out of this relationship.

About 10 years ago, they decided once again to put their house for sale. They signed the same agent as usual for a period of 3 months. During this period of time, almost nothing happened. They had about 3 visits and no offer on the table. Definitely, there was nothing to get excited about. As Christmas was coming, they decided to celebrate without any bugs and get the house out of the market. Spring season arrived and their friend/agent was on vacation for two months. My parents wanted to start looking for new house right away and decided to try to sell their house by themselves.

Only 3 days after they put the house on the market, someone knocked on their door without a notice, visited the same day and made the offer at the end of the day. My parent didn’t even use internet back then! On top of saving 5% on 135K ($6,750 plus taxes), they sold the house 10K more than the agent told them to sell at. Therefore, without any effort, they mad $16,750 more that if they would have sold their property 6 months before with a real estate agent.

They quickly turn around and made an offer on a riverside property. They had previously visited this property while they were with their friend/agent six month ago. They ask the agent that was selling the property if it was make any difference and he assured that everything is in order and that they could purchase this house without giving anything back to their friend. Man, I swear some people don’t know what they are doing!

When their friend came back from vacation, she heard about my parent selling their house and buying the other one without her help (to read: without having her making the sell commission). She then decided to show how a good friend she was by suing my parent for the purchase of the property. My parents thought they were covered as the other agent told them to not worry about it. They went to see a lawyer and discover they deceptive truth: they really owed her commission on the purchase of the property. In the end, they still made more money with the sale of their property even after paying this commission.

With this little piece of life, I do not want to show real estate agents as incompetents individuals or that they are not acting in good faith. I simply wanted to demonstrate that some of them (and this is the same case in any profession) do not really care or understand all legal aspects of a transaction. They are claimed to be professional, but really it requires a 6 months course to obtain their license. It is the exact same situation with financial advisor. Some of them are really good, some others are clowns. In the end, do not foolishly think that you are protected if you are doing business with a real estate agent. They are less responsible for legal issue than you might think.

 

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The credit card application is submitted to the concerned authoritative official of any credit card company for the issuance of creditcard. You may get services of the financial consultant for the debt collection in the proper way. The advisory services of the expert financial advisor help a lot for the appropriate debt management. In the case of non-payment of all installments on time, the banks or other loan companies are liable to repossess the actual property and this process is known as foreclosure. The mortgage brokers are running their business of loan brokerage in order to get the massive amount of charges. The central mortgage corporation provides all necessary mortgage products and services for the borrowers in the affordable charges.