Lee Quaile Broker of Record Earlier this week, we got underway with the first of what will be an ongoing series of short community profiles about some of the smaller real estate markets which surround the Kitchener-Waterloo area. As prices have increased in larger urban areas over the past several years, we’ve seen an influx of buyers turning to these communities as more budget-friendly (and...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record A few weeks ago, I posted a short article which outlined the dynamics which are causing smaller-market towns all over Southwestern Ontario to experience a surge in buyer interest and new home construction. As a quick recap, there are two primary forces at play here: 1) Ever-increasing average prices in markets immediately surrounding the GTA over the past several years...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record A Cautionary Tale. My final post this week is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual analysis.  Instead, I’d like to bring a real-life event to your attention – something which occurred just this past week at my own brokerage, and it’s a situation that highlights just how valuable proper representation in the real estate world can be. I know many...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record As the cost of entry for home ownership continues to defy gravity in the Waterloo-Wellington area, it was always inevitable that we’d eventually see a consequent bump up in average monthly rents here, too.  People need somewhere to call home – and when they’re being priced out of home ownership in ever-greater numbers, they turn to the rental...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record I don’t often break my professional focus on these pages, but if you already know me well, then you’ll know that not much gets me more fired up than a Leafs winning streak!  While the residential resale market has been absolutely on fire over the past several weeks too (I’ll get into a little stats recap later on), I couldn’t help but be tempted to lead off...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Real estate news in Kitchener-Waterloo was absolutely dominated in 2020 by massive increases in sales prices year over year in every part of the housing market.  And when the average sale price of a single detached home surged above $850,000 for the first time ever just this past month, eclipsing even the 16.9% average increase we saw between December of 2019 and...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Here in Ontario, ‘Cottage Country’ is often synonymous with Muskoka. It’s easy to see why this is the case – Southern Ontario, after all, is powered largely by the economics and demographics of the GTA. For city dwellers in search of an accessible playground for their summer holidays, the resort towns of Gravenhurst and Bracebridge with their historic downtowns,...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Several years back, I published an article on my blog titled “The Expanding Small(er) Markets of Southwestern Ontario”, in which I did my best to counter a prevailing narrative at the time that small towns in Ontario were slowly dying out.  While it’s true that population growth in ‘census metropolitan areas’ (as Statistics Canada refers to larger urban...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Real estate markets in Waterloo Region weathered 2020 in far better shape than many initial projections would have suggested.  For example, who else remembers that now-infamous CMHC report from last spring which forecast a drop in average sale prices of as much as 18 percent?  In reality, average sale prices in Kitchener-Waterloo increased over the one-year...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record It need hardly be said again that 2020 was a year unlike all others.  Expectations being defied and norms being cast aside were common threads which seemed to run through each aspect of the year, since our lives changed dramatically last spring with the onset of an ongoing emergency in our province, country, and the entire world.  Every industry was forced to...