FEDERAL HOUSING POLICY PRIMER Lee QuaileBroker of Record With less than three weeks now left to pass until election day, campaign rhetoric and promises are tumbling out of the various political war rooms at an increasingly frenzied rate. It can be tough for the average voter to keep up with where each party stands on everything from environmental issues to foreign policy, to taxation… and...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Of the many population centres and market towns which surround our portion of Southern Ontario, the City of Woodstock is one of the larger ones within a 45-minute drive of Kitchener-Waterloo.  With a population now north of 40,000 residents, the seat of Oxford County has in recent years become an increasingly popular option for would-be homebuyers exasperated by...

What does this campaign promise mean in practice? Lee Quaile & Erik ErwinBroker of Record & Sales Representative,Chestnut Park West With the announcement of this year’s impending Federal Election on September 20th, Canada’s six major political parties have all scrambled into campaign mode.  And aside from perennial top-of-the-ticket issues such as health care, unemployment, foreign...

Southern Ontario Homebuilders Face Increasing Obstacles Lee Quaile Broker of Record If there’s one overarching theme to this past year’s real estate market in Southern Ontario, it’s been the inadequacy of supply in keeping pace with surging demand from homebuyers.  This most fundamental of economic laws has served as an engine to drive prices ever higher in our region since early last...

Equity firms, REITs, & private investors have long been active in Ontario housing markets. Lee QuaileBroker of Record A Toronto-based developer made headlines in Canada’s business world last month when it announced its intention to pour $1 Billion into residential housing markets across the country.  The plan, as laid out by Core Development Group, is to buy up to 4,000 homes in targeted...

Rules for Homebuyers Lee QuaileBroker of Record Admitting failure and backtracking is difficult enough for most people, but when’s the last time you heard of a government-affiliated agency tapping out and issuing a public statement outlining their mistakes?  It’s a rare occurrence!  But that’s exactly what happened earlier this week when Canada’s federal housing agency (CMHC) came...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record As we round the corner from June into July and the summer holiday season gets well and truly underway, tradition dictates a seasonal slow-down in real estate markets.  At least, that’s how things have usually unfolded along historical lines.  But with an anything-but-normal past 18 months, are any of us out there really surprised by this point that sale...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Waterloo Region’s continued growth and resilience in the face of all obstacles has been a common thread across much of the material I’ve published over the past year and a half.  Real estate is, of course, the lens through which we’ve monitored the developments of an unpredictable and tumultuous time, but it must be said that a strong housing market is an...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record This week we’re making a return to our continuing series of profiles on the smaller towns and communities dotted throughout Chestnut Park West’s predominant market area. We’re also making a return to Wellington County, and to the township of Centre Wellington – Fergus, to be exact. An independent town until 1999 when it merged with the Village of Elora and a...

Key Things to Remember Lee Quaile Broker of Record Just yesterday our local real estate board released its monthly statistics report for the Kitchener-Waterloo market. The numbers tell a story which will, by now, be familiar to most of you – average sale prices are way up over last year, average time to sell is way down, more listings than ever are being sold each month, and a record number of...