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...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Over the past few years, particularly in unusually hot markets such as our own here in Southwestern Ontario, buyers and sellers alike have become accustomed to multiple offer scenarios. While the concept of multiple offers is simple enough on its face, there are myriad of underlying factors and dynamics that can make it a potential minefield for both buyers looking for...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record Between the day-to-day running of a newer real estate office, and with the Kitchener-Waterloo market now in full-on ‘spring mode’, it’s been quite some time since I’ve had a chance to update my blog. I’d like to share a few quick thoughts on the current state of affairs in Waterloo Region, and on where I see things going from here for the remainder of...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record It’s a common assumption when a market starts to cool that the worst-case scenario is imminent. But instead, let’s take a moment to revisit what the previous market was like from a buyer’s point of view. The action was fast and furious with homes being listed and then sold, often in a matter of hours. Buyers struggled to understand prices as houses sold for far...

Lee Quaile Broker of Record The Toronto Real Estate Board has been forced to concede and comply with the federal Competition Tribunal’s order to allow the free flow of previously protected information. Buyers and sellers will now have access to transaction records for properties including sale prices and sales numbers for Real Estate Agents, information which, to date, has been exclusively...