Category Archives: Real Estate

Driving back and forth

So this blog post will actually start on Thursday, the renovations to the new house are complete so I went over to take some photos and it looks a lot better.

I love how much natural light the house gets and that main living room is amazing.  This house is easily bigger than mine which is kind of funny and I also really like how large the basement is.  The house was officially listed for rent on Friday night, timings kind of suck frankly but as the pool of prospective renters will be low but I wanted to get it onto the market anyway.  Oh there’s stuff in the house because Julia our agent did some staging, I didn’t think it was necessary but Maggie liked the idea.

In addition to having it on Realtor, I also posted it to FB Marketplace & Kijiji as if I can find a tenant myself that’ll save me about $3k and I did 3 showings myself (one was through an agent).  So far nothing firm yet but that’s how it goes, the rent here will be more expensive and again looking at the time of year I’m not surprised at the interest levels.  I told Maggie if it doesn’t rent by the coming weekend we may do some more renos and make one of the big rooms downstairs officially a “bedroom” and see if that helps.

Pretty tired, it’s ~50km from my home and in addition to the showings, I had to go to the house twice myself once to give it a good vacuuming and another to change the disability toilet seat (didn’t have the proper tools) and all in all probably put 500km on my car this weekend.

Ahh well it’ll be worth it, have a bit of anxiety right now but I’m sure the house will be rented sooner or later. 🙂  Oh and on a side note, I absolutely love the Canon EF 16-35 F2.8L MKIII lens on my R5!  I like that it doesn’t change shape when I zoom so I think I’ll skip the RF 15-35 lens. 🙂

Got the keys

So our new rental property closed today woo!  I picked up the keys, went over and changed the locks.  It was an estate sale & Maggie said it wasn’t necessary but it makes me feel better knowing they’ve been changed, that and the previous brass locks were really tarnished and ugly looking.

Since this house is old, it’ll require a bit of work to bring up it’s cosmetic standards up to snuff & hopefully it doesn’t take too long as I’d like to get it onto the market and filled. 🙂

Checked out the new house

So today we went to the new house and it’s actually pretty nice!  Built in 1979, it’s only ever had one owner and while the interior is dated it’s full of potential.  The lot is a good size and what’s really impressive are how high the ceilings are in certain parts of the house, even the basement!

For reference, Maggie is 5’6″ so some of those ceilings look like they may be 9-10′ high.  It needs a coat of paint everywhere, new carpeting in the basement and some new appliances & structurally it’s in pretty good condition.  We were mentioning done up, it’d be nicer than  our house and perhaps we should move there, too bad it’s so far though.  In any case the house closes on Jan 15th so looking forward to that day and then we’ll have some work to do.

Good broke part 2

So the house we bought on condition fell apart unfortunately due to the basement so last night we signed the contract to buy this house instead. No conditions, all the papers are signed so this is a done deal, closing is Jan 15th 2021 but it’s an estate sale so the estate has the right to push the closing 30 days (twice) if they choose, hopefully not. I was not able to see this house but Maggie liked it and thought it had a lot of potential despite it’s dated interior but that’s nothing a new coat of paint, new carpeting in the basement and some new appliances in the kitchen can’t fix.

It’s a bit like a time capsule back to the past with the interesting colour scheme but who am I to judge what people thought was nice back then, that and I don’t have much style myself lol.  Anyway our agent provided a listing showing what people rented houses in the area for in the last 30 days and it’s north of $2,800 so while this house was expensive that would more than cover my monthly expenses. 🙂

GOD I’m so glad it’s done, I think we lost over 20 bids but this one is in a good location and does have a lot of potential so I guess we lucked out.  No more house shopping for the rest of the year, we may restart in the spring but I’ll worry about it later because all I want to do is relax. 🙂

Good broke

So today we came to an agreement to purchase another house in Oshawa. Finally we’ve been looking at houses for weeks and after you lose 10-12 bids it can get rather frustrating but yeah deal has been signed and the closing date is set for Feb 1st as the family currently inhabiting the house needs to find a new home.

Pulled these photos off the Realtor site, newly renovated so everything looks nice & it’s a decent lot size.  With the recent announcement of new production at the GM plant in Oshawa prices in the market have already started to increase in value so I’m happy that we got something sooner than later.  Exciting times, I’m broke but yeah it’s a good type of broke right, where the investment pays for itself. 🙂

Whoops, a bit late

I forgot to post, Monday we closed the new house in Oshawa woo and it’s been listed for rent!  Hopefully it won’t take too long to find a tenant and fingers crossed there because you never know what you’re going to get…

Saturday we’ll be looking at more houses, sigh the search begins again lol.

Visited the new house!

Yesterday we went to the new house for a visitation and it’s quite a nice place, if it wasn’t so far hell I’d consider living there…  All the appliances work as does the furnace and AC, I took some pictures but just wanted to go and think of the possibilities. 🙂

I mainly used the 14mm Samyang lens and it’s odd it said things were in focus but many of the pictures are a bit out which is annoying.  I guess I just have to use and test it more.  It makes the house look bigger than it actually is and I’m not showing you pictures of everything but yeah we’re pretty happy. 🙂  It closes on Sept 21st and I hope we can find a good tenant quickly but we’ll see and it’s going to be exciting.

Bought another house

So as I mentioned previously, Maggie and I have been looking at properties to invest in and last night we agreed to purchase a house in Oshawa for $555k.  Our cost with the mortgage & property taxes will be ~$1,500 month and we’ll be using a property management company to help with finding tenants & fixing small stuff which will be about another $200 a month.  Rental rates in the area are in the range of $2,300-$2,500 so as you can see this endeavor should more than pay for itself.

First picture is with the Canon RF 24-70 F2.8L IS USM lens while the rest are with the Samyang 14mm wide angle which makes everything bigger lol.  The driveway is rather large and can easily hold 4 cars, I didn’t go inside, it’s unoccupied and well I didn’t get the key yet.

Anyway this is going to be a fun ride and let’s see what the future brings. 🙂

House hunting

So this weekend we were house hunting, we’re looking for investment properties & looked at 9 houses spanning the Pickering, Whitby, Ajax & Oshawa cities.  Saturday was a bit disappointing, we were mainly in Oshawa since it’s cheaper but many places were…  well dumps but I need to remind myself that I’m not living there I guess.  With that said, if I spend $500k on a house, my mortgage & property taxes would be ~$1,500 a month and I can probably get close to $2,800-$3,000 a month if I rent out a basement & upstairs separately (legally done of course).

A friend of mine who owns 16 houses in the GTA region said someone he knows was caught with illegal rentals and was fined heavily by the city so it’s not worth it to try an skirt the law.  I have to admit, it was kind of fun and dream about the future, mentioned to Maggie that if we do this right who knows maybe we can give Brandon a home after he gets married or something.

I saw a house I really liked, the house itself was built in the 70s & it’s interior is quite old but the lot is huge.  It’s only 35′ wide but 150′ long so you could build a pretty big house on a lot like that, in fact some of the neighbors are knocking down the old houses and building monster homes.  I don’t have the capital to do that but the land could be very valuable in the future…

Anyway expect more updates about that as time moves on.  Changing topics, since I had so much fun doing astrophotography Friday night, I decided to buy a new lens today. 😀  I bought a cheap Bower (aka Rokinon or Samyang depending on where you live in the world) 14mm F2.8 manual operated lens for $280.  I still have it in my heart to eventually get the Canon 15-35 F2.8L IS USM but that one is over 10x the price and the Bower 14mm lens has great reviews.

It’s for the Canon EF mount so I’ll need to put an adapter on it to use with my Canon EOS R (or upcoming R5) and Bower does make an RF version so if this works out, who knows maybe I’ll get the RF with autofocus instead later on.  I was really debating if I should get an ultra wide angle lens or a standard faster wide angle but settled for the wide because it’s easier to do astro composure.

Well I’m just a newb, I suspect I’ll grow out of this thing pretty fast but for the price I couldn’t resist so here’s hoping it serves my purposes well!