Listing a house with Yasir means starting the professional presentation right on the front lawn with his agent sign since first impressions mean everything.

Yasir can advise you on what renovations you should do before trying to sell. It’s important to fix even little details like the doorbell, touch up paint and de-clutter the home for potential buyers.

With Yasir’s unconventional marketing methods, your house will be listed in the virtual world with global and local web sites, virtual tours that feature profession quality photos and email blasts to his customer data base. Knowing that many buyers search for homes online, Yasir will make sure that your home’s presence is known.

Yasir also helps you host open houses and promotes them in newspapers and through email. Stay updated on the activities that have been performed to get your house sold in an online report secured on his website.

Working with you and the current market value, Yasir can help you with home pricing strategies and take into consideration what percentage of people will buy the house at what price.

When it comes time to show your house to potential buyers, it’s important to be flexible and ready at all times. This means maintaining cleanliness and removing pets and pet odours from the home when a showing is scheduled.

Be sure to leave the home for a showing appointment as your presence may make the buyers uncomfortable and could actually hurt a potential sale.

Sales and Price Increase in May

June 3, 2011 -- Greater Toronto REALTORS® reported 10,046 sales in May 2011 – up six per cent compared to May 2010. This result was the second best on record for May under the current Toronto Real Estate Board service area. The number of new listings in May, at 16,076, was down 15 per cent compared to last year.

"Positive economic news and low borrowing costs led to strong sales through the first five months of the year, including the increase in May," said Toronto Real Estate Board President Bill Johnston. "At the same time, the market has become much tighter compared to last year, due to a substantial dip in new listings."

Homes were on the market for an average of 23 days and sold for an average price of $485,520– up nine per cent compared to $446,593 in May 2010. The strongest rate of price growth was experienced for single-detached homes sold in the City of Toronto.

"We have seen clear-cut seller's market conditions emerge over the past two to three months," explained Jason Mercer, TREB's Senior Manager of Market Analysis. "The robust price appreciation that we have seen will hopefully prompt more households to list, resulting in a more balanced market later this year," continued Mercer.

Median Price
In May, the median price was $400,000, from the $376,750 recorded during May of 2010.

Home sellers today are under a lot of stress. It’s a tougher market, home prices have fallen a lot, and many are trying to get as much money as possible to recoup their investment. Real estate agents feel sellers’ pain and we’re on their side. But sometimes, sellers do things that make it harder to for an agent to sell a home for what it’s worth.

Here are five not-so-great things sellers do that make their real estate agents cross their fingers and hope for the best.

1. Sellers who think their property is unique, thus worth more money.

Sellers consider their homes special; most likely they've put a lot of heart, soul, and money into fixing it up. It may be where they started a family or built a lifetime of memories. Real estate agents get that, but trust me, unless it's the Winchester Mystery House, most properties aren't that unusual.

When a seller believes their home is unique, however, they also believe it’s worth more. Sellers then end up fixating on an asking price that’s too high, despite the advice of an agent. If it's priced too high, a home will sit on the market for months. Unfortunately, nine out of 10 times, the seller will end up selling for less money than they would have gotten if the home was listed at an appropriate price from the start.

2. The home is a mess.

Sellers: It’s important to pick up the home before a showing. Potential buyers touring a home usually don’t appreciate stepping on a child's toy and fail to see the charm of a dog's discarded tennis ball. Buyers want to feel that a home is clean and well maintained. If it’s not, they'll likely move on to the next.

3. Sellers who hang around during an open house.

There’s a reason why real estate agents don’t want sellers sticking around when potential buyers arrive. While a seller may be perfectly friendly and agreeable, they can alienate buyers or make them feel uncomfortable without even knowing it. I have one horror story involving a seller attempting to shoo a cat out from under the bed just as buyers were arriving. He’d just gotten out of the shower and wasn’t appropriately dressed, needlessly repelling potential buyers.

4. Holding out for extra money at the last minute.

Say a buyer made an offer that was $40,000 less than what the seller wants. The agent and the buyer’s agent have gone back and forth with a series of counter offers. The seller is only about $3,000 from their dream price but they insist on trying to squeeze another $1,500 out of the buyer.

During escrow, the buyer may find a reason to ask for that $1,500 or more back in credits anyway. In demanding more money, the seller may have created bad will, as well as stressed those involved in the purchase. When it comes down to it, extracting that last $1,500 may actually cost the seller more at the end of the transaction.

5. Sellers who don’t clean up before turning over the keys.

Sellers should imagine themselves as the future buyer. Would they want to walk into their new home and find twelve cans of old paint in the garage? Or an old sofa with a broken leg in the attic?

The tip to sellers is to try to make the home as spotless as possible for the new owners. They’ll appreciate it and so will the agent. And besides, it's good karma.

The process of buying a home involves many crucial decisions and few are as important as the location you choose. Identifying a great neighbourhood before it becomes well known can make an already solid investment even more lucrative in the long term, but with gentrification well underway throughout the majority of Toronto, spotting such opportunities can be challenging.

With the help of a Greater Toronto REALTOR® though, you'll find that there are a number of neighbourhoods throughout the city that offer modest prices and their own unique flare.

If for example, you've always wished for a little place near the water, Lakeshore Village, located along Lakeshore Boulevard West between Kipling and Islington, could be the right neighbourhood for you. Featuring property near the waterfront, this area may lack a bustling boardwalk but it does include its share of parkland. Many of the streets end in green patches near the lake and the scenic beauty of Colonel Sam Smith Park can also be found nearby. While this community is still evolving, it has always held the potential to resemble a quaint coastal village, and the abundance of film production in the area is a testament to this notion. With quick access by Go Train, TTC street car and Lakeshore Boulevard, it's really only a stone's throw from downtown.

Not quite as far west and further north, you'll find a number of other emerging communities like the Junction, near Dundas Street West and Keele; Brockton Village, located further east along Dundas toward Lansdowne; and Bloordale, which can be found by traveling north on Lansdowne to Bloor. These neighbourhoods have a friendly, bohemian feel and offer alternatives to the established communities of Bloor West Village and High Park nearby.

On the other side of the central core nestled due south of Riverdale, you'll find Riverside. This neighbourhood includes a mix of new townhouses, stylish lofts and businesses in Victorian era buildings. With coffee shops, art galleries, antique stores, and nearby Riverdale and Jimmie Simpson parks, there are plenty of ways to spend your free time in Riverside. While the area is home to the Don Jail, its closure is nearing, and conversion plans for the older section of the facility are underway, to be opened as part of Bridgepoint Health in 2013. Riverside is just minutes to the central core by streetcar and offers convenient access to further reaches of the Greater Toronto Area via the Don Valley Parkway, and the Gardiner/ Lakeshore combination.

Moving a little further north and to the east you'll find a stretch of Danforth Avenue between Donlands and Main which, although it's home to young families with children and dogs, is anything but ordinary. It boasts a rich cultural mosaic that is reflected in its eclectic mix of cafes. Here you can find everything from Mexican to Thai to Tunisian cuisine. You'll also find plenty of cozy coffee shops and bakeries in the area, and like Riverside, it offers proximity to downtown without the gridlock.

If shopping is one of your favourite pastimes, the mid-rise condominiums popping up around Yorkdale Shopping Centre might appeal to you. Located at Dufferin and Lawrence and along Allen Road, at Wilson and at Sheppard, these developments range in size from 400 to 1,500 units. With great shopping and plenty of green space thanks to nearby Downsview Park, they are attracting a range of buyers from retirees who have called the southern reaches of the area home for decades, to young singles who appreciate the proximity to subway transit.

Whether you own a house or are looking to buy, rising mortgage rates are your enemy.

You think you know that, right? With Monday's announcements that Toronto-Dominion Bank and CIBC are raising some of their fixed-term mortgage rates by as much as one-quarter of a percentage point, let's see if you do.

Rising rates will make affording a first home much harder – so much so that you’ll pay more even if housing prices decline. Higher mortgage costs will also shrink the cash flow of families that stretched to buy a home but were getting by in a low-rate world – potentially by thousands of dollars a year.

People looking for a home face astronomically high prices in some cities, but they benefit hugely from very low mortgage rates. What a dilemma these people face – buy now to lock in manageable borrowing costs for a while, or risk higher mortgage rates while hoping for housing prices to fall.

That could happen. A firm called Capital Economics has raised the possibility of housing prices falling 25 per cent in the next few years, in large part because of rising interest rates. Even the Canadian Real Estate Association has projected a price drop of 1.3 per cent this year.

Let’s say prices fall 5 per cent over the next 12 months, enough to take the national average house price in December to $327,322 from $344,550. How would this play out from the borrower’s point of view?

With a five-year fixed-rate mortgage at 3.9 per cent and a 10-per-cent down payment, you’d be looking at payments every two weeks of $823 (includes mortgage insurance and a 25-year amortization) if you bought now.

Now, we flash ahead a year to find that mortgage rates have climbed a full percentage point. You’re now buying a $327,322 house and taking a five-year mortgage at 4.9 per cent. The new biweekly payment: $865, which plays out to an extra cost of $5,460 or so over the five-year mortgage term.

Imagine you use your year on the housing market sidelines to build up your down payment by, say, $5,000. This lowers your biweekly payment only modestly to $850, which means a total extra cost of about $3,540 over what you would have paid if you bought a year earlier.

Renewing Your Mortgage

There’s definitely an argument to be made for buying a house now to lock in low mortgage rates, even though home prices are potentially at their peak. But then you will be in the position of having to renew your mortgage in a few years, when mortgage rates will almost certainly be a lot higher.

Assuming that’s the case, recent buyers will be especially vulnerable because they’ll be renewing at a point in their mortgages where they’ve paid off very little principal. Remember, the early years of your mortgage are spent primarily paying off interest.

Long-amortization mortgages of 30 or 35 years only make the situation worse. The 35-year amortization will disappear next month for people with down payments of less than 20 per cent, but it has been popular in recent years.

Maybe you bought a $333,000 house in the spring of 2009 and decided to pay it off over 35 years. You put 10 per cent down and ended up with biweekly payments of $629 by choosing a 3.5-per-cent rate over five years. If, on renewal, you went with a five-year mortgage at 5 per cent, your payment every two weeks could be almost $800. Over a year, the extra costs would top $4,000.

People who are further along in paying off their mortgages won’t be hit as hard when rates rise, and they have more latitude to cope if higher payments become a problem by lengthening their amortization period at renewal. That’s much less of a big deal if you have 12 or 15 years left on your mortgage than if you have 25 or 30 years to go.

I’m much closer to the end of the mortgage on our family home than the beginning, but I’m still planning ahead for higher rates. Here’s what I’m doing to get ready. For each weekly mortgage payment over the past several months, we’ve been adding an extra $100 through what are known as double-up payments.

I arranged them online through my Web-based banking service, setting a start and stop date. It’s an easy way to whittle down the outstanding principal in a way that will lighten our load if rates climb and help reduce our overall mortgage interest bill.

Pay down your mortgage or find a way to carve out some cash flow to pay for higher payments. That’s how you fight the enemy of rising mortgage rates.

Housing Affordability

How higher rates can hurt affordability, even if housing prices fall.

TODAY

3.90%: Cost of a five-year fixed rate mortgage

$344,550: Average house price in Canada at December 2010

$316,297: Amount to borrow if you bought the average house with a 10% downpayment*

$823: Accelerated biweekly payments amortized over 25 years

ONE YEAR FROM NOW

4.90%: Cost of a five-year fixed rate mortgage

$327,322: Average house price after a decline of 5% from a year earlier

$300,482: Amount to borrow if you bought the average house with a 10% downpayment*

$865: Accelerated biweekly payments amortized over 25 years

*includes mortgage insurance

Source: Canequity.com

By KEVIN CONNOR, Toronto Sun

Last Updated: January 20, 2011 6:12pm

Last year, numbers of units sold increased by almost 3,000 units reaching 36,803 in total sales. Click here to watch the video

Last year, numbers of units sold increased by almost 3,000 units reaching 36,803 in total sales.

Play Video

Housing sales raised the roof in the GTA real estate market in 2010.

Last year, the number of units sold increased by almost 3,000 reaching 36,803, in sales valued at $16.7 billion.

The high-density sector — apartments, lofts and stacked townhomes — made up 55% of units sold making 2010 its second best year since 2000.

In 2010, the inventory of homes for sale was near record low levels.

“You can’t sell what you don’t have,” said George Carras, president of RealNet, which analysed the GTA high-rise and low-rise residential market.

Sales of low-rise new homes decreased by 10% over 2009, making it the second worst year since 2000 due to a shortage in supply.

The overall number of new home sales climbed, however, for the second straight year increasing by 8% over 2009 as the new condo market continued its annual sales growth by more than 30% over 2009 with more than 20,000 residences sold.

“Interestingly, the downtown west sub-market accounted for almost one-quarter of the GTA’s total new condominium sales,” Carras said.

Please see below for a summary of upcoming government changes announced today.

• Mortgages with amortization periods longer than 30 years will no longer qualify for government-backed mortgage insurance (CMHC), which is required for buyers with less than a 20% down payment on a home. The previous limit was 35 years.

• Maximum amount Canadians can borrow against the value of their homes, lowered to 85% from 90% on refinancing.

• Government backing for Home Equity Lines Of Credit, or so-called HELOC's, is removed

• Adjustments on amortization and refinancing limits coming into force on March 18.

• Government backing on HELOCs will be removed as of April 18.

• The minimum down payment for purchases remains at 5%.

Here's the link for full info...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/housing/flaherty-d=etails-new-mortgage-rules/article1872599/

Even if Canada’s housing sector is in for a sluggish stretch, there are still ways to capitalize

As the U.S. housing sector crashed, a handful of investors made billions of dollars because they had the foresight to short the market. 

They were able to cash in because most of the mortgages issued during the U.S. property boom were repackaged and resold to other investors. Owners of the investments were willing to lend them out to be sold short, because they didn’t understand the extent of the crisis to come. 

Good luck trying that in Canada, where lending has been more conservative and banks tend to hold onto their loans rather than selling them off. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways to bet against the housing market. 

Full warning: a full-scale housing correction is unlikely, according to most economists. But rising household debt and declining home affordability have caused some observers to conclude that the sector is vulnerable, at least to a long period of stagnation. 

“We have allowed armies of hormonal young couples without money to buy homes," said Garth Turner, a former MP who now makes his living writing books, acting as a financial advisor and giving scary speeches about a coming disaster he likes to call “Houseageddon." 

“We had a state-sanctioned policy of inflating real estate through bizarre mortgage rates, the home renovation tax credit, first-time buyer’s grant, RRSP home buyer’s plan and the tax-free treatment of capital gains on a principal residence. Why would we not expect consequences?" 

If you share Mr. Turner’s viewpoint – or even if you think that the real estate market is merely entering an era of flat prices – here are three strategies to consider: 

Sell your house

If this is indeed the top of the market, the easiest strategy is simply to sell your house and let some other chump suffer the indignity of falling values. 

But don’t rush to dump your residence until you research the specifics of your local market – even if home prices weaken nationally, some cities may still be fine. 

“You want to look at the fundamentals of the market," said Ross McCredie, president of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada. “Are there more buyers than sellers?" 

He considers the idea of selling “beyond stupid" because of the transaction costs and taxes involved, not to mention the costs of renting until you feel comfortable with the market again.

Not everyone agrees, of course. The Economist magazine recently concluded that Canadian home prices were 23.9 per cent overvalued, which suggests that delaying a home purchase or even selling might make sense in some cases. 

If you don’t want to jump out of the housing market entirely, you might want to consider moving to a smaller home with less expensive payments. This reduces your costs and reduces the pain if real estate prices flatten or dip over the years ahead. 

“The next 10 years will be about buying a house to live in, not to live off of as an investment," said Phil Soper, chief executive officer of Brookfield Real Estate Services. 

Short housing-related stocks

Another way to bet on falling home prices is to short stocks that would suffer in the event of a real estate decline. 

Banks might seem to be candidates. There are about a trillion dollars of outstanding mortgages at Canadian financial institutions, with the Big Five chartered banks holding about $400-billion. If the housing market were to completely melt down, the banks would take a hit. 

The problem with this strategy is that banks are very well capitalized and there are no historical precedents to suggest shorting a bank because of bad mortgages would be a good idea. The delinquency rate on mortgages across Canada is about 0.4 per cent – and has been decreasing for the last year. It was last “high" in the early 1990s, when it reached 0.6 per cent. 

Strong condominium sales in October have kept the Greater Toronto Area new home market on par with last year’s near record pace.

Sales of new housing hit 4,535 units last month, up by 0.6 per cent from the same time last year according to figures released by the Building, Industry and Land Development Association on Monday. The positive figure is a major rebound from September, when sales were down by 32 per cent.

The October numbers are the best such result for the month since 2000, according to BILD.

Most of the bounce is due to continued strong high rise sales, with seven out of ten homes sold in October being a condo.

High rise sales were up by 27 per cent, while low rise sales were down by 32 per cent.

“Clearly investors are still active in the property market,” said housing analyst Will Dunning. “It remains to be seen how this will all play out.”

Some analysts have said there are too many high rise buildings being built.

But some empty nesters, particularly from areas such as China which are extremely active in the Toronto market, may not be as sensitive to local market conditions and are looking for long term appreciation, said Dunning.

While the city of Toronto accounted for most of the condo sales at 76 per cent, the largest percentage spikes were in the 905 suburbs such as Mississauga and York Region.

“The high rise housing craze has started to spread to the suburbs, and it’s a trend which will continue to grow,” said BILD.

The more affordable condominium sector has taken off because low rise homes have been priced out of the reach of many buyers. Investors meanwhile, continue to be attracted to the relative stability of the Toronto market.

There is a $75,000 difference between high rise asking prices at $424,327 and low rise prices which surpassed the half million dollar mark for the first time in October, hitting $500,532.

Overall, new home sales are running 15.5 per cent ahead of 2009 on a year to date basis. However, sales are not expected to continue to outperform.

A forecast by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation says that a weaker 2011 is expected especially in comparison to the already softening resale market.

“The new home market typically experiences a more pronounced decline than the resale market when conditions soften,” said the CMHC’s Shaun Hildebrand.

New condo sales are also expected to give up share to the resale market because of the large number of completions.

“Buyers will take advantage of the increased selection and improved negotiation power for existing units,” said Hildebrand. “The growing gap between prices for new unsold product and selling prices in the resale market should require an adjustment in inventory.”

Affordability issues means that builders will likely have to keep building smaller units to keep first time buyers and investors interested in the market according to the CMHC.

Toronto new housing prices remained flat in September over August, the first time that prices have not increased this year, according to figures released by Statistics Canada.

A softening market means builders will have to hold the line on pricing.