I’ve been looking for a house for the past month or two and I’ve learned a few things about real estate jargon that might be helpful for anyone looking to take on an enormous amount of debt.
You might want to print off this handy legend and take it with you when you talk to real estate agents.
| Real Estate Jargon | | | Actual Meaning |
| Tidy Home | Small | |
| Cute Home | Really Small | |
| Shows well | Leaky basement | |
| Needs TLC | Is on fire | |
| Good starter | This is a crappy house | |
| Good retirement home | This is a crappy house | |
| Character Home | Shitty old house |
It also seems that, as a rule, all photos taken for real estate listings, particularly those on the web, are taken at night with no flash.
A note to those publishing real estate listings: if you do not tell me the price or location of the house, then I will not call you.
The highlight of my domicile-hunt so far was when the mortgage lady at the bank told me that as part of the first-time home-buyer package I qualify for such benefits as no-fee banking (on my current plan, this amounts to about $30/year, and it would be free if I wasn’t too lazy to switch banks), and, get this, three free months of AOL-Canada! That’s really tipping the scales.
If I ever do find a house that I like and can afford, the first thing I will do (that is after weeks of landscaping, renovating, moving, and cleaning) is sit down with a piping hot mug of ice tea (using my AOL-Canada CD-ROM as a coaster) and order some exploding dog wall hangings for my naked new walls.
I also encountered “investment property” which meant it was a amateur built duplex which had smelly, alcoholic tenant who played CFCY “at 11” on the other side of thin drywall who had a fifty year lease.
and get a goddamn answering machine.
I have to ask — what, exactly, is a “piping hot mug of ice tea”? Excuse my ignorance, but in Arizona we serve iced tea over ice as often as possible.
If you are shopping for a house in Charlottetown and area, I cannot speak more highly of Paula Willis as a real estate agent (she works with Century 21 on Kent St.).
We told Paula that we were thinking of selling our house in Kingston (PEI) about two months out. When we finally listed it with her, it was a Friday afternoon about 1:30 p.m. We sold the house that evening. She showed us the house at 100 Prince St. the following Sunday morning and we bought it Monday morning. Total time spent slogging through the real estate market: approx. 3 hours. Paula is well organized, honest and a very nice person to boot. You cannot do wrong using her to buy or sell.
While I’m making unsoliticed commercial interruptions, let me also recommend Gordon Waddell at TD Canada Trust if you’re looking for a mortgage. When we paid off our house in Kinsgton, TD somehow lost the paperwork inside their vast corporate vortex. Gordon turned this stupid situation into a positive experience simply my staying on top of things until they were resolved. This is the only area of finance in which my recommendations leave the credit union system: we’ve twice tried to approach the Metro Credit Union about mortgages, and both times found them cold, obtuse, and forever having to fax things to Halifax.
One final note: the word from both our lawyer and from Gordon at TD is that it’s no longer necessary, at least in most situations, to get a lawyer to certify title on a property: title insurance, where, basically, a third party takes on the risk of there being clear title, appears to largely be replacing the work of lawyers here. Note: our lawyer’s first is the local rep for First Canadian Title Insurance, so there’s at least the opportunity for bias here.
Alan: “Investment property” – Good one.
KJB: Answering machines are robots.
Paul: You confusion is not a result of ignorance or geography on your part. As far as I know, the piping hot mug of iced tea is a drink unique to my own tastes (I called it “ice tea” rather than “iced tea” in my original post – just a typo). It’s pretty simple, heat water on the stove or in a kettle, and use it to make a glass of iced tea. This works with both ‘real’ iced tea, and ‘fake’ iced tea (the kool-aid ‘heavy on sugar / light on tea’ stuff, like nestea). It’s good. There must be others out there that have tried this? If it weren’t for fear of chemical addiction, I would have a glass of Neo-Citran every evening instead.
Isn’t hot iced tea really just ‘tea’? Well, in some cases yes – real iced tea is just hot tea served cold. However, most of the iced tea that most of us a drinking these days is not tea at all (particularly the sugary stuff – much more like KoolAid than like tea). Hence the necessity of the apparently redundant moniker: hot iced tea.
For the real low down of hot/cold and sweetened/unsweetened iced tea, listen to Off the Beaten Track with Peter Rukavina (Real Audio).
Peter R.: I am envious of your weekend house buy & sell. Thanks for the agent and mortage tips. It’s interesting that you mentioned that lawyer may not be necessary. CIBC is advertising that they will cover your legal fees (no free AOL though).
Right now I think every real estate agent in Queens County thinks that they are my exclusive agent – this came to be because the technique I have been using so far. I find the houses on Canada’s Multiple Listing System (MLS.ca) and just phone the agent number which each property that I’m interested in.
A few of the agents I’ve talked to have been helpful, others less so. The trouble is (this is trouble more for the agents than for me) that almost all properties are listed on the MLS system now, so agents are really helping me find anything. In general, all the agents have done for me is unlock the house and relay questions to the owner.
Agents: make sure none of them think they are your agent but only the sellers agent as is normally the case. You can get stuck with a bill if you slip too far down the path of buyer’s agent.
Tea: nothing more fun than spotting Canadians in the Big Stop at Calais puckering their faces and dumping packet after packet of table sugar into their glass.
Lawyers: [Warning – I am one and do this once in a while so please take this as a warning and not solicitation.] Yea, who needs ’em. Then again, there are other aspects of a real estate transaction other than the title search that the fee covers like the drafting or review of the agreement of purchase and sale before signing to make sure you are bargaining for what you expect: “funny, honey, there was a shed there before…” / “funny, honey, there was a driveway there before…” Then there is that bit of bad luck when the buyer turns out not to have the actual amount they need to buy your place. Who tenders? Does your real estate agent (who, if you are a purchaser, is often not really your agent but the seller’s) know when to tender and why? Then there are those zoning set backs, etc., etc. [Funny how after all that the lawyer gets about 0.7% as a fee while the MLS guy gets 5%. What is the bank’s cut on your mortgage again?…] Real estate law is the greatest source of legal errors and omissions claims and they do not all relate to title insurance. E&O claims are made against an insurance fund and provide folks with valid claims recompense. No lawyer…no help when things go wrong and no one watching to make sure they don’t go wrong in the first place.
I echo Alan’s statements about lawyers: I don’t think we would have gone with title insurance the second time around had we not gone through the entire lawyer-guided experience the first time around (btw, I can also recommend Bill Dow at Carr, Stevenson & MacKay; he’s done excellent work for us). Buying a house involves about 50 signatures, and it’s good to know, at least the first time, what all of them mean.
Steven, I hope you’ve seen http://www.gov.pe.ca/realestate/, which is an interactive mapping gateway into the same data you get from MLS’s online system (all the “dots on the map” are clickable links to the MLS site, so you’re getting the same data through a different window). Don’t underestimate the utility of a good agent: I originally thought that I didn’t want to filter my wants through someone else, but quickly found (at least with Paula) that this (a) saved us a lot of time and (b) got us access to houses that would never make the MLS system. Remember that agents can leave a house off the MLS system for some period of time, and if you use only the MLS book/site as your guide you might be missing out on good houses.
Peter, I should have mentioned the http://www.gov.pe.ca/realestate/ site. It’s great – excellent use of the MapGuide system. However, hunting and double-clicking on properties until you find one that’s in your price range isn’t very efficient. When you do find a house in the MLS system but don’t know the street, the Address Locator is a great service.
Steven, based on your note, I’ve added the ability to filter the MapGuide Real Estate map real estate map by price range.
Bam! That’s fantastic Peter. When I’m sitting in my dream home, I’ll remember how I found it.
I echo Peter’s echo on Alan’s comment re: lawyers.
I also agree with the service a good agent can provide. My next door neighbour put his house up for sale, and it was sold an hour and a half later. Hardly time to get it listed in any guide. Having an agent’s eyes watching for such deals can be very helpful.
And can anyone point me to a realty web site where searching for houses is actually EASY to do? I have yet to find a site that actually allows me to search for houses BY THEIR ADDRESS…pretty much the ONLY WAY TO IDENTIFY A HOUSE when driving by.
We were the beneficiaries of a messed up MLS system. We moved back to the Maritimes to be close to the folks so the kids could have lots of grannie time. With an agent, who we knew outside of the job, we were looking for this farm house listed in the MLS book as being in Anglo Rustico – that metropolis between Rusticoville, New Glasgow and the former South Rustico now known as Rustico. Every time the MLS guide came out, there it was still for sale. We finally drove by a house in New Glasgow and realized from the photo, this was it – 500 yards from the folks cottage and about 2 miles from Anglo-Rustico. We drove into the driveway and knocked on the door. The owners were fortunately in – they were holiday home owners from Ontario. We looked around and bought the place within a day or two of dickering. They had been trying to sell for a year and had no offers much to their astonishment. We were told that within a day of our offer being accepted the listing was changed to the proper village and they had 3 higher offers…but too late. Once we got the survey there was another bonus. A second acre of land out back which is being slowly populated with Marchel Foch and blackberries. Needless to say the sellers were not impressed. I am just glad the fee came out of their side of the deal.
Steve – you might also think about a mortgage via the President’s Choice gang at the Superstore – you will get $$$ in groceries and good interest rates.
Thought of this Simpson’s episode when you first made your post, but I just watched it today. So funny.
[face becomes unfriendly, voice deepens] the truth
[shakes head, “no”] and
[voice becomes chirpy, smiles] the truth
[nods head, “yes”]!
% to show Marge how to do things the Red Blazer way.
[Lionel shows Marge a realty catalogue. The first featured house is extremely small.]
Full Episode Transcript
It is done. I’ve found a home.
Why don’t you tell us about it, Steven?
It does have a pool, right?
To my great dismay, the day after I bought my new house, it was listed in the local paper as “a doll house”.
I don’t know what that confirms to me about you, Steven, but it confirms something. Don’t most Spirit driving low riders live in doll’s houses?
Today, I have a new house. Despite my original post, the real estate agent was quite helpful. If you know who I am and where I live, come visit me.
Another definition.. compact – really really small
Yester Year – Too Old.
Curb-side appeal = great yard, shitty house
Another vote for Paula Willis as a great real estate agent in Charlottetown.