Toronto Condo and Real Estate Blog

After the Toronto Star announced the most expensive house in Toronto, they just had to nose around at the low end of the property scale.

Excerpt from an article by Andrew Chung - The Toronto Star

Perhaps only in property-frenzied Toronto, where home prices have gone through the vaulted ceiling, would you find that the cheapest house isn’t even a house.

And it belongs to Larry McGill, a 55-year-old Toronto real estate agent with a love for the water and a keen eye for practicality.

The houseboat’s price is $129,000, and McGill says it’s a steal. The carrying and maintenance costs are way better than for anything else you’d find on Toronto’s waterfront. With mooring costs, taxes, heat, hydro and satellite TV, you’re looking at about $750 a month.

Everyone knows that Toronto real estate is almost too hot to touch. The average asking price of a home at the end of June? $358,035. The most expensive home on the market? An ultra-modernist concrete and glass marvel on the Bridle Path valued at $15 million.

Take the 3-bedroom semi-detached brick rambler on Old Weston Rd. that’s being sold “as is.” It’s listed for $159,000 as an “Opportunity For Home Renovator/Handyman.”

The cheapest detached home available, according to the Multiple Listing Service as of July 7, is selling for $185,000 in Scarborough.

“You can’t find anything in this town that’s standing and has plumbing and wiring for less than $279,000, and that’s on a busy street and it’s pretty shabby,” says McGill. “Finding anything under $300 G’s is pretty hard.”

A lakefront property, he added, would be around $1 million just for the lot itself. Which, he says, perhaps predictably, makes his houseboat such a nice find.

The 18-metre boat, called “Palm Beach,” has over 650 square feet of living space, a gorgeous hot tub that’s made hot in cool weather and cool in the hot weather, two bedrooms - one in the back and one in the front - new carpeting, a full kitchen, a galley dining area, a sofa and two rattan chairs, and of course, satellite TV. The main deck can seat six people comfortably for entertaining, which McGill and his wife Joan Fenton do all the time under the harbour stars.

The boat is currently moored in the Outer Harbour Marina adjacent to the Leslie St. Spit. It’s a no-frills harbour. No tennis courts, swimming pools, or cold drinks like at some of the yacht clubs. But it’s close to the Bay St. towers and the rest of downtown, should the buyer be so inclined.

“Or it’s a cheap cottage, or it’d be perfect for empty nesters or snowbirds who want to live here in the summer,” McGill says. “People forget there’s a lake right here and they don’t have to fight traffic to get there.”

Wintertime is a bit trickier. To stay where it is, the boat must be put up on blocks, rendering it unusable when the snow flies. However, a spot could be reserved at Bluffer’s Park in Scarborough, or in Port Credit, which allow live-aboard boats in the winter, McGill explains.

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Monthly fees can almost double in first 3 years, says Ellen Roseman

Excerpt from an article by Ellen Roseman - Toronto Star

You have an agreement to purchase a new Toronto condo unit. Now you’re worrying about how much the monthly operating costs will be.

There’s cause for concern. The monthly fees can go up significantly if you’re buying a newly built Toronto condo.

“It is common for condominium owners to see fees rise by 40 or 50% in year two and by another 20 or 30% in year three,” says John Warren, a chartered accountant who has done audits for more than 200 condominiums in the Toronto area.

There are no published benchmarks on what it costs to live in a Toronto condominium, Warren says. Comparisons are difficult because of wide variations in the services offered.

Developers know that if they say 37 cents a square foot and their competition says 27 cents, they’ll find it harder to close deals. So, they will calculate the first year’s budget as tightly as possible.A portion of your monthly fees goes into the reserve fund. This is a separate trust account that all Toronto condominium corporations have to establish.

As a Toronto condo owner, you’re responsible for the upkeep of your own unit. But you also share the cost of maintaining the common elements of the development.

“Areas designated as common elements in one condominium corporation might be parts of individual units in another,” says Toronto condo lawyer Audrey Loeb, author of a plain-language buyer’s guide distributed by the Canadian Condominium Institute.

Common elements are what are outside your unit - the lobby, hallways, elevators, parking areas, landscaping, recreational facilities and structural parts of the building.

Maintenance and repair of common elements are generally the Toronto condo corporation’s responsibility.

Individual owners usually pay for maintenance and repair of exclusive-use common elements - balconies, parking spaces, storage lockers and lawns in a townhouse development. However, the cost may be shared by all owners.

Under the Condominium Act, Toronto condo developers must use 10% of monthly fees for the reserve fund in the first year.

The Toronto condominium corporation, once it’s registered, has to do a reserve fund study within a year. That’s when surprises happen.

Toronto condo developers prepare their budgets at the start of a marketing campaign - about three years before the condominium is registered - so they’re working with gas and electricity prices that are far too low.

Most Toronto condo developers try to include the first-year deficit in the overall negotiations over building defects. They hope to delay payment until all their obligations are settled.

Typically, condo corporations receive payment for reserve fund deficiencies in year three. They may have to sue to recover, which takes longer.

And if there’s a bankruptcy - since developers set up shell companies for each Toronto condo - the owners may recover nothing at all.

Even if the first-year deficit is repaid, new Toronto condominiums are still financially fragile, Warren says.

He advises Toronto condo boards to collect more each year than they need for costs - between one to two months of common element fees - until they have a big enough surplus to withstand most financial shocks. Loeb agrees that Toronto condo developers “woefully lowball the costs. They say they’ll pay the costs in year one, but don’t say what the costs are in year two.”

“It’s terribly unfair, because people budget to go into a Toronto condo with the lower amount,” she says.

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Woman appeals Superior Court ruling on real estate theft
New land-transfer rules meant mortgage was still valid

Excerpt from an article by Harold Levy - Toronto Star

A North York woman who lost the 100-year-old Victorian home she had been living in for 30 years to identity thieves says she is going to court for herself and other victims of mortgage fraud so the taxpayers don’t have to pay the tab.

Susan Lawrence discovered earlier this year that she was on the hook for a $300,000 mortgage the thieves secretly put on her property after forging her signature in order to acquire it.

Last month, a judge ruled that the property transfer - of which she had no knowledge - was invalid because it had been carried out fraudulently.

But Superior Court Judge Edward Belobaba reluctantly ruled that even though the mortgage was also fraudulent, he could not declare it invalid. His hands were tied because of a decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal released last November.

That decision provided that as long as the transaction was properly registered in Ontario’s Land Title system, the mortgage was valid in the eyes of the law - even if it later turned out to be tainted by fraud of which the owners, like Lawrence, were unaware.

Belobaba apologized to Lawrence, who is a widow, for not being able to declare the fraudulent mortgage void. He ruled that her only recourse was to apply to the Land Titles Assurance Fund, which uses public funds to compensate victims like Lawrence.

“I trust and expect that the Land Titles Assurance Fund will act quickly to provide Mrs. Lawrence with the compensation that she clearly requires and deserves,” he said.

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