Jared Lind­zon – National Post

From the side­walk out­side 831 Logan Avenue, there is not much to rec­om­mend the three-storey home that sold this week.

Yes, there is With­row Park just across the street to the south, and vibrant Dan­forth Avenue is a short walk to the north.

But the shin­gles are crum­bling, win­dows are bro­ken, there is no real kitchen and in some areas the ceil­ing is falling in. It was, all who saw it agreed, in need of a $300,000+ renovation.

Those neg­a­tives did lit­tle to deter poten­tial pur­chasers: 17 offers were made on the prop­erty, which sold for more than $1-million, well over the ask­ing price of $699,000.

And pre­sum­ably the 16 bid­ders who were unsuc­cess­ful have already turned their atten­tion to other prop­er­ties and other com­pet­ing offers.

Indeed, with the scarcity of avail­able hous­ing in desir­able neigh­bour­hoods near the down­town core, it seems naive to assume that the days of the bid­ding war will ever come to an end.

“This is quite an inter­est­ing city we live in,” said Dun­can Frem­lin, a bro­ker for Re/Max Hall­mark Realty Ltd. “The great attrac­tion is to walk to work or hop on your bike and walk across the val­ley and get to work that way, so it seems that the closer you are to Yonge Street, the greater the demand.”

Mr. Frem­lin says that in his 24 years in the busi­ness he can only recall a brief six-month period fol­low­ing the eco­nomic down­turn when demand in those neigh­bour­hoods slowed down.

“The phones stopped ring­ing for maybe six months or so,” he said. “That was really the only seri­ous blip that I remem­ber in the last many years for real-estate.”

But with lim­ited houses avail­able in the most desir­able neigh­bour­hoods in Toronto, bid­ding wars are the new normal.

“It’s worth what some­one is will­ing to pay for it, but ulti­mately if there’s no sup­ply, we’re going to con­tinue to see this,” said David Flem­ing, a sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Bosley Real Estate Ltd. “Unless half of Riverdale is mag­i­cally listed at the same time, we’re going to con­tinue to see this, and I don’t think any­one blinks when they see 10 offers on a property.”

Part of what makes the prop­er­ties in these neigh­bour­hoods so valu­able is the fact that there is no room for them to grow, explained Mr. Fleming.

“The real­ity is, if you want to take Lea­side as an exam­ple, there’s only 4,000 homes in Lea­side, there are never going to be 5,000 homes, it’s just never going to change,” he said. “So you can build con­dos any­where in the city because you’ve got enough sky, but there’s only so much ground to work with.”

With so much com­pe­ti­tion in the Toronto hous­ing mar­ket, Mr. Flem­ing explained that peo­ple tend to get emo­tion­ally tied to cer­tain prop­er­ties, which leads many to pay more than they can afford.

“If you have a cou­ple with one kid and a baby on the way, and you’re look­ing at school dis­tricts, and your look­ing up the tree-lined streets, and it’s sum­mer and it’s nice out and your car­ry­ing gelato while your walk­ing down the street, that’s when peo­ple will pay sig­nif­i­cantly more than they ever intended,” he said.

“When you’ve got a cou­ple that’s made offers on six dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties and lost, if they lost six times, that sev­enth time around they might say, ‘I’m tired of this….’ and they might end up pay­ing $20,000 more than they ever intended on paying.”

Mr. Flem­ing feels for the fam­i­lies he has wit­nessed lose a house they had their eye on, hav­ing rep­re­sented a fam­ily that lost a 17-way bid­ding war over a house in the Junc­tion Tri­an­gle in May that was listed at $469,000, and even­tu­ally sold for $611,000.

While it’s easy to get attached to a par­tic­u­lar house or neigh­bor­hood, Toronto Real Estate Board Pres­i­dent Elect Richard Sil­ver says it’s impor­tant for buy­ers to know their limit.

“I would just say know exactly how much it is your ready to pay, what it is you can afford, and what­ever price you offer has to be one that you live with,” he said. “If you hear that it sold for more the next day than it should not be an offer that you’ve said, ‘oh, I would have paid that.”

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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831 logan avenue toronto

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