Tag Archives: lifestyle change
Sotheby’s has high hopes for Toronto’s high end
Carolyn Ireland – Globe and Mail
At a time when pundits are watching for signs that Toronto’s housing market is cooling down, Ross McCredie is gearing up.
The chief executive officer of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada is adding a second Toronto office and new agents are signing on.
Mr. McCredie is sanguine about the top tier of the market, where Sotheby’s agents already glide between polished marble foyers.
Mr. McCredie was first drawn to Toronto by the opportunity to attach the Sotheby’s banner to condominium units in the Four Seasons Private Residences currently under construction in Yorkville.
The largest units were the quickest to sell – at prices as high as $1,500 to $1,800 a square foot, he says.
That venture went so well, and he has such high hopes for more such lucrative deals, Mr. McCredie says, that he has brought about 25 new agents onboard and expects to add another 25.
He points to the injection of capital from overseas, the line-up of five-star condo towers nearing completion, and a projection by Deloitte Services LP that the number of millionaire households in Canada will swell by 38% in 2020 from the 2011 tally.
A lot of attention is focused on investors based in China, he says, but other factors are at play too: The huge transfer of wealth from aging parents to their baby boomer offspring and the expectation that more homeowners in tony neighbourhoods such as Rosedale and Forest Hill will downsize and move into those Four Seasons condos.
“There’s a lifestyle change going on.”
There are a lot of Canadians with money and a lot of successful ex-pats are returning. They are the ones buying in Whistler, he points out.
And for those who don’t choose the Four Seasons, there are plenty of other ensuite dressing rooms being readied for the unpacking of Tom Ford moccasins and Christian Louboutin heels. The Residences at the Ritz-Carlton, Trump Tower, and Shangri-La are ready for occupancy or nearly so. Toronto has more condos coming on-stream than any other city in North America.
Oh and then there are the vacation properties in Florida or California that these buyers will be able to escape to when they are ensconced in their new turn-key lifestyles. Mr. McCredie wants Sotheby’s to help with the purchase of those too.
Mr. McCredie is not put off in the least by agents who say the high end of the market is slow – has been for months. Some say buyers in the upper echelons are wary amid all the turbulence in global financial markets. As for high-priced houses for sale in Rosedale that may go weeks without a showing, Mr. McCredie characterizes that as a perennial lament that can be explained by seasonal doldrums.
“Everything starts firing up in the spring again,” he says.
If there is a segment he worries about, it’s the mid-range condo market in Toronto. Those buyers, he cautions, are the most likely to be hurt if interest rates rise.
“I don’t see fire sales happening in Rosedale; I don’t see anything happening in Forest Hill.”
Those areas, along with traditional bastions like Westmount in Montreal or Shaugnessy in Vancouver, tend to fare better because homeowners are mostly well-established.
“Those are the markets that will hold up.”
He also travels the world and, in the past two years, the fervour of people who want to talk about investing in real estate here has only intensified.
“Canada is absolutely the darling of international markets now.”
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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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Tiny homes are attracting the thrifty and the green
More people are deciding that a modest house is better for their quality of life than a mansion in the burbs
Craig Saunders – Globe and Mail
Sasha McIntyre lives in a house smaller than some suburban living rooms. And she loves it.
The Toronto animator shares a 480-square-foot house in eastern Toronto with her husband, John Lei.
Open the front door and you walk not into a vestibule, but the couple’s bedroom, with a double bed, tall cabinets and a miniature ceiling fan. Beside the bedroom is a bright, six-foot-square bathroom.
The living room has two loveseats, shelving and cabinets, and a fold-down table for dining.
The 96-square-foot kitchen is newly renovated and features an apartment-sized fridge, a 24-inch stove and an oversized sink. In the unfinished, 5-feet-10-inch-high basement is another bathroom and a small office.
“After 10 years in a basement apartment I didn’t need anything bigger,” says Ms. McIntyre, who works from home. “I don’t want to clean it.”
Like a growing number of people, the couple have decided that a modest house is better for their quality of life than a mansion in the burbs. On the extreme end of the trend are people who live in minuscule houses, sometimes not much bigger than a typical suburban bathroom. Motivated by environmental concerns, convenience and tight finances, they are saying goodbye to 1990s-style monster homes.
The shift got its start in the United States, with the launch of companies such as Tiny Texas Homes and Tumbleweed Tiny Homes, which offer pre-built houses and DIY plans. Today, there are dozens of websites and blogs featuring designs for houses as small as 65 square feet (including kitchen and bathroom), and the stories of people who live in them.
In addition to being low-maintenance, smaller houses cost less. A popular design in tiny-homes circles is the Tarleton from Tumbleweed Tiny Homes. Built on a trailer chassis, the house kit is 117 square feet, including a kitchen and bathroom. It sells for about $47,000 (U.S.) ready-made.
Will Pederson lives in a Tarleton he built on a communal farm outside Abbotsford, B.C., where he grows organic salad greens.
“I like the idea of only having the space you need, the efficiency of it,” he says. “It’s really efficient for heating. I’ve always been kind of a minimalist thinker and trying to reduce my number of possessions.”
Living in a space that small does require some lifestyle changes. Home electronics mean a laptop and a boom box rather than a big-screen television. Digital audio files and e-books replace most CDs and books.
Mr. Pedersen has a table that folds away to give him space for yoga, and has an unheated shed for storage. The entire space is heated with one plug-in radiator. Because it’s essentially an insulated one-room house, every activity, be it cooking, working on the computer or exercising, helps to heat it, Mr. Pederson says.
His wife, Alyson, lives nearby in a 300-square-foot house that she recently sold. In October, the couple will pack up his house and tow it to New Brunswick, where they have bought a 45-acre farm. They plan also to ship Alyson’s goats, start a dairy and live in the farm’s 900-square foot house, using Mr. Pederson’s tiny house for guests or seasonal labourers.
“There’s something nice about a small space. It’s comforting,” he says.
John Gower is another fan of smaller homes. The Victoria architect is one of only a handful who sells plans for houses under 800 square feet.
“The whole idea of the small-house focus started because I was in Nelson [B.C.], where there are all these small houses with nice, timeless lines to them and they’ve proven to be good dwellings over the decades. That was the inspiration for our whole design thrust,” he says.
The movement is a mixture of people trying to get into the housing market, environmentalists and empty-nesters, he says.
“There’s still the phenomenon of the empty-nesters building a home larger than they had during their child-rearing years because they can. It’s hard to understand,” he says. “That was in the 1990s. Today, they want to lighten their load and spend more time travelling and with their grandkids and in the garden.”
But tiny homes aren’t for everyone, he acknowledges. Only about 20 of his smallest homes have been built, mostly in rural British Columbia.
“I don’t know where these tiny houses fit in the spectrum. There’s a place for them,” he says. “As a culture we’re going to have to find many more models for housing as we face the limits of sustainability. If there’s a lot of belt-tightening going on, these might seem more attractive and less fringe. Right now, it takes a special individual to live in a space that small.”
Ms. McIntyre is happy in her little house, which is bright and welcoming inside. She acknowledges she’d like to be able to have more books, but the tiny house’s tiny price tag meant she and Mr. Lei could afford to buy a property of their own.
Before moving into the house, they shared an 880-square-foot condo downtown for 18 months. Still, after shedding duplicate possessions, their new home feels comparatively “spacious,” Ms. McIntyre says. Indeed, a family of four lived in the house before them.
“I like it. We picked happy, bright colours to paint it,” she says. “It’s cheap and easy to maintain, and we’ve already paid the mortgage off.”
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Park the car permanently
Get out of the traffic and into an easy-living, luxurious downtown condo
Canwest News Service
When the pace of life gets too hectic, some people head for the hills — but not Frank and Lori. This fortysomething couple will soon be shipping out of the picturesque village of Kleinburg and diving straight into the bustle and confusion of downtown Toronto.
For Frank and Lori (who asked that their last name not be used), the move makes perfect sense. He is a partner at an insurance and estate practice near York University, while she teaches school in Mississauga. They bought their current home — a 2,500-square-foot bungalow across from the celebrated McMichael Art Gallery — about 16 years ago. They like it just fine but admit they are rarely there. Instead, they spend an excessive amount of time in their cars, either commuting to work or scurrying downtown to take in their favourite restaurants, films or operas.
“Between business and pleasure, we drive into the city about three to five times a week,” Frank says. “We wanted a lifestyle change, and thought we should get out of our cars and into an area where we could walk to the action. So we started to search for something that could provide us our last move; a spot that would give us all the luxuries but in a setting that didn’t feel like a condo complex.”
Last year, they finally found their dream condo — a spacious 1,600-sq.-ft. unit at 77 Charles, Aspen Ridge Homes’s 15-storey, 47-unit project currently under construction in Yorkville. So much about it is right, says Frank, from the quaintness of the building to the proximity to the University of Toronto, his alma mater, and the many interesting areas to walk their cocker spaniel, Dixie.
There are an abundance of Franks and Loris waiting to put down elegant doormats at a luxury high-rise. Many have put last year’s monetary concerns behind them and are once again putting down hefty deposits in anticipation of their next big, luxurious move.
OK, it hasn’t all been rosy. Last year was a roller coaster ride for real estate, the gloom coinciding with the economy’s demise. “It was definitely challenging — for everyone,” says Howard Tikka, director of marketing, Trump International Hotel & Tower. “We continue to make sales, but at a much slower pace than we have been accustomed to. While the Canadian economy has fared better than most, even those with the capital to make luxury purchases and investments in luxury real estate have scaled back a bit as well,” he says.
“From November ’08 to a couple of weeks into February, we would have weeks where nobody — not even a single soul — would come into the sales office, so that was pretty scary,” recalls Sam Crignano, president of Cityzen Development Group. “You had traffic in the order of 45 to 70 [visitors] a week down to nothing. Some support staff had to get cut. … We were preparing for the worst, and thank God it didn’t happen.”
The market eventually rebounded in spring 2009 and sales offices in the Greater Toronto Area started to see some action from both local and foreign buyers. Within weeks, sales were back on track and developers started feeling relief. In fact, last October Mr. Crignano began construction on three new luxury buildings that are selling fast: Pier 27, comprising 700 units in two towers at the foot of Yonge Street, priced up to $4.6-million; 58-floor L Tower a few blocks north, priced up to $2.6-million; and Oakville’s The Shores, 202 suites and nine town-homes priced to $2.6-million.
“Once people took a look around and realized the Canadian economy and our housing climate were very different from what was happening in the States, when they saw our market was very stable and had solid underpinnings, they were able to get comfortable with making purchasing decisions again and looking at properties and what their options were,” says Mimi Ng, vice-president of marketing for Menkes Development, one of three partners building the Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences in Yorkville.
Boosting the buying frenzy are cranes and construction workers visibly busy behind the hoarding. Many luxury buildings and major hotel brands, such as Trump, Shangri-La and Four Seasons, used 2009 to tout their residences and have now broken ground, with The Ritz-Carlton already topped off and ready for its first occupants by summer.
“A lot of people are scrambling to get new products on the shelf for the early part of 2010 while the world is cautiously optimistic, and people will continue to buy,” predicts Mark Cohen, senior vice-president at The Condo Store Marketing Systems. “As long as borrowing rates remain low, prices remain competitive and the general economy seems to be healthy from a rebound standpoint, people will continue to buy new homes and condos. There’s a guarded sense of optimism for a very good 2010.”
One curiosity that has come to light since the recent boom is that local buyers are outpacing those from overseas. Christene De Gasparis, Aspen Ridge Homes’s marketing director, says many own properties in New York and Muskoka and are selling their large Toronto home for a smaller but equally luxurious pied-a-terre. Robbyn Hayden, sales manager for Living Shangri-La, is delighted by the local interest because “you don’t want to be in an investor-only building.”
Despite the bounce-back, luxury high-rise players are hopeful about 2010. Ben Myers, executive vice-president of Urbanation, says few projects launched in 2009 due to the economy, leaving plenty of inventory left to sell, and he does not expect many new projects to come to the market until the current units are sold. Mr. Myers says the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), which kicks in this July, will not make a big impact on luxury buyers “because they are already spending a lot of money in this market.”
Julie Di Lorenzo, co-president of Diamante Development Corp. that is building The Florian, a 21-storey, 90-unit building in Upper Yorkville, says prices will certainly rise due to the dearth of units.
“There aren’t a lot of luxury two,-three-and four-bedroom units out there, period,” she says. “They simply have not been built. Inventory of high-end condos is not available. Yet there are still many, many couples who will be downsizing. That demographic is just starting to influence luxury sales. The first Baby Boomers are just hitting 65 and thinking about their luxury home without stairs to climb and eavestroughs to clean. And now many young families have substantial recreation properties and they prefer [to have] the home in the country and the condo in the city for lifestyle.”
Kind of like Frank and Lori. They may not own a cottage, but they want the lifestyle that goes with luxury high-rise living. Judging by the reactions of their family and long-time neighbours, they will have plenty of company at their new pad.
“One word: envy,” laughs Frank as he describes the reaction when he started telling people of the downtown move. “We’ll have a lot more friends and family coming to visit. We’ll be the cool aunt and uncle — and we’ll get to enjoy all the fun and frolic of Yorkville.”
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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