Rise of Laneway Houses, Converting Retail To Office Space, Toronto Market Update (With Philip Ramos)

Welcome back to another episode of Inside Canadian Real Estate where I'm sitting down with my good friend Phillip Ramos. Phillip is a realtor. He's a real estate agent. He's been for a very long time actually. His dad has been a realtor forever and he learned the trade from him since he was a young kid. He got right into it and he's really, really good at what he does.

He's actually built the team called the Ramos team. They're down in Toronto. They are my go to for anything real estate in Toronto, especially in their particular area that they mainly service. But I fill on today and we're talking all about the real estate market, what sellers need to know, what buyers need to know, what changes are happening, what opportunities are coming up. All of that is going to be in today's episode. And we also do a version of this Week in real estate where I pull up some trending headlines this week, what's going on in the world of real estate, residential and commercial.

And we talk about them. We go back and forth. He gives them his input. I give some of mine. So it's a really interesting episode. I think you guys will enjoy it.

So without further ado, let's get to the show. All right, Phil, thank you for joining me, man. I appreciate you coming up. Absolutely, yeah. Thanks for having me. Man, excited to do this.

Why don't we? Before I get in, there's a lot to talk about today. But instead of me getting too far out of myself, why don't we tell everyone who you are what you do, and we'll start from there? Yeah, my name is Philip Ramos. I run a team, kind of in the central West Toronto area. Been doing it for nearly ten years now.

So yeah, been been a ride. What got you into real estate? My dad for sure was. Was he in real estate? He was in real estate. He's been in it for 32 years now I want to say and kind of looking around at that time when I was 1819, I was looking at what was going on in the industry, the potential to really build something.

And you know if you actually brought some systems and and marketing into play like some actual decent marketing seen a lot of opportunity there. And yeah, that's that's really what got me into it. I mean I I was, I was really into real estate since I want to say 1415 years old. Like I'd go around with my dad take a look at some homes start trying to come up with values. So yeah, it was a it was a journey. It's.

Interesting. So you had, you had pretty early exposure, which is good, and you kind of had this like legacy presence and brand in the area, but it wasn't really modernized. You saw an opportunity to grow and so you kind of breathe fresh life and you can see that, 'cause you guys operate as a team, obviously, and your team is very young, it's clear that it's your influence bringing these people on. It's not like your dad's old friends. It's very new. It's new blood and it's it's clear that you kind of moving it forward, which is nice.

But you also focus on a very particular area. Let's talk about where you're operating. Yeah. So W Toronto is, I mean our office is right at Dufferin and Sinclair, we're right on Dufferin, South of Sinclair. So yeah, that that whole W Toronto area is, it's in that kind of average price point for the most part. And that's where you know we typically see a lot of more of the turnover.

We're able to you know, kind of capitalize on that and that's that's where we've been focusing, yeah. OK. So like let's jump into, I mean in terms of the Toronto market right now, there's some weird stuff going on. We were talking a little bit off there about the Toronto market. It is a hard market to paint with a broad brush. It's hard to just say the Toronto market is this or that.

It is very different depending on where you are. It's a very compartmentalized market. Some pockets are hot, some pockets are slow. What are you seeing down there right now? Yeah, it's it's totally segmented. So you have you know, some pockets that have always just been kind of lower turnover, not a lot of inventory that's staying true even in this market.

And you're really still seeing some, you know, multiple offers things going over asking in those areas and and then in other markets it's just a totally different world where you'll struggle to get showings. You really got a price aggressively if you're looking for the, you know, the opportunity to track some offers, attract some attention. Yeah, it's just something that's and I mean we're talking about this too, like I seen something yesterday listed at 1.9 come out, sold for 2.3 that's and it's, it's like that's reminiscent of what was going on in 2021, right. Nobody really thinks it's gonna happen today, but in these really, you know, high demand pockets, it's still still happening.

What do you think is driving is? Is it just the location that's creating that? Is it a strategy of how they're listing the house? Like what's creating that kind of situation? Yeah, I mean that place is definitely worth more than what they listed it at, right? 1.9 like it's it's definitely, it's definitely worth more than that.

So they had to to be really, really aggressive with the price. My question in those scenarios whenever you see something listed at 1.9 sells for 2.3 and they had multiple offers. I always my question is always what were the second and third offers like? Is this somebody that just blew everybody else out of the water that just had to be had to have that house for whatever reason? What was the 2nd offer? Was it 2 million 250 or was it 2.1, right, so.

Like, were they beating each other up? Was it close race or did this guy just say, like, screw it, I'm taking it. Crazy offer, even though, no, there's no other offers like this. It's a one off, but I'm going to take it. Or was there a bunch of people really close competing for her, you're wondering? Exactly, Yeah.

And I mean we we've seen that even in 2021, right, where you know, you'd have something one off, you'd have seven offers, right. You have three that are kind of, you know, not really in the run, they're just there to to show up and then you have two or three that are serious. But then you could have one that just blows everybody else out of the water like second, third and 4th place could be 50,000 apart. But then that number one offer just kind of sticks out, maybe $200,000 and and we were seeing that, right. But yeah, that's why my question on whenever you see something like that is, yeah, what were the other offers at? So you guys got, I mean you got a good handful of agents there cranking away.

What are you guys doing in this market try to give, So let's talk on the listing side for a second to give your listing clients the best chance of having something similar happen. Like do you have control over that? Is it just location or is there things you guys are actively trying to do on new listings to try to get similar scenarios in your deals? Yeah. It really depends where that house is. That's it.

You really got to look at the actual market in that pocket specifically and it comes down to competition a lot too. So it's not just, you know, what did the other home sell for in the last 90 days, What other options do the buyers have today? Because sure, you know, maybe you can look at a sold from 60 days ago, sometime in September, right. You could use that to compare more or less with value is, but if since that time you're now competing with four other listings at the time that you go on the market and they're priced aggressively, you got to adjust, you got to adapt, right? You can't just look at what are other things selling for 60 days ago, but what other options are the buyers going to look at today?

So strategy wise, doing that research in real time as this listings going up is a big part of knowing how successful you're going to be able to be based on what else is happening around you, What are the comps looking like, what's the activity looking like? And then all that is prefaced by location to begin with, Like are you even in somewhere desirable to begin with? But I'm assuming even in like less desirable pockets, in the right conditions you might be able to drive these kinds of crazy prices as well. Yeah, you can. No, absolutely. I mean, marketing is a big part of it.

We're really kind of involved in a lot of the old school stuff as well as, you know, some of the newer marketing, getting on Instagram, getting on Facebook, That's part of it too. But what we found more than ever is right now a lot of the stuff that you do needs to go back to that old school stuff, the traditional type of, you know, going out there, hustling, you get a new listing in an area, go and talk to all the neighbours in that pocket to see if they have any friends, family that want to move in, pick up the phone, call people. You know, we've got a pretty significant database where we have a lot of contacts in there with, you know, their search criteria, what they're looking for, what the neighbourhood is with the price ranges.

So a lot of times as soon as we go on the market, we're able to basically dive into that database, see who has a search criteria similar to that, right, pull all of those contacts, pick up the phone and call them. Right. Yeah, that's awesome because so many agents aren't willing to do that. I think part of, I do blame part of the soft market has a lot of reasons, but part of it is because the market conditions are changing. There's a lot of agents that are not used to operating in the way they should be operating. They've been, I guess, for lack of a better word, made lazy by really strong markets.

And so now that things aren't like, what's happening in the market should not be creating the kind of effect that it is. And I think it's amplified by those lazy agents still doing what they did two years ago, which is get a listing. MLS wait, oh, we don't have much action. We don't have enough offers. We're gonna have to, like, reduce like they're not actually like how many agents do you know not on your team that get a listing and then hit hit the ground and do everything you did. Pick up the phones, walk the neighborhood door, knock like, get get those Flyers out.

Talk to the neighbors. Talk to the community. Like how many agents are actually doing that? Yeah, I think a lot of agents really got spoiled over kind of what we were seeing in 2020-2021. How many are doing that today? I mean, there's a few, don't get me wrong, like there's a few agents that are out there that, you know, really go at it and kind of adapted to what has happened.

But you're right, you're absolutely right. The the majority is just list the house, put a for sale, sign outside, put it on MLS, wait for something to happen and if nothing happens in two weeks, they go to their seller and say hey we need to reduce the price. But what are you doing to actively create that demand for that home to actually bring people in to go out there and and expose the house to to as many buyers as possible. Because the reality is, today, in a market like this, there aren't as many people, buyers out there that are actually on the realtor, like on the MLS realtor.ca every single day looking at everything that's come out. So you got to be a lot more proactive, not just reactive.

I agree. And I mean that's the way that I do business too. Obviously I'm a real estate agent as well, my area being much more north, so like Simcoe County's my pocket. So if you're listening and you're gonna buy and sell something, if it's north of Simcoe County, you're coming to me. If it's South of Steels, you gotta go to go go to Phil little plug right there. But we both do business in a very similar way in the sense of like being very proactive on how we like market things and push things maybe in different ways and different tools but the same idea.

And like when I look at our market in Simcoe County, so basically from like Bradford up past Barry area which is where I do most of my business, the average days on market as a recording this sits somewhere around 30 plus days. Meanwhile my listings average days on market minus a couple of exceptions which are different like multi family but like regular detached homes somewhere between 2:00 and four days. And like the last listing we had in Innisville was a basically not a legal duplex but it had a an in law suite, fully renovated bungalow with an in law suite. And this thing we sold the day before it was going to get on market. So I had listed exclusive two or three days prior push it out with my process like e-mail to the buyers list contact past buyers contact investors contact my network and sphere of influence and push that property.

Before I was still planning to go to MLS. But I'm like, you have a couple days, let's let's try to like hammer this thing and get interest right. And so you hit that network and we sold before we even went to market And and that's in an environment where I just had another agent friend of mine in the same area, very big. He was doing 6070 deals last year, right, alone with an assistant Guy was crushing it this year saying he can't sell anything. He has a duplex legal in Barrie, puts it up, no offers, no interest. It's been 3 weeks and it's like, what's the difference?

It's like when I asked him, well, what have you done? He's like, what do you mean what have I done? Like I put on the market. There's no interest. That's all they're doing. And then they're wondering.

So now if you're a seller, you got to think about this stuff. What agent you're picking, what team you're working with, what agent you're working with. Because agents now are going to be earning that Commission in the sense that, yes, you're paying a chunk of money to an agent to sell your house. But what they're going to save you The difference between the guy who's just listing your house and the guy who actually sort of market and sell your house can be worth not just 10s of thousands of dollars, but in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's true now more than ever. Two years ago, maybe not.

Like sure, anyone puts thousand MLS and you get get crazy offers. That's not happening. So if you, like, don't want to lose 50 grand, 60 grand, 70 grand, you can't just use your friend down the street anymore. You need someone. You need an agent with the systems, with the process. And you should be asking them that.

Like if a client goes to you, they should be asking you and your team, what are you guys doing? List my property. What? What efforts are you actually going to? Besides MLS, what else are you doing? And I think the agents that can answer that question out properly and show the results of how they do that are gonna completely annihilate the next year.

Like the next year, two years. And the rest of them that were just listing and waiting are all gonna die. We're already seeing that. But they're they're gonna die off. They just can't operate in this. But they can't move property.

So they just they're they're useless essentially to sellers because they can't do the job they're getting paid to do, right? Yeah, no, I I think that's the reality to whether or not the seller actually asks that question in plain English. I think that's something in the back of everybody's mind today. It's like, OK, you know, we're paying you X amount, but other than just getting the signatures, putting it on the less like you said and just waiting for something to happen, what else are you doing it? It just really comes down to the fundamentals to me of supply and demand. We can influence supply.

There's nothing that we can do to change it. Demand obviously has its kind of natural influences like interest rates and everything else going on. But demand is the one side of the coin that we can actually influence. And then it's how do you create that demand, right, Because if you creating demand is just putting on MLS, well, you're not really doing much. But back in 2020-2021, when was the total opposite end of the market, you had supply working in your favor because. So you didn't need to create the demand.

Demand was out there naturally, right? And supply was really low. So yeah, again, I think a lot of a lot of agents got spoiled by that, right. I mean, I'm fortunate that, you know, I got into this business with my father and I think since I was, I want to say, yeah, probably around 1415, he was kind of instilling in my mind what happened in the 90s. Because the reality is, you know, anybody 35 and younger in our age demographic really hasn't experienced any kind of economic contraction while they've been out there in the professional. World.

Well, let's actually talk about that. What happened? What happened? In the 90s prices dropped, I think it was about 30%. Within two years inventory skyrocketed and it's it's something that yeah, like I said, my father instilled in me that like look there's the potential that this happens again, it's sort of recovering in what I think was 9596. So right around the time we were born.

And since then, I mean what have we really seen in any kind of economic contraction or any kind of rising interest rates? I mean back to O eight there was about a six month pull back in the market, right. Nothing major, but this is the first kind of real test that that's going to test people for sure. Yeah, I mean that's a great point 'cause you you're basically a student of the of the old school which was agents that actually had to work to get things sold and they had to have an actual plan, a strategy, tools, skills like what could they actually leverage to get this thing sold. And you got to learn that way. Whereas a lot of new agents that came in recently never got to see that.

And that's why I I interviewed our, our broker manager here a little while ago and we were talking about why now is actually a really good time for agents to get into this business. Probably I'm gonna say join a team because you have a lot of ground cover. It's a hard market. You need someone guiding you. But it's a really good time to learn because you actually get to learn. Like these tools that you can get now will apply to your whole career.

And when other agents come in in the good years again and never get this, you're always going to be ahead of them. Just like you've got ahead of competition. Having those skills that your dad was able to kind of instill and pass down to you from his experience in that that, like, terrible time in the market. That now you're like hitting this market going, oh, it's OK, I have the tools for this, right? Yeah. No, 100% kind of if you look at building a successful business in a down market, it's on the flip side of that when the market starts recovering that if you've established yourself and built the skills and built the hustle through that down market on the other side, you're just gonna, you're gonna win big time, right?

How about, so let's talk about buyers, let's talk a lot about listing. But you guys work with both obviously on the listing side and on the buy side. What are you seeing in the market for buyers? Like you have buyer clients coming to you? Is there still a lot of interest from buyers like you're still getting a lot of people coming in looking for property. Has that slowed?

Are they as aggressive? Like what are they? What are they feeling? So, yeah, I mean, when we talk about buyers, there's like, OK, how many buyers are actually coming to us and saying, hey, it's time for me to buy a home? Hey, it's time for me to move up, buy something else. The other side that I always look at is with our marketing and with the listings that we have that we're promoting out there, how many inquiries are we actually getting, right?

How has that been impacted by the change in the market? So yeah, I mean there's a huge difference between the properties like property specific or inquiries that we get today versus you know what we used to get, right. There's a massive, massive difference in that. And I think that kind of gives you almost like a you're able to kind of see ahead what's coming. If you see that that's dropping down a lot, you know that looking forward, you're probably gonna have to do a lot more work to bring in some buyers. We're fortunate in the way that, you know, I've been in the business for, again, nine, close to 10 years now.

So we've built kind of a database, I've built a reputation. We do have still people coming directly to us to buy, but it's it's the marketing side of the things that you really kind of start looking at, OK, how many inquiries are we getting? How many people are actually reaching out, How many people are coming through the open house? That's a big one, right. So yeah, that's all that's slowed down for sure. So you got to do more of it, right?

So do you think like in in these buyer's minds, we're going to play psychologist for a second. Do you think it's more. I don't think I can afford a house right now. These rates are crazy. I'm not going to get approved. It's not the right time.

The market's going to come down. Do you think it's more of that or do you think it's no like we we could do it. We have the income. We'd probably get the pre approval. I'm just not sure if now is the best market to buy. Like are they holding off 'cause they have to hold off?

Are they holding off 'cause they want to hold off I? Think it's a mix of everything. We're definitely seeing some buyers that are coming to us and they're saying, hey, it's finally my time to buy, especially some of the bigger investors that we work with. They're looking at what we're seeing right now is a lot of opportunity and they're kind of excited by it almost because I mean since I've started the business, I've had people every single year saying, oh, this is the year, this is the year that the market's coming down like this is, you know, I'm not buying this here. The market's gonna crash next year and that's been ongoing for forever, right, since 08, a lot, since 08 literally.

So a lot of those guys are now looking at this market as a as opportunity. And I think it's smart, right, if you can, if you still have the capital, if you're able to get approved, I think looking at some of those bigger deals is, you know it's a, it's a great environment for that. These these kinds of economic conditions come across few and far between in Canada for better or for worse. But we do have a lot of stability and that stability leads to this being a very rare occurrence. So when these happen they tend to be like once in every 10 to 15 year opportunities. So you only get a few of them in your lifetime.

And as an investor, this is really the chance. Like not, but not just an investor, even as a home owner like this is the chance like for you to go in and buy that house now, even if it's only a 5% discount, right, 10% discount for what it was a year ago, get that house. Because these sellers are becoming much more favorable to conditions now. They're they're willing to give you the, you know, less deposit, flexible closing, they'll take away under ask a lot of cases, especially if they've been sitting for a while, they haven't marketed well as an individual. This is a great time to invest in your own primary residence as an actual investor investor, like a career investor.

It's a great time to screw up properties. And if you talk to any of the big guys that have large portfolios either in residential or commercial, they'll tell you that well next to the 90s that the 07/08/09 period was like the best thing that ever happened to them. And 80% of the wealth they hold now was the shit they bought back then in that time period, because that was the time to buy. That was the time that the market favored them and they were coming in. There were low balling offers and all kinds of conditions and it was still getting accepted. And they would scoop up all these properties at a discount and then you just sit back and let the market do its thing.

But that doesn't happen a lot. And I've been telling people like now and over the next like 5 to 6 months is a really good time to buy. It doesn't feel like it, but is a really good time to buy. Too many people I think, and you can tell me what you think about this, but I think too many people are waiting for confirmation in the market that it's going to be good. Like for the for the news to say OK, the the client stopped. It's coming back up now.

By the time that happens, it is too late. Every seller knows it. They're not going to take under under ask anymore. They're going to expecting bidding wars. They're expecting good offers. By the time you hear it's OK, come back, it's too late.

So now when everyone's still scared, oh, is it gonna come down more? Oh, ten percent, 5%. We don't know what's gonna happen. That's the time to do it. I promise it will eventually come up. In 30 years, you're not gonna look back and say, darn it, that house I bought in 2023 is still sitting where it was.

It's not gonna happen. Yeah. No, 100%. And I think even for the move up buyer, I think there's a lot of opportunity up there, right? Because if you know, if you're looking at selling something in the one to 1/2 range and you're looking at getting into the 1516 range, that gap has closed so much. And I get it, interest rates are higher, that money's gonna be more expensive.

But I I feel like it's easier to close the gap today than it would have been when interest rates were, you know, 27 because of the fact that it's you're just in so much of A better position to take your time with the purchase. Sure, you're not gonna sell your home in three days for $300,000 over the asking price, but when it comes to buying, you're also not going to be stressed out, right? Like you're going to have the opportunity to do your home inspection, take your time with the decision and really kind of especially have more options. I think that's one of the biggest benefits today is buyers can actually look at a few homes before they decide to buy.

I remember, you know, you would one house would come out and you would go out and you'd show your buyer and you'd see the same exact people showing that house and presenting offers on that house that you just seen at the last one. You guys both put an offer on the last one, especially before COVID and all that and we were still presenting offers in person. I remember being in specific pockets with the same buyers night after night and seeing the exact same buyers, their agents presenting offers right alongside us, right. So the fact that that's gone and you can actually, again take your time, look at multiple homes, you don't have to sacrifice as much on the purchase.

I think there's more benefit in not having to make as many sacrifices when it comes to purchasing than just getting 10 offers on your house and selling for $200,000 more, right? And and you mentioned there a bit ago, but like rates and people's worried about these higher rates and the cost of money is higher, but like I don't know if you have you, have you heard the saying that is is basically along the lines of marry, the price date, the rates? Marry, marry the house. Marry the house. That one. That's to say, say it again.

Say it again. Marry the house, Yeah. Date the rate, marry the house. Something like that. Something like that. And the idea is basically that the price you pay for the house doesn't change.

What you paid is what you paid. That doesn't change later, the rates change. And so it's it's better to get that deal on that house now at the higher cost of money. So yes, your mortgage today is gonna be higher on that house, even if it was more expensive a year ago. But it won't be probably in three years and four years and in five years and the remainder of the time we're going to live in that home and those rates will come down, but you still will have that great deal. Meanwhile, if you wait for rates to come down, prices go up.

Yeah, your cost of money is lower. You buy that house at that high, that high price, but your rates are not going to go any lower. You're going to be the one that, like those people that are going through that issue right now where they bought this house in the peak, they got 1.9%, but they're like marking the renewal in their calendar, saying, Oh my God, like we're going to have to, like, leave. Like we got to get a first flight to Mexico on this renewal day because we're not going to get out of this. And that's happening now. That's how that happens, is you buy this peak market.

Oh yeah, the rates are great. It's so low. Money's free, but you're buying top of the market. House price comes down. Nothing you can do about it. Your rate goes to renew.

Now you're screwed. You have a high price, a high mortgage, a high everything. So the only time to avoid that is now. But that window I think is closed. I don't think it's going to disappear. But I think by summer, we're going to see very slow rate decreases maybe 1/4 percent of the time by summer into the winter and in into 2025.

But the moment the general public catches wind of this, a lot of these buyers are hanging on the sidelines. Oh, great, rates are coming now we got to buy now. And then again, you're competing with everybody. So don't wait for that is my point. Like, talk to somebody now. If you're going to buy, buy now.

Yeah, if you can do it, buy now. Especially on the financing side of things, I mean talk to an expert like we we just had a meeting with our mortgage broker yesterday and we were kind of going over some of the programs that are out there. One genius program that he told us about was a this company, this mortgage company, it's an A lender and they put out a program that they're doing a six month term of a mortgage, right. And the reason they do that is because people's biggest struggle right now is qualifying at the new rates plus the stress test, right. So if you're going out, you're getting a 6% mortgage, you're qualifying at 8%. That's a challenge for a lot of people.

What these guys did that's genius is they introduced a six month term at a much lower rate just for the six months so that people will qualify at a lower rate even with the stress test. And then when you're renewing your mortgage with that bank, you don't have to re qualify, it automatically renews. So then at that time you can go to the three-year, right, you can go to the four year? That's really. Do you remember the name of that lender? I'd have to double check.

Yeah, I need to know that after because that's actually really good. That's a really good program that makes sense. And I think it's also because they're anticipating the rates will come down anyway. And so they're starting to position for that. They're not as worried about like, oh, what if we do this and then the rates go up and these people are screwed because they couldn't afford it. I think they're all now pretty much under the consensus that rates have stopped going up and at some point will decline.

So I think the majority of that increased risk is gone. And so you're I think you'll see more creative programs like that hopefully. There's also a lot of B lenders that are pretty solid and like there. There's also like for example, if you want to buy right now like we're saying, right, you tell me if I'm kind of off the rocker on this one. But if you want to buy right now, but you're worried about like whoa 7% or or stress test at 8%, I'm not going to be able to qualify. Like it's going to be a big payment even though you know rates are going to come down in the next year or two.

You're like, I can't do it like right now that's a little bit too much for me. And a lender's never going to approve my income. There's nothing wrong if and I'm not. I'm not giving. I'm not telling you, you have to. I'm not giving you financial advice.

If you're listening to this like don't come back to me and say Darren, maybe I'm just suggesting ideas to think about which is there's nothing wrong with saying I think now is a very good time to buy. Pricing is good. The market conditions are good. It's a buyer's market. I need to get in now. Go to AB lender, get the financing you need for a year for two years.

When those interest rates come down and the payments drop and the servicing drops, then go back to A lender and refi at the better rate. Get the better program. But guess what, you still got the price of the house. The B lender gives you higher interest on your your rate but doesn't change the price of your house. So get that good deal today. Pay a little bit more to get the approval.

However, you have to do that and a lot of brokers will will have a good relationship with B lenders and then when the market turns around, refi. So long as you can affordably cover your payments and you can actually financially afford it, I think it's a good thing to do. I'm not going to say go do it because I'm not going to tell anyone what to do, but if I was doing it right now, that's what I would be doing if I had to. I wouldn't wait and say, well no, if I can't make it work with an A lender, I just won't do it. I won't do it until I can make it work because by that time it's too late, prices came up. But what do you think about that?

Yeah. There's a lot of people that kind of, you know, as soon as they hear BB lender, they kind of, you know, try to stay away from it. I don't think there is anything wrong on the short term, right. At the end of the day, going to the B side, it doesn't necessarily need to be a permanent thing. It can be super temporary, right. It also depends a lot on people's, you know, what they're claiming as personal income.

If they're self-employed, I think that that's a big part of it too. So some people, you know, decide that they want to buy a home, but they haven't really been claiming enough personal income out of their whatever, whatever, whatever they're operating. So going to that B lender for short, short term, like you said one or two years. And then on the flip side of that at the end of the one or two years through that time claim more in personal income. So you can switch over to the A lender. Yeah, I mean I I, I think that there's a huge opportunity there.

The only, you know, kind of caveat to that is we've seen a lot of people get stuck when the market changed. It's a big risk. You know if somebody went to the B lender side in 2022 for a year at the beginning of 2022 counting on you know a year later just going to the A side, you run into a lot of issues because now you gotta re qualify at a much higher rate. You gotta do an appraisal of the home and if you've lost a lot of equity you're not gonna have that 80% loan to value. So you're gonna need to fork up some money if you can. So there are some people that got stuck doing that, but you know, that's that's only because of the Super specific kind of issues that we've seen this.

Year yeah you can't you can't do that in a in a in an up market that that's important to know like you have to that's where the some of the some of the skill comes into play. But knowing when to buy which is always hard recognizing patterns like if you're top of market don't go to AB letter that you can't afford. If you see certain patterns and you're confident in yourself and your research and your team and you've consulted with your professionals and your realtor and your mortgage broker and your you and your lawyers, everybody talk to everybody. And if it makes sense and you think, yeah, this is this is the time to buy, they're called calculated risks, like we see rates at all time highs.

We see them flattening. It's a good indication that they're probably not going to double next year. Like it's probably not going to see that again, right. But meanwhile, if you did it two years ago, we were at peak market peak prices, peak activity, Why on earth would you think I'll stretch further than I can now? That's just not good timing. And so I think a lot of people did get stuck doing that and we've seen a lot of them like I have clients on the House flipping side that flip houses and a lot of the off market deals they're getting is that it's people that way over leveraged peak of market whether it was a new mortgage or a refi they did and it's like now they owe so much more in the home than the home is worth and they can't get out of it.

That's a bad spot to be in and we also saw a lot of that in commercials. So no, you're totally right on the risk and it's always risky approach. But the way the market's sitting now, it's like you're gonna have to, at some point, if you want to really take advantage of it, take that, that leap. Like there's gonna be a gamble involved for sure. Yeah. And I I don't really see a lot of concrete reasons as to why the market would kind of go down much further, right.

Like looking forward-looking at what what everybody's calling for, like you said, they're calling interest rates to start coming down summer, fall of the next year. So when that's on the horizon, I think it's I I don't think that there's a lot of, a lot of reasons for it to go down any further unless for whatever reason there's a big spike in inventory. I mean that can really change things. Right. Or immigration changes. Or immigrate, Yeah, absolutely.

And that goes back to supply and demand, right? I mean, you know the supplies, the competition, if you're selling a home, how much competition you have because that's going to have a a major, major influence on it, right Do. You think asset type in terms of condo, townhouse, semi detached makes a difference right now in terms of if you're if you're trying to buy a place, assume you can afford all of them, They're all in your budget somewhere. Should you be looking at one or the other in terms of what you think will do best in this market or during this change? I'm a freehold guy. I like freehold, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. From an investment standpoint I think it's there's it's a much safer way to go. I know a lot of people made a killing in the pre con market, a massive amount of money for sure. I think long term what the safest play is. I think Freehold is is definitely the way to go. I agree.

I agree. I mean you own land. Land is what matters the most and have full control that land and the most land possible is big and I was talking about this yesterday, but I think detached homes are going to be a luxury. I think they're they're going to be a luxury you're not going to see a lot more of. I don't think a lot of new builds are are, especially anywhere near the GTA, are focusing on detached homes. All the government funding and programs is going to be towards more affordable, more condensed, high density housing.

There's going to be nothing for detached homes and so that's going to push supply way, way, way down. And I think if you really want to insulate for market changes over the next five years and you really want to play it safe stretch for that detached home. Now if you can get your hands on one because you're not going to see a lot more. I've already seen 2 developments personally in Simcoe County originally slotted to be detached homes. So large subdivisions like we're talking like 3-4 hundred homes slotted to go in as detached homes that have pulled down all their marketing and then come back six months later townhouses. So they at some point they realize these things are not selling.

We can't move them. This is not going to make money, like we're not going to be profitable here. And they made the smart decision to cut their losses and change the plan over. So they would have had to get some sort of adjustment I'm sure and redo all their freaking planning from scratch and they started selling townhouses. I've seen that now twice and I think that's a very good indication of what's to come. And you're going to see man I I think that's going to be like the in 20 years people be like you have a detached home like you're not connected to anything and you own the land like it's going to be like that because every other, every other play is getting smaller.

Like we we were at a conference together recently and at that powerhouse conference they were talking like modular homes. Yeah right. And and more of these like not not trailer park but like resort style living where someone else owns the land. It's a land lease. You put a tiny home on it. Everything is moving towards that.

So the more land you can own and the more like autonomy you can get, which is what freehold provides, the better. Because to me, that's gold. Like, I don't know if you feel the same way, but that's that's how I see it. Yeah, 100%. And I think a big part of that is it's just it comes down to affordability too, right? Especially with with how things are now that developer making that change like you said, I think it speaks a lot to what's going on in the market even from a from a demand perspective like what are people buying, what are they able to buy?

There's one, it's one thing to say well what do people want, but what can they actually buy? Those are two separate things, right? And yeah, I think that's awesome that they were able to kind of see that coming, adapt to it before they made any major investments hopefully and and make a quick shift there. It's avoided those spontaneous development fires we've been seeing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what happens.

You don't catch it early. Now those are curious. Yeah, that's a whole other other thing. But no, I I agree and I think the market is shifting that way. But let's do something fun. So we do, we do a series usually called this week in real estate where I go through kind of like what's happening in real estate this week, pick out some headlines and then we're going to talk about it.

So I have a a few here. I'm going to open them up. I'm going to read it out and then we'll just talk about it, give me your opinion on it and then we'll go back and forth. So first one is up on Costar News commercial real estate platform, but fewer Canadians aged 75 and older are selling their homes. And so the general theme here is they've been doing some research and essentially they're realizing that people that are in their homes at a certain age now, the downsizing is not happening. They're parking it, They're sitting there, they're leaving their home.

They're not coming to market. They're not downsizing the condos. They're staying where they are. Have you seen this? What do you feel about this? What does this mean for the market?

Yeah, We haven't seen that for a long time. I mean, people just staying put and and that's been a big challenge for the inventory too, right. And you know, you have a lot of people that say, oh, well, I want my kids to buy a home in the same neighborhood as me. It's like, OK, well, if you're not moving, you're not willing to sell. It's probably a lot of people like you, right. So, yeah, no, it's something that's been going on for a long time.

You go downtown into central Toronto, you go to Queen St., Dundas College, all these really high demand kind of areas and you still see a lot of, you know, the old school Portuguese. And I mean a lot of these are our clients and you know, they even themselves, they could be 80 years old and they're saying, well, look, I'm not moving until my time's up, right. So that's that's been going on for a long time. Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't blame them. I mean, especially I think now it's it's made worse with the the rates and stuff and the prices cause like where where are we gonna go?

Like we want to retire and I don't want to leave, like where I've been my whole life. I don't want to go far for my kids, especially getting older. You don't want to be like in your 80s and have to drive an hour to see your grandkids somewhere. You want to be closer to where they are. Ish. You don't want to move up to like you know Midland from Toronto to downsize and so like where am I going to go, right.

And they don't want to go to retirement residents for whatever personal reason. They want to stay in their home. I know a lot of people like that. My, my first, the 1st house, I was born as a kid in Toronto near your office. Our neighbor that was there when I was born there and was still there till he just died like 2 weeks ago. He passed away.

He was there his whole life in that house and his wife passed away. He stayed in that house. He stayed in that house. They've been in the house since before before I was born and never went to a retirement home, never downsized, never wanted, because that was where his life was. And he had said that he wanted to. He said literally like this.

He said I want to die in his home. That was his plan. Because to him it was like, where else? Where am I going to go? There's not much opportunity or options for. Them.

Yeah, we're seeing that a lot, right. And I kind of don't blame them because they're comfortable where they are, right? They got the grocery store close by. The area they're in is super convenient. They've got the doctor around the corner that they're used to. The last thing they want is to have to be an hour away from the doctor.

A lot of them talk about being really close to hospitals too. It's these are things that are important to them. The thought of moving into a condo terrifies them. They can't imagine going from, you know, a three bedroom Samuel, let's say to, you know, a condo that they call a a box in the sky, right. It's they like their garden. They like to grow their their vegetables.

And you know, they say well, yeah, if a bungalow came up for sale in the neighborhood, I'd move into that because I don't want to deal with the stairs. But what bungalows do you have downtown Toronto? It doesn't. Exist. That's the problem. You have that that detached home in Toronto you paid 40 grand for 50 years ago.

Where are you going to go get a detached home that's comparable. You'd have to move way north and then you're you're isolated, you're and you don't want to be isolated your elderly age. So it's like they're just stuck. So yeah, I think that and I think that's going to be a problem because I think the theme of this article has been a it's hard for new people looking for homes because the inventory is not coming up. Developers who would buy these lots or some of these lots to build more multi tally project can't do that either. And even developers that would market to elderly people where they're gonna build projects in certain areas to try to attract them to sell their homes and move into these condos aren't getting any success with it either.

So it's creating some hiccups on both sides of the market, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's, yeah, it's it's creating an interesting kind of dynamic, right? Agreed. So next one. OK, this is like kind of left field commercial real estate.

I don't know what you feel about it, but I just thought it was really interesting. So we'll talk about it. Abandoned sear store becomes contemporary office space. This was for BMO. So BMO actually opened a new Toronto office. It was a Sears store.

They gutted the whole thing. They left the cool escalator going from the first floor to the second floor. And they built this like, it looks like kind of like a Co working, like a modern Co working like if you walk through a we work, that's what it looks like. It's got couches, it's got some isolated offices, it's very modern. It's got colors. Is this a trend?

Have you seen this? Have you heard anything about this? Like what's happening here? It's interesting, but where was the location? Of it. I don't know the exact address.

It just says downtown Toronto. Downtown Sears. Yeah, so I can't see the actual address, but it's somewhere in Toronto. I mean, this is like, this kind of begs. It's funny, 'cause like we were thinking of, like, people repurposing office for other use, but now you're seeing giant big box retail being repurposed into office, and I think it speaks 2 interesting things. One is there is a lot of big box retail that was not repurposable.

It didn't fit for whatever reason, the needs that we have now and it's very hard to fill. It's very hard to lease large retail space like that size. It's very, very hard to lease a handful of tenants that will take it and a lot of them are very picky. They have their own locations where they want to be. They don't want to take an old location of a filled business. So what the heck do you do with that?

This makes sense and I think this type of office is what you're actually seeing. So they don't want any more of these like 20-30 story, like cookie cutter cubicle office buildings. They want you to walk in and it feels like again, you're in a we work sit wherever you want, grab a couch, grab a chair. We have a little cafe over there, a little in house, restaurant over there. You want to sit and have lunch, you know, a patio. You can walk outside and get some sun with some plants and work outside if you want.

I think they're heading in the right direction there. And I think as more and more of these guys get rid of their conventional office space, like as the Bmos of the world move out of these high rises, you're going to see more of this stuff, I think, getting built and being used. I think this is the future of office that we're seeing. That's a really interesting conversion. I I mean wow, no, that's I'm surprised by that to be honest because even from like a financing perspective, if you go to try to buy office space now from a financing perspective that's tough very it's people are are having a hard time getting those deals done, right. That's probably why it was BMO.

It works. It works when you're the bank. Literally. It doesn't work when you need money. No, I agree. And I think that's been the biggest challenge of like they're talking about even converting office to residential.

Like I just said before, the biggest barrier that has been financing going to a lender that's going to support this conversion, this massive conversion with a lot of risk, it's hard to find. So unless you have the capital and house, no one's doing it. This is a similar situation like if you need to build new fund creative office, but like how do you convince A lender to actually put up the money is the difficult part, right. So I think this is, this is good because these guys have to lead the charge. If BMO leads the charge, all of a sudden the whole company sees that happening and it makes it more of a precedent to say, yeah, that that is something that's feasible.

It's worked for us in house, We've done it in house. We can see the economics of it. We get it. It makes sense. And so the ones with the money have to lead the charge. And then hopefully that inspires others to make a way and and do the same.

I love that 'cause I'm, I'm so tired of cubicle offices, man. I hate that. Yeah, I hear you. It'll be interesting to see if that becomes a trend. It's the way, let's see, TD Double S forecast for Canadian housing prices, they're calling for a decline of 10%, which previously, very recently they were expecting a 5% decline. They've come back and up that now to 10%.

What do you think of that? That was within 1/4 they were saying. Yeah, right. First quarter 2024 first. Quarter down 10%. That would be a huge, huge hit.

I I'm really interested to know what would act like, what did they base the, the 5% off of to what did they base the 10% off of like why the massive change because that's not, that's not a couple points that's that's huge, right? It has massive implications on the $2,000,000 house. It's yeah, 200 grand. So they they said here. I'm going to read right off the article. But it said the gloomier forecast comes as the highest interest rates in decades have cleared many buyers from Canada's housing market while putting more pressure on existing mortgage holders.

The result has been an increase in the number of homes up for sale since the middle of the year and a slide in benchmark home prices since September. And it says persistently high inflation has caused TD to hike its forecast for bond yields. As that translate into still higher fixed mortgage rates, more prospective buyers could be squeezed out, and those who remain will have more negotiating power because of the surge in new listings. Yeah. So then again, that goes back to inventory. If there's something that causes inventory like a bunch of renewals, let's say, if if it causes inventory to really pick up that's going to be, yeah, that could definitely damage the market.

I think one of the things they were they were looking at that looking at on that is the sales to new listing ratio which is definitely gone way down. I mean when we're at the the peak we're hovering you know 70%, high sixties 80% in some markets I think we're at about 32% as of as of the October statistics. So it it'll be interesting to see how the November numbers play out when they come out probably sometime next week. But yeah, that's sole to new listing ratio is definitely something to watch. It's yeah, it's cut I'm looking at now. It's cut almost in half.

And that's that's huge. But The thing is this is the crazy part for all the the doom and gloom of people saying, oh, real estate's down. They end by saying even with with the greater than expected price decline, so even if we drop 10%, Canada's average home price is still 15% higher than pre pandemic levels. 15% higher than pre pandemic. So what we're at this is this is all just losing some of the gains from that crazy pandemic boom. It's not actually even affecting the normal market.

Like if you bought Pre Pandemic, you're still ahead a. 100. Percent, right. And so it just goes to show you like these these drops that look so dramatic. It's not really a drop. It's just that crazy, unsustainable 2 year boom is clawing back a little bit, but not even all the way back to what it was.

It's still a net positive. Yeah. And I think that's really important to take into consideration as well. I mean, a lot of people kind of read the news headlines and just look at that and unfortunately kind of base their whole opinion on the market on those things without actually speaking to somebody who's in it every single day, right? Like I said, right. And when we first started talking, there was still something that was listed at 19, sold for 2.3.

There's still things going over asking. I mean I bring that up, that one up a little bit because of the fact that you know, it's something that nobody would expect to happen in this market. But it it's not the end of the world. There's still people buying and selling homes everyday people need to move people, you know that growing families they want to downsize, they got, you know they they're moving into Toronto because of work opportunities. There's a lot of people that kind of moved out of the city that we see coming back now. So yeah, it's it's, I don't know, it's it's not the end of the world.

No, I I agree. I agree. And I think it's something that has just been way overblown. And I don't think it's something that you have to concern yourself with, but it does show the fear in the market and that's going to create fear regardless of the irrationality of it. And so if you're an owner or a want to be owner and you're going to buy, use that fear. These are the headlines amongst which you want to make purchase decisions through.

You don't want to wait for these to turn. So I'd say use those to your advantage if you're buying and now's the time to buy. On that note, more bad news. Commercial real estate, again, this is so obvious, but I'll say it anyway. Real estate investors are shying away from Canada's biggest city, so they're talking about Toronto. Commercial real estate investment drops 27%, it says Real estate investors are drawing back from Canada's biggest city has higher interest rates.

Construction costs and remote work take a deeper toll. So it says we've dropped 27% in investment in the city, down more than $2.5 billion from the year before. And the biggest sector of that obviously was office, so office leading the majority of that loss. And so what's happening is just remote work. People are moving out. They're both leaving the city, so they're not living there, they're not working there.

A lot of them flooded out during the pandemic and that's obviously hurting across the board. What are your thoughts there? Yeah, I think commercial's been impacted pretty hard. I mean I focus much more on the residential side of things. I I take a peek into commercials sometimes they've been hit hard. Yeah, for sure.

I mean even 11 property in particular that I was looking at, they they purchased this property in 2016, I want to say for about 5.9 million they're back on the market now trying to sell at six million. Wow, that's 2016 they purchased for 5.9, right. And they started higher. I mean they were they started 12, they started slowly bringing it down over the year but back down to six. So when you factor in the costs of closing, right, so their land transfer tax costs for the agent, right, Because they gotta, they gotta pay to list the home. If you take everything into account, it's it's not a good position to be in for those people, right.

And that's a huge, huge loss that they're gonna take on their end. That's if they sell for the six. Oh, massive. And I I think it's important to like look at too, like although it's commercial like, OK, we're talking about like office is really what's messing stuff up in Toronto. But that office translates into if less people are coming to work there, it means less people are living there. So that means condos are getting hurt.

This condo, we have a lot of supply of condo and of new construction condos and if people are leaving, that's not helpful in selling those, but also that's going to hurt local retail, right. It's going to hurt local services. So I think that that office sector has ripples. I don't know if we've seen them all yet, but it's definitely indicating something because if we have 30% less investment in commercial space and most edits from office, that does indicate that we have probably a large portion of that being people that are just no longer going to be there. Yeah. And I think a lot of that comes from the difficulty in getting approved for financing, especially for commercial today.

You know, the down payment substantially higher, the qualifications are totally different and with interest rates where they are, it becomes really, really difficult to get approved for something like that, right. So I think that had a massive impact on that, right, Just the ability to actually get the capital and well, sorry, get the funding for it. Yeah, and it's gonna be hard to recover from because of that. Like, how do you get out of this? Yeah, all these offices are vacant, no ones coming back, not no one. But there was a study from McKinsey which said we're still 30% shy of the ratio of how many employees work in officers from home since pre pandemic.

So still we have 30% more people work from home than were even pre pandemic. That's a really big gap and it's very close to the correlation of the drop in investment. So it's definitely, it's definitely a leading issue and it's very hard to recover from to your point because how how, how do you fix it? Like you can't force people to come back to work. You can't even really build like if you say OK we want to go do new structures, we'll make it more fun, we'll do some serious conversions. Right.

What do you financing for it? How do you do it? How do you, how do you fix this issue? I think that's what's gonna have to be seen on a more positive note. I know I'm covering commercial, but just cause Toronto has so much cool stuff going on and it's just fun to talk about. But we drove by this the other day.

I don't know like anything about this so I'd love your opinion but the well, so the well has been all over social media. It's a really cool development. I think there's residential in there. There's some retail, is there office too? Is there everything? You know, I'm not sure.

It's a mix, right? I don't know what the whole profile is, but like that's an interesting what do you know about it, 'cause I know like nothing and I was just curious if you'd have any. Insight for me, Yeah. No, I mean, if you're right, you're 100% right. There's a lot of hype around that building. I think it was well done.

I I haven't dove too much into it on what's going on there. But yeah, no, it it's something that there's a lot of hype around for sure. So apparently, yeah, apparently I'm reading the article, but apparently they spent like a ton of money on this thing. And the innovation being that there's like these apartments inside the building that's essentially feels like a mall when you walk in where people are living above you. And the complaint I guess from some people already is the rent in these units is apparently absurd. So like the tiny studios are already almost 3 grand a month going upward of $7000 a month to get in there.

And I wonder if they're gonna have a hard time like on the rental side throughout. I don't know if you've been following it at all, but have you seen the same slow down at all the rental side? Like are they as price sensitive? Huge. Huge. Yeah.

Yeah, there's you. Think there'll be more renters? Now there's a there's a lot of inventory out there even on the rental side of things and one of the biggest challenges is and like we were looking at one recently right where you get first let's look at pre confer that right. So if you look at you know some of these that start having their occupancy right. So first occupancy the owners are paying occupancy fees and it's time to rent the unit out. Well the problem is you have a bunch of other people at the same time they're in the same position as you that are looking at renting that something similar out.

So we had one for rent and I think at the time that we went on the market to lease, there were 48 other listings available for lease in that specific building. Yeah. So that creates a lot of downward pressure and you know when we when you originally go on the market, the price that you could rent at is one thing, right. I think it was hovering around the the 31131 fifty. Now those same units are being leased out at I seen one 26127 hundred 2800 that's a huge, huge gap in you know what few months. But it's because people are carrying these, you know they have the carrying cost with these occupancy fees that are substantial and they need to get something in.

So they'll take whatever they can get. Yeah, that's crazy, man. But like it, it makes you wonder, like if there's downward pressure on the buying side, so less home buyers and there's there's less people renting. So there, there there's, there's more, there's less competition on the rental side. If people aren't renting or aren't buying, where are they going? Where are they living?

Yeah, it's a good question. It's. Just like more people living with each other, Is it more people staying at home? Like, I wonder what's happening there. Yeah, No. No, in the basement.

Question. I don't know. I think a lot of people, especially now, they're just kind of staying put. They don't know what to do. They're frozen. Yeah.

Confused mind does nothing, right? They they're staying put. They're they don't know where to go. They don't know if they should rent it. They don't know if they should buy. So it's it's easier to just stay where they are.

It's a safer decision for them and that's, yeah, that's what they're doing. Wow. Which makes you think of that whole that Warren Buffett saying of like be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. Like right now I see fear. So if we kind of follow that goes back to our point. I think like this is what you want to be doing.

Everyone's frozen, do something because as soon as all those people do finally make that decision and they come back to more whether it's on the rental side, the buy side, the investment side, when all these people decide to like, OK, it's time to do something. That's a lot of competition because we have a lot of people and and it's not slowing down. Like we still have that that million five people coming in every year with students, with immigration, with everything. These people all need places to live, whether it's rental or buy whatever it is. And like if they're on the sidelines, plus the people that are already on the sidelines, it's like plus all the people still in their home waiting to finally sell and move or or upside, like it's going to be a wave.

Like I think when this happens, it's going to be big. There's a lot of pent up demand for sure, a lot of people that want to make the move, but they are scared. So I think, yeah, once we see interest rates start to come down, I think that there's going to be a huge, huge wave like you said of people coming into the market and it's going to, it's going to be a lot of competition. Again, I think it just, it is what it is. When, when you have the amount of people coming into the city as we do, when you don't have really the the supply to to fill that need, it's going to create a lot of demand and we're going to see prices go back up I think once we start to see interest rates come down.

Yeah. No, I I totally agree. So I'm going to end this then with, I'm going to have you give two pieces of advice for people listening from your area of expertise. So buyers and sellers, we'll start with buyers. There's a buyer listening to this right now. They're in the market.

Maybe they're upsizing, buying something bigger, maybe they're buying their first house. I don't know what it is, but there's a buyer listening to this right now and they want to know they come to you as an agent or they come to some of your team. I wanna know what to do. Should I buy? What should I buy? Where should I buy?

What's the advice you're giving? These clients are now coming to you saying I think I'm ready to buy something. Yeah. If you're in a position where you can take advantage of what, where the market is today, get a get in the market. I mean when you go to get your mortgage, get something shorter term, go to the two year, go to the three-year option, you're gonna pay a little bit more. But I think in the long run it makes sense.

But I think especially in this market if you have the ability to do that move up by or to just get into the market the first time, I think you're you're in a really good position to do that. And like I said, I think once we see interest rates start to come down, it's there's going to be a huge wave of demand that really picks up at that time and we're not going to have the inventory to really fill that demand. Yeah, I I totally agree on the on the listing side, the seller side, I own a home. I come to you, I go Phil, I'm not sure what to do, but I I think I'm going to get out of my home. I think I want to get this thing on market. I think I want to sell.

What's the advice? What do I got to know? Yeah, I would probably start with a question. Why are you moving? What's the reason? Are you looking at getting into something bigger?

Are you looking to just offload some property? Like what is the actual reason that you're looking at making a move? I think if you are moving up, I think it's a great time to do that. The biggest thing though, and and this is something that you really need to look at before you go on the market today is it's pricing. That initial price that you go on to the MLS at is so, so important. Get some really good advice on that.

Make sure you really understand the the market in your exact pocket where you are, what your competition looks like, but really spend some time on that. I think that that's super important today. That's and I'm I'm glad more people in the real estate profession as well are seeing the importance of pricing because it's like in general business, especially in marketing, that's like the biggest piece of your marketing is pricing product properly. And to me that's all this is like pricing product, the house, the product, the biggest lever you have is the right price. And I think a lot of sellers see that maybe with with jaded lenses, they think if you're lowering the price, you're just trying to make your job easier.

But it's not true. You're actually trying to get them the best deal for their house and get the most attention possible. I think more sellers have to understand that. Trust your agent, If you go with a good agent, you trust them to begin with. Trust them with guiding on price. They're not trying to screw you.

They want the house to sell for as much as possible, just like you do, and they don't want you to be sitting there for two months. Yeah, I think that's huge. Make sure that the person you're deciding to list with is somebody that you trust. You trust that they know what they're doing, #1 but #2, you trust that they're gonna have your best interests at heart. A great agent's gonna do that for you, like a great agent's really gonna keep in mind your best interests. They're gonna they have their fiduciary duties that they need to abide by, and they're gonna, they're really gonna push for you.

I mean, you guys gotta be dialed in, be on the same team, understand? Like I said, where the market is be able to interpret what you're seeing because I think too many people are still stuck in pricing properties like we were two years ago where if you look at the three most recent sold, you barely need to look at what the competition is because there was none. And they're looking at the three most recent sold that are between a million 1,000,050 let's say and they're pricing at 1,000,075 just above right. And the time for that is gone. You got to look at the recent sold, expect that you're gonna price more aggressively than those who were actually sold for and then also look at the competition that's out there and take all of that into account.

Yeah, no, I love that. So what I'm gonna do is one more bonus question and then we're gonna wrap it up here, investors, they're looking at your neck of the woods. So you're you're about like, what's your main intersection there where you are your office. Defer and Sinclair. So I'm an investor. I wanted to play some capital, but I'm not picky.

It can be in something retail, can be mixed-use, can be multi family. I'm coming down to your area. I'm looking around, I'm going this, this looks interesting. I want to do a deal down here. What's what's the opportunity right now in your neck of the woods? If you're trying to guide some money, someone's looking to allocate capital.

What are you seeing around there that's like, oh this is interesting. I wish I could get more people down here doing this. I think mixed-use, mixed-use is huge. You get the residential, you get the commercial. Especially if somebody's just diving into that for the first time, let's say they're just getting into the commercial side of the investment stuff. When you go mixed-use, you can try out the residential, you can try out the commercial, figure out what you like better, You get to try both out.

And I think there's a lot of good opportunity in that space right now. And do you do you think like as a value add like I'm going to go into your your, your pocket there and I'm going to look for stuff that's kind of a little rundown get in there make it nice, do that value out approach or is there another way to go better? There. Yeah, I think that's huge. But like my biggest thing is get something that has some real long term potential. Like, don't just buy something because, yeah, it's it's got a main floor retail and then a second floor apartment kind of thing.

Get into something that has some future potential. Try to get close to the corner. Obviously the more frontage you can get, the better. Don't buy something that's right in the middle of the block if you can avoid that. Yeah, Those are all things that I think are really important that you want to look at. Obviously you know you're going to pay for all of these things, but I think in the long run it really pays off.

So if you're able to get something that, if you're able to pay the premium for something that has a lot more long term potential, I think you're in a much better position. I think it's worth it to to push a little bit to that. Point I love it. Yeah, I I I totally agree especially down there driving the other day with you, it's like you you do see a lot of that and you can see the the value there, especially buying and holding for the long term, the redevelopment opportunities down the road as they continue to change the zoning bylaws and push for more density and more housing, they'll start to ease up on what can be built where. And if you're positioned on that nice Main Street and you got that corner lot and you got the land and you can put some up really interesting there, that's gonna be a really good long term play too for sure.

Yeah, and the city's really pushing on density, right? Like they're encouraging it. I mean you look at laneway houses, how much they've opened up laneway houses, garden suites to to huge, huge area, even areas where you wouldn't really think that a laneway house would, would make sense, like they're they're really allowing it. I mean you've got to meet certain criteria for sure. But one thing that we always do whenever we're listing property is let's look at the ability to put a laneway house in. So we bring in an expert in that field.

They do an assessment, they give us up a written document that basically says, yes, it qualifies what the square footage is that it would qualify for. And these are all really important things to a potential buyer. I mean, we sold something not too long ago that one of the main reasons the buyer went for that property over another option. Was because we were providing them a document that said, hey, you can put a laneway house here and this is the space that you can do it for and they've got that listed right now. The laneway house for it was 3700. Wow, that's a great house hack 'cause also like, no one's actually living in your house.

Yeah, it's a separate. It's a separate. Structure, I think it's the best return on investment too. Like what does it cost you to put a laning way house up, right? I mean I've heard some people say 300,350 in and around that range. Where do you turn around and rent something out for 36137 hundred, right?

Like to get a condo that's leased at 36137 hundred? You're spending quite a bit of money, right? Oh, for sure. So that no, that doesn't make a lot of sense. How does that actually work? I I don't actually know this 'cause I don't do anything down in that neck of the woods.

But this is gonna sound like a really dumb question. When you build that laneway house, is that just part of the same property? That's one lot. So it's sold together. So there's no severance involved in that doesn't become two addresses. So when they have like someone lives in in the laneway house and they order Amazon, this is gonna sound so dumb.

Where does it come? No. So they'll have like their own kind of their own address for like mailing and everything. So that's separate, but you can't sever the lot. Is it like a letter? It'll be like 132 A&B or something?

Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I see. But it is one lot. It's not severed. It's it's one pin. If you're looking at Geo Warehouse, it's one thing.

Exactly. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

So it's just, it's a house hack. It's like having a basement apartment, but no one's in your basement. It's a huge way to increase cap rate too, right, because of the fact that it doesn't require a ton of capital and you can get such good rents because. Yeah. And that tenant, they also feel like, OK, well, I'm in my own house, right? It's not like renting out a basement.

It's not like renting out a main floor where they've got neighbors upstairs, they've got neighbors downstairs. So I think even from the tenant's perspective, it's much more attractive. Seems to be the trendy cool thing to do too. So I I think that helps. I I have seen some really interesting ones. There's I can't I I wish I could show them out now.

I can't remember they have Instagram and it's it's a design company and all they do is is like drawing a design for laneway, laneway suites and houses and they do some really, really cool work and they're just really creative with how they put these things together and they actually look actually pretty cool. Like it doesn't look like a small little like shack in laneway. They look like super modern luxury homes to buy like a place in a laneway which is really I I I think it's the future. I mean, whether people like it or not, people do need affordable housing. And unless you want them to tear down your house and build a condo, that's going to be your next best option is trying to squeeze some density out.

I mean it, it makes sense. If you have like 100 houses in area and you can turn them all to triplexes, you'd have 300 units, 100 units. So it does make a lot of sense. So I I think I'm supportive of it. It makes sense. In Toronto especially, like you said, economics make a lot of sense because the rent is so strong and the cost of building that in Toronto is going to be the same as building it in Barry or Midland or anywhere else.

That might have an availability, but your return's gonna be much higher, right? So you might as well, Especially for Toronto. That's a thing to consider. I love that. Well, awesome, man. Where can people find you if they want to connect with you?

Instagram would be Philip Ramos with two s s at the end. And yeah, I mean, you can always Google US. Ramos Team, Ramos teamhomes.com is the website, but if you just go on Google, you type in Ramos team real estate will come up. Awesome man. Well, thanks so much for coming out. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me, man. Thanks for tuning into another episode of Inside Canadian Real Estate, guys. Don't forget if you liked the episode, if you found it enjoyable, if you learned something, if you liked our guest, if you liked our topics, don't forget to subscribe to Inside Canadian Real Estate on Instagram. That's where you'll find all of our clips posted. We're also sharing on YouTube, so just search Inside Canadian Real Estate on YouTube, follow along and please, please, please if you really want to help the show, because again, there's not a lot of Canadian content on real estate. We're putting a lot of money and time into this.

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