Buying a pair of jeans or a home

Buying a pair of jeans or a home. 

You want to go jeans shopping.  Quickly you google some stats and find that the average price for a pair of jeans in Toronto is $76,-.   A nagging thought comes to your mind.  What does the average price mean?  Is the price representative of all jeans including leggings that look like jeans? How about jean-shorts? How about where I buy them: Yorkdale or Walmart? What about the different brands? 

How about home prices? The average price we read and hear are representative of all units ( detached, semis, towns, condos)  sold in all of Toronto!!!

All too often home sellers only hear “prices are up by 3.6% ( year of year summary August 2019).  Some sellers remember the home prices of spring 2017, add the increase they have just heard and decide to sell. A home owner of a detached home, worth between $ 1,000,000 and 1,5 M invites  a realtor and is disappointed when hearing very different numbers.  Of course any agent can promise the sky just to get a listing and hope for spinoff business. The good realtor educates the sellers of real facts: homes similar to the seller’s home in the same area sold and unsold. The facts tell the real story, the important story for any home seller to know before deciding what to do. 

You may have read statistics for August 2019.  

Let’s take a closer look:

The average price is up by 3.6%. Again:  all units, all of Toronto. 

Let’s look at detaches houses in the Central area.

August 2019  165 detaches homes sold with an average price of $ 1,987,737

August 2018  144 detached homes sold with an average price of $ 2,201,334.  

That is a 10% decrease year over year for a detached home in the central area. 

So where does the 3,6 % increase come from?  Homes under 1 million, condos, semis, townhomes. 

Selling and buying a home is not like buying a pair of jeans. The initial investment is 10,000 times  (and up)  more and the consequences from uninformed decisions can be extremely costly. 

Martina Brankovsky