The Anchor Weekly – The Chestermere Lake News

This was our first visit to Stage West, and we enjoyed it so much, we definitely plan on returning. With no previous benchmark for us, we had no expectations and were quite ecstatic to experience the Stage West performance. And what a great experience it was. First, it started with a wonderful dinner, then to follow it up with a wonderful musical revue, it made for a fantastic evening. We weren’t entirely sure what we were getting into attending a musical revue, but when the ensemble cast broke into The Lovin’ Spoonful’s hit song Summer in the City we knew [...]

Spring is typically the time of year that the Real Estate market starts to pick up the pace and it’s during this time that many Realtors shine. Unfortunately, it’s also a time when some Realtors expect the market to do all the work for them. To help you avoid getting stuck with the wrong Realtor, I’ve compiled some tips to get you on track. Dealing with a good Realtor can often be the difference, between having a property sell in a timely fashion, and having your property languish on the market for months, so pay attention! One of the phrases [...]

At about this time in 2007 the economic environment here in Alberta was still running at a frantic pace. Unfortunately, it was also at a pace that was shortly going to come to a grinding halt, but not before thousands of people (myself included) purchased properties. Also unfortunately, most of these properties were bought at or near the peak of their pricing and still haven’t completely recovered back to their original purchase price. For homeowners with plans of living in this same property for years this can be a bit of a letdown knowing that their property is currently worth [...]

With a less than 2% vacancy rate for rental units, it’s only a matter of time before the various political parties bring up rent control. After all it’s the ideal time, we have a big election coming up and looking out for the little person (the renter in this case), will be a perfect posturing opportunity. In a supply and demand marketplace like the rental market, the current low vacancy rate is creating an ideal situation for rents to start increasing and increasing quickly. These increases will, as usual, catch people off guard and create a backwash of ill intent [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article talking about Return on Investment or ROI and talked about how it applies to Real Estate investments. Now ROI can actually be quite a complex subject and there are a significant number of variables that can affect the actual formula and ultimately the final return. In my example, I really simplified this and one of the local readers, Mike R., sent me a great email calling me out on my simplification and providing some great comments for me. Mike pointed out that when you are making mortgage payments on your property, you [...]

Just when you start to have a grasp on how to determine what is happening with property values (using median and average prices as a starting point), along comes the Real Estate Associations with a new, improved and better solution. The question is who is it more improved for and is it better? For years, and for better and for worse, Realtors and homeowners used average home prices and median home prices as guides to what was happening in the market. This system had some issues and some faults, but it’s been consistent. One issue that plagued the system was [...]

Return on Investment or ROI, what a great subject for the beginning of the year. So what is ROI? Well, simply put, if you invest $100 and make $100 on that investment, you had an ROI of 100% and now have $200 in your investment. If you invested $1,000 and made $100, you would have an ROI of 10% and if you invested $10,000 and made $100, you would only have an ROI of 1%. 1% would likely be the least attractive to people in this scenario, but we’re missing one more key element, the time frame. If your ROI [...]

To nobody’s surprise, the Bank of Canada decided to keep its key interest rate on hold at 1 percent yet again in its latest announcement released in mid January. While the economy and overall outlook in Alberta continue to get rosier, the same cannot be said for many other parts of Canada and more importantly, for the global economy. The intent of keeping rates at this level is to help keep money flowing in the economy. Lower borrowing costs make it more attractive for business (and consumers) to borrow, expand and grow their operations. Increasing rates have the reverse effect [...]

I can, and I just can’t stop talking about it. It’s the sense of optimism as we are going into 2012, could it really finally be our turn again? Face it, the last five years have been rough on a lot of people. Work has been harder to come by, the economy has slowed down, wages appeared to be lower and housing was stuck in a rut. Of course, we still had it significantly better than most of the rest of Canada; it just wasn’t what we were used to. For the last several months, things have felt more upbeat. [...]

If you have been keeping track, there were a significant number of good news stories floating around about the Real Estate markets in our province and most seemed to be quite promising. Well now that we have the full stats for the year, how exactly does it compare to the previous year and was it as wonderful as they said? Before I go down that path, from the activity of the for sale and sold signs out there and talking to people in my travels, 2011 definitely felt like a more optimistic year than 2010. Number of for sale signs [...]