The Anchor Weekly – The Chestermere Lake News

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 [...]

Following in the tradition of so many others out there, I thought putting a list together of some of my projections for 2012 might be a fun idea. So here are a few of my thoughts of what is going to happen around us in 2012 in the Real Estate market. The Rental Market is going to get tight and people will complain about it. This one shouldn’t come as a surprise as we are already have seen vacancies drop drastically around Calgary and the onslaught of people moving to Alberta for work won’t let up. This will immediately impact [...]

Slumlords, just the sound of it makes you think of broken down tenements in places like New York City. You know, the types of buildings we see in movies with boarded up windows, garbage in the hallways and essentially unfit living conditions. We’d like to think we are sheltered from those types of properties and I suppose for the most part we are. The problem here isn’t so much large apartment style blocks that fit the description, but rather similar situations on a smaller scale. Smaller apartment buildings, various sizes of plexes and even single family homes are much more [...]

I just received a copy of the CMHC’s Rental Market Report for the Calgary Region and all I can see in it is good news! Unfortunately, it has no details on the surrounding areas, but we all know what affects Calgary, also affects the surrounding areas like Chestermere. Now I’ve been talking about how the number of vacancies out there has been decreasing for months now and this report confirms it. Not only have they seen the apartment vacancy rate drop to 1.9%, but also they are seeing rents increase. It’s only a little bit, but as vacancies remain below [...]

Last week I talked about renting out rooms in to your home to people and how you fall under the Innkeeper’s Act. This can be a great way to create some extra income, but it also can be a bit tricky when you end up sharing the common areas of your home with strangers. An alternative that is much more common place is renting out part of your personal residence. Renting out a basement suite or even living in the basement and renting out an upper unit is a great way for a homeowner to create some extra income and [...]