From the Toronto Star:
When Paul and Stacey Johnson arrived at the Market Wharf condos recently to tour three units for sale, they knew far more than most licensed realtors about the dollars and sense of the biggest purchase of their lives.
They knew the precise square footage of each suite, instead of just the 800-899 square foot range listed on the MLS. They knew the age of the building, the name of the developer, even which had balconies allowing gas barbecues.
But, most importantly, the Johnsons knew how overpriced each of the two-bedroom units were compared to what’s sold, so far, in the relatively new building just south of St. Lawrence Market.
That’s because Paul spends each morning trolling an innovative and insightful new website called condos.ca — the most comprehensive to date among a new generation of online sites aimed at shaking up the GTA real estate industry and giving buyers, and investors, vital bottom-line information.
“The number one concern for me right now is, am I buying at the peak of the market. I’m not going in with the attitude that I need to make a profit, but I want to know that, in five years, I’m going to at least break even and have had a great place to live in the meantime,” says Johnson.
Realtor and founder Carl Langschmidt, also founder of mrloft.ca, has spent $800,000 and three years creating condos.ca with his computer programming brother Ahren and commercial real estate appraiser Andrew Harrild.
They started by buying critical land registry information that’s given them the exact square foot measurements of more than 275,000 condo units across the GTA, as well as their maintenance fees, rules and restrictions.
They then had an analytics team painstakingly map out that information, building by building, and have cross-referenced it with MLS sold and other data to create a very clear picture of each building, going as far back as a decade.
Click on a condo listing — or a specific address — and all the information pops up automatically, including the most critical element, a graph that shows the average sale price per square foot of each units in the building and how that value has changed over time.
The website cleverly skirts Toronto Real Estate Board rules that prohibit realtors from posting sold data online, ostensibly for privacy reasons. Langschmidt, who studied investment analysis and finance at Bond University in South Africa before immigrating to Canada in 2003, is quick to point out that the site doesn’t identify the sold price of specific units.
Condos.ca now gets about 35,000 unique visitors a month and sales for Langschmidt’s Royal LePage office have climbed about $400,000 since the site launched last year, he says.
Langschmidt became concerned that buyers, and investors, weren’t getting the information they really needed to make sound purchases after having so many clients come to him the last three years, trying to unload units they bought in the preconstruction phase based solely on developers’ claims of their values.
In many cases, they were prices at least 10 per cent above similar, brand new resale units in the same area, says Langschmidt. Some are now unable to sell or are renting out their units in hopes that values will eventually climb to what they paid.
“With this site, there’s no pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes in terms of what the real (values) are. There’s not going to be any way to hide from the facts.”
Leora Kronfeld tripped across condos.ca after moving to Toronto recently from Boston.
“Being able to get that one-stop-shopping, contextual information in a snapshot saved me a lot of time.”
As she began researching the Dundas St. E. loft she recently bought, she discovered from condos.ca that it wasn’t 800 to 899 feet at all, but just 789 sq ft. She also found out that the average sale price in 2013 was $517 per sq/ft in the building, a little more than she offered.
(Langschmidt says he discovered during data crunching that realtors appear to round up condo sizes in about 15 per cent of cases, making the units bigger on paper than they are in real life.)
“It’s unbelievable to me that, here you are making the biggest purchase of your life, and it’s like someone is playing a trick on you. The condo could be 800 feet, it could be 899 feet,” says Kronfeld.
“This is the information age. People aren’t willing to accept not getting full information, especially when we know it exists in a database somewhere and there’s no reason it should be kept from us.”
Langschmidt has big plans for the future of condos.ca.
He’s now examining maintenance fees of each building to determine if and how they impact price growth.
He plans to create a list of “best developers” so that buyers know which buildings are best as investments based on their rates of return.
“I love selling condos,” he stresses. “The resale condo market has increased 88 per cent since January, 2004. People should not be losing money in this market. If they are, it’s because they overpaid.”
The Johnsons decided to take a pass on Market Wharf. They didn’t like the look, or the numbers: One of the condos they saw was listed for $727 per square foot when, according to condos.ca, average sale prices have been closer to $610 or $657 per square foot, depending on the phase.
“The other thing that would be useful, as a buyer, is to have a breakdown of condo fees and what’s included in them from property to property,” says Johnson.
Langschmidt’s team is still hard at work. That information is coming.
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