Houses and Mortgages
The search for a house is narrowing in, I have a short list of five MLS listings that I hope to visit in the coming days. I have been using a combination of realtor.ca and findmyedmontonhome.com to search for homes. Given an estimated offer of 95% of the list price, and that leaves me with about $345,000 and under, which turns into about $327,000 down to about $299,000. In my opinion, and in this market, these are good prices for a 3 bedroom freehold properties with fenced yards and double garages. Idealy, I am looking for maximum resale value, so that means that I have to take advantage of the situation of the buyers market that we have (and are going to have for another month or two at least). Providing that I pick up a property on the continuing downswing of prices, this gives me the leverage of comfortably offering a far lower offer than I normally would be able to, this is effectively to take advantage of the seller’s impatience. Some sellers have had their properties on the market for quite some time, with the inventory of houses growing and growing, this can only motivate a seller to accept a lower offer when they have nothing else on the table.
As for mortgages, I narrowed things down to a set of three. FirstLine Matrix, BMO ReadiLine, and National Bank All-in-one. BMO is highly regarded, but it (as well as the All-in-one) lacks a key feature, portability. Portability lets me sell my house and buy a new one, all without having to renegotiate a new mortgage. This is especially useful when implementing a Smith Manoeuvre because a renegotiation involves liquidating the investments that are secured against the LOC portion of the mortgage. These investments would then need to be repurchased with the new mortgage. This could cause complications with capital gains or capital losses. Since I have every intention of selling the house before i convert the mortgage, this is a very important feature. FirstLine also has a very good online portal for managing the accounts (and hopefully automating transfers). Paired with my PC Financial account, I can only hope that I will be able to completely automate the transfer of funds to the point where my routine tasks become very straight forward. News and details on the FirstLine Matrix mortgage once I hear back from my broker.