EDIT: Sorry, i accidentally added a space in the link, it is now fixed.

Edmonton and Area Tennis Courts

My beta project was a research project on ruby, Hpricot, and XPath. you can see the minimalist webpage for this project at http://llamabot.com/ and play around with it. It is just a quick and easy way to scrape pages without having to know much of anything about the page structure.

This new mash-up combines the XPath for scraping various IKS channel counts with google’s dynamic data visualization widgets. With the addition of a cron job, the web page is now fully automated. While it currently has very little data, soon the data set will grow and this will become a useful method of determining which systems are better suited for different people.

Check out the results at http://fta.errorok.com/

Where to look:

• http://www.findmyedmontonhome.com/
• http://www.mls.ca/splash.aspx
• http://www.comfree.com/home

I found that findmyedmontonhome worked best for me, it has the same database of homes that mls does, but the fine tuning of the search and the ease of navigation was much better.  I spent very little time looking at comfree mostly because when real estate is heading towards a buyer’s market, comfree listings tend to be over priced.  There is some rhyme and reason behind this; home owners are reluctant to drop their prices as they still expect that their home has not decreased in value.  The truth is that unless you are able to keep up with the changing market (which is totally possible), you NEED a realtor to market your house for you, they will handle all the small details of keeping your house appealing in the price department.  To sum things up, comfree listings were always priced a few months behind and I often found myself saying “gee, how the hell do they expect to sell THAT place at THAT price?”

FIND A REALTOR

This is so important!  Realtors have access to all kinds of extra information that is not available to the public (I’ve checked into it, only realtors have access to it).  The most important being that of the prices that homes have sold for in the surrounding areas where you are looking.  This can give you a lot of leverage when buying a home.  Realtors will also help show you around some of the homes you find interesting and likely point out things that you may have otherwise missed.  The bottom line is that when buying a home, the realtor works for you but gets paid by the seller, this type of business relationship is very beneficial to a home buyer.  One last mention, make sure you shop around for a realtor (ask friends, family, someone is bound to know a good one).  When it comes to starting the home buying process (the paperwork), a good realtor can mean a world of difference, between actually getting the home you want and letting it slip through your fingers.

Negotiating

Once you find the home you like (or homes if you have a hard time deciding between several), you put down your initial offer in a contract.  The contract will have two major sections that concern you, the condition date and the financing date.  It is easy to put offers on multiple homes because you get to remove the conditions at your leasure.  This means that if you put an offer in on 5 houses, and 4 sellers bite your offer (with a potential counter offer), you get to choose the one you like best and just let the other contracts expire.  Your conditions will likely include that the house is given a clean inspection (or at least relatively clean).  And financing revolves around your ability to get financing from the bank of your choice.  So even though you could get financing for each contract, you have to manually lift the conditions on each contract, and if the dates expire you are no longer bound to the contract.  Now, you likely do not want to pay for multiple inspections, that can get pricey, but the option is there which is nice. 

The negotiation process is a bit like haggling for a t-shirt in Mexico, only instead of $1 and $2 it is instead $5,000 and $10,000 (depending on the price of the home i suppose).  But the concept is still very similar, start low but not too low or the seller might get offended and refuse to do your business.  The seller will almost always counter with a higher offer, upon which you should (in a buyer’s market especially) re-counter split down the middle.  Repeat this process (more or less) until you both agree on a price.  Like I said before, in a buyer’s market (like today), the buyer has the advantage of not losing the seller too easily with counter offers.  In a seller’s market the buyer must fight with other buyers for the seller’s home, which means they have to over bid the price.

Research

Do some research, as much as possible.  Here are some links to get you started:

• http://www.ereb.com/REALTORSAssociationOfEdmonton.html - click on Latest Market Activity on the left and read up (especially the Monthly and Quarterly reports).
• http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pjgVyIX-40-W8yD9s9BLjGQ – I have compiled (and will continue to compile) a lot of Edmonton real estate data.  Basically, I take the EREB reports and condense them down to nice graph-able data rows.

Some RSS feeds to watch: 

• Alberta Real Estate Watch
• Alberta Bubble
• Canadian Mortgage News & Canada’s Mortgage Trends
• Chris Davies
• Edmonton Condo Blog
• Edmonton Housing Bust
• Edmonton Real Estate Blog

Remember to take everything you read with a grain of salt, while the author may be a professional, they often just voice their opinions.  Personally, I like to gather data, and dump it into a spreadsheet, then try and filter things down or graph numbers to see if I can get a bigger picture.  Here is one graph i have created that shows the extent of the Edmonton housing bubble:

and a closeup of the 2007 bubble: