Real estate is emotional. Why? Because a home is more than walls and a roof, it’s a container for our lives, our families, our communities. As part of an occasional series, we’ve asked local writers to share their stories on real estate and housing.
It was spring 2021 and houses in our East York area were selling so fast it was as if the city was having one giant flash sale on properties. Only instead of discounts and promotions, houses were getting gobbled up for hundreds of thousands over asking in record time.
We hoped ours would be one of them.
We purchased our detached two-storey barn-style home with a generous backyard in 2007. It was small but suited our little family of three (and a dog) just fine — that is, until COVID-19 hit. In the early days of the pandemic, with no family in the city, I felt isolated. And with all of us working and learning from home, our cosy space now felt tight. At the time, the world returning to normal seemed like a pipe dream and I thought if this was my new reality, I wanted to be closer to my parents and siblings.
The timing just seemed right. We could take advantage of the crazy hot real estate market and move to my hometown of Winnipeg, where we could buy a home outright with the proceeds from selling our Toronto home and be mortgage-free.
It seemed like a no-brainer. Family (check), financial security (check, check).
We had spent the winter and early spring renovating our house — complete with new bathroom, kitchen, upstairs flooring and a fresh coat of paint. We listed the house for $999,900 on April 21, 2021, in hopes of generating interest and maybe spurring a bidding war or bully offer, a trend our real estate agent was seeing in the market.
We thought it would be an easy sell — with the pandemic at its height, there were plenty of people looking to escape their boxes in the sky downtown for more space in the city. We knew who our buyer would be — a young couple, a single professional or an empty-nester.
As soon as the for-sale sign went up, prospective buyers started to trickle in but it wasn’t the stampede we had expected. While my home was small and pretty, there were glaring issues out of our control — namely its size and the shared parking.
When offer night came, we had zero bids. We relisted the property at $1,125,000, thinking buyers were sick of bidding wars and a higher price would make us more transparent about our expectations. Almost two weeks later, my husband and I had “the talk.” He wanted to pull it off the market and stay. I convinced him to keep it on for just one more weekend.
The next day, we finally had an offer for $1,040,000 — much lower than our list price. After some negotiations, we ended up selling for $1,075,000, which still garnered us a great profit as we’d purchased the property for $375,000. After renovations, remaining mortgage, realtor and lawyer fees, we walked away with about $650,000. That meant we could comfortably buy a home in Winnipeg for $500,000 and have a financial cushion for future renovations and savings.
Now here’s where the story takes a twist.
I boarded the plane to Winnipeg on May 27 to find our dream home on the Prairies, picturing a big yard with a pool — perfect for all those family barbecues. I moved in with my mom and spent a few weeks searching and found the market fraught with a lot of the same issues as in Toronto — record low interest rates, low inventory and high competition.
The difference was the price — houses ranged from smaller $300,000 bungalows to more modern $600,000 homes — and the space. I remember walking into one that just kept going. I could see the realtor’s eyes light up after he showed me room after room after room, thinking the expansiveness was sure to wow me. We walked outside to the backyard, and it was massive, with an above ground pool and hot tub. This was what I thought I wanted — a private space in which to entertain, play and relax. But as I looked out onto the big space, all I could see was … work. Plus, what would we do with all this space? We were a family of three and my son would eventually move out. None of it felt right.
I started thinking, maybe the saying is true. Maybe you really can’t go home. That’s when I called my husband and said something that I was sure would make him lose his mind. “Hey, what if we stayed in Toronto?”
After a small stroke, he agreed to start looking in Toronto.
Staying meant re-evaluating our budget and priorities. It would mean not only kissing our mortgage-free dreams goodbye but taking on an even bigger mortgage than we owed on the house we just sold.
We decided on a budget of $1.2 million and went shopping for a home that checked off our must-haves: it had to be relatively close to our east end area, have parking and be larger than the home we had before.
After weeks of searching, my husband found a semi-detached home — anything detached was now out of our reach — in the Coxwell-Greenwood pocket, just southwest of where we had sold our home. It was two minutes from our son’s high school and steps from restaurants, cafes and shops on the Danforth.
The home was old and dated, but it had good bones and potential, including a separate entrance to the basement, perfect for rental income down the road.
It had been on the market for one week and had one failed offer night as the sellers turned away the offers that were put forth. It was listed for $1,129,000 and we offered $1,180,000 but they countered with a number out of our range — $1,235.000 — so we walked away.
Three weeks later after losing on a handful of bidding wars in Toronto, the semi-detached home was still on the market and the sellers were getting antsy. We decided to put in a second, lower bid and eventually settled on a purchase price of $1,175,000 — $5,000 less than our original offer three weeks previously.
While I had seen the home over FaceTime calls from Winnipeg, I hadn’t actually stepped into our new house until two weeks after we got possession. It was only a five-minute drive away from our old place, but it felt like a world away — the neighbourhood had zero space between houses and the home was much darker than my open and airy barn.
Still, the kitchen was big and beautiful, the front porch looked out to a tree-lined street that smelled of fresh flowers, and we now had an extra bedroom (perfect for visiting family and friends). I still felt at peace letting my old home go. It was time to move on — just a few blocks west rather than a province.
So, what did this experience teach me? Sometimes, the grass isn’t always greener. I had visions of a big house with a big yard and a pool but when faced with that reality, it wasn’t actually me.
The truth is, it’s important to love where you live. At least it is to me. Could I have been happy in Winnipeg? Sure. I could describe it best as a safe, sleepy choice and, truth be told, I wasn’t ready to slow down. I knew if we moved to Winnipeg, I would always wonder what could have been if we stayed in Toronto.
While nobody can say what the future will bring, as I sit on my front porch with my dog, Stanley, snoring softly beside me, for now I am happy exactly where I am.
Rachel Naud is the founder of INBETWEEN magazine, a digital magazine for parents of teens. When not working on her porch with her dog, Stanley, she loves to walk to the Danforth for coffee and croissants.
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