The spring market is b-u-s-y!!

And a busy market means lots of properties, good and bad.  Here’s a few unique observations…

I talk a lot about the value of staging and how important it is to make a home look its absolute best.  In fact, if you spend money on staging, you can make a home look even better than it actually is!  Smoke & mirrors, baby!  It’s all part of the sale…

Having said that, I recently came across a very…..interesting…..staging item in the bedroom of a house that was for sale for $800,000.

Just behind the bed-frame, I noticed this:

Yeah…

In all seriousness, one of the cutest items I’ve seen in a house in a long time might not be for staging purposes.

Blue = boy
Pink = girl

Right?  So why not make your little boy’s bedroom even more little-boy-ish and give him an airplane light fixture!!

Back to the…..unspectacular houses.

Do you feel like you’re in a “safe” neighbourhood when the front door looks like this:

Safety aside, how about affordability?

Everywhere I look these days, I see articles about how expensive housing in Toronto has become!

The average price of a house is over $500K!

So what does $500K get you?

Here’s the bathtub in the “master bathroom” in a house listed for $499,000:

Although, today’s “nice, clean” bathrooms might be out of date.

How about carpet in a bathroom?  Whose idea was that?

I’m 32-years-old and I still can’t hit the bowl while half-asleep at 3:30am…

Imagine having kids in this bathroom with carpet?

And last but not least, make sure when you’re choosing your “upgrades” at the sales centre for the latest condo development that you know exactly what you’re getting.

When a developer offers you gas cooking in the kitchen, you should ask HOW they’re going to get the gas into the kitchen.

If you’re going to shell out $2,500 for an “upgrade,” you’d expect that it would be done properly, right?

It’s not like the developer would just run a gas line through the drywall and across the ceiling……….right?