Here is a before and after with a “personal touch.”
My childhood home was torn down about one year ago, and in its place now are two beautiful new homes with two new families ready to build their lives where my family once lived.
Here is a bit of the back story, and of course, let’s talk $$$ to make it even more interesting…
I first wrote about the demolition of my childhood home in Leaside back in August of 2008. That post can be found here.
At the time I wrote that post, my former childhood home was a hole in the ground. Fast-forward almost twelve full months, and not only are there two new, gorgeous houses on the grounds where my old house once stood, but there are two very happy families inhabiting those two houses.
I drove by the other day and I actually stopped and watched a child playing basketball in the driveway of one of the two houses. It was less than twenty years ago that I was a child also playing basketball in that driveway (metaphorically, since my driveway extended to the backyard where the second house now stands), and I kind of relished the fact that when my family was finished with the house, we passed it on to another family to build their lives afterwards.
You never really think of it that way – a family may move on, but the house stays where it’s always been. A home is not a perishable good; it’s a re-useable product that can spawn generation after generation.
I watched this child play basketball for a few moments and eventually his mother came outside with a baby in her arms, and suddenly I felt that much more fortunate to have grown up in that house, in this area, in this city, and in this country in which we live…
The decision to sell our family home was all but a formality once it ceased to serve any purpose to my father or my siblings. In the fall of 2007, when the market was red-hot and when we figured we could maximize the property’s, we decided to list the house both for sale and for lease.
I’m a real estate agent, and I work for Bosley Real Estate. I work all over the city, and I often joke that if somebody wanted to rent a storage locker in Markham for $50/month, I’d probably help them out. I specialize in the St. Lawrence Market area, but I know Leaside like the back of my hand since I spent twenty-years there (and I’m also incredibly obsessive-compulsive…).
But when it came time to list our house for sale, I told my father that we had to bring in the unofficial mayor of Leaside, Patrick Rocca.
Patrick is a colleague of mine, and he is one of the best real estate agents in the city.
And by “best” I don’t mean that he makes the most money for himself; I mean that his name on a sign on your lawn WILL get you more money for your home.
If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t have brought him in. I could have sold this house myself, but I knew that his name would net us more money.
Leaside is an area dominated by Bosley Real Estate, but more specifically, it’s dominated by Patrick Rocca.
At the risk of getting in hot-water, I’m going to say what I’m about to say. I personally believe, and my colleagues would back me up (off the record), and I could provide stats to back up my claims, that if you were to put a HomeLife or a Century 21 sign on your lawn in Leaside, you would not get as much money for your house.
Plain and simple.
Patrick Rocca’s name is a brand and if we had a HomeLife sign on our lawn, people would say, “Interesting…..I wonder what’s wrong with it.”
Building a successful, identifiable brand takes years, and with Patrick on board, it meant that our house was all the more saleable.
We listed the house for $2,500,000 and it took some time to sell.
In fact, most of the feedback we received was negative!
It was tough for me to stand there with a phony smile during the open house in my own childhood home when people said, “Do you think this is a tear-down?” Or how about, “Is this land value only?”
In the end, I suppose they were right, since a developer tore down the house.
We had a very special double-lot; a 70 x 150 foot property with one house on it and very large side-setbacks from the adjacent houses.
But our house was first built in the 1920’s, and had extensive renovations in 1980, and 1992, thus it was deemed by most potential buyers (and those gawkers who just wanted to come through the open house) to have no “flow.”
The house was built in pieces, since it kept being added on to, and for a large, “one-of-a-kind” house, it just didn’t have what people are looking for in 2009.
So, nobody wanted to buy our house.
It sat on the market for a month, which was a long time when you consider that virtually ever house in Leaside has a ‘holdback’ on offers and sells on a pre-determined day (except those overpriced properties that are listed by out-of-area brokerages whose names I won’t mention…).
And the very day that we decided to take the house off the market, a buyer came forward.
We spent about $50,000 sprucing up the old homestead before we put it on the market.
We re-carpetted the entire house, painted every square inch of the property and put in new light fixtures in every single outlet, and we bought new stainless steel appliances for the kitchen since that is what today’s yuppie deems “essential.”
In the end, the house was torn down, and one might argue that the $50,000 went to waste.
But it didn’t, and I’ll tell you why…
The developer who purchased our house paid what he did because there was a chance that an end-user might buy it to live in. Without that $50,000 in renovations and staging, the developer might have thought “Nobody’s gonna live in this house, in this condition.”
So the $50,000 investment probably paid off to the tune of $300,000, in my estimation.
The house was sold in November of 2007, and set to close in March of 2008.
It took some time for the investor/developer to get his permits in place (the neighbors fought him), but he broke ground in August of 2008.
He turned this:
Into this, in a matter of hours:
And of course about a year later, he gave us this:
I just assumed that he would construct two incredibly ugly houses like most of the crap that is built in Leaside today (ugly stone and stucco houses that people pay $$$ for), but instead, he built two absolutely gorgeous red-brick houses that fit in with the street and keep the integrity of the area.
He severed the 70-foot lot into a 38-footer and a 32-footer.
The house on the left is the 38-footer, which he sold when it was a hole in the ground for $2,400,000.
He then sold the 32-footer, also while a hole in the ground, for $1,900,000.
So let’s work backwards here for a moment.
He paid $2,400,000 for the “lot” (I hate thinking of my old house as just a “lot”), and then spent months working on severance and building permits. I don’t know what the legal costs of those procedures were, but I assume they weren’t free!
These two houses total about 7,000 square feet, and at a very modest estimate of $200/sqft to build, that’s $1,400,000 worth of construction costs.
He also paid $44,475 in Land Transfer Tax, and I’m assuming he paid about at least $100,000 in real estate fees to sell the two houses.
Is it possible that this investor only profited $350,000 from this venture that took over 18 months?
My numbers are all estimates, but I don’t think they’re that far off.
The crazy part is: had my family waited another six months to sell our house, we wouldn’t have received anything close to the bounty which was gratefully bestowed upon us. I remember asking Patrick what we’d get for our house in the fall of 2008 and he said, “Not over two-million!”
Timing is everything in the real estate market, and we were very fortunate.
The developer was also fortunate, since in the fall of 2008 after he had already sold these two houses while they were holes in the ground, I’m not sure how many people would have been in the market for $2.4 and $1.9 million-dollar houses!
In the end, I’m very pleased with the result.
There comes a time when everyone, and everything, must move on.
Our family moved on from our house, but the house itself became obsolete and it had to move on as well.
As sad as it was to see it go, I’m not at all bitter about what stands in it’s place.
The two houses are gorgeous, and from what I’ve heard, the two families that live in them are great people and love living on the street. I’m happy that they’re happy, and maybe when those kids grow up one day I’ll show them a photo of the house that stood in place of theirs, years and years ago…
