I was browsing MLS today, looking at new listings in the downtown core, and something really jumped out at me: an 850 square foot condo priced at $1,450,000.

But this wasn’t at The Four Seasons Private Residences, nor was it in the Ritz Carlton.

This was in Corktown, and the unit was priced at $1,706 per square foot!

So I clicked on the listing to investigate a little bit, and what did I find?

A one-of-a-kind terrace that’s over 2,000 square feet, open air, and west-facing with absolutely no obstructions whatsoever.

It was simply gorgeous.  A rare gem in a city with so many cookie-cutter units!

And while I don’t have any clients looking for a $1,450,000 condo with a 2,000 square foot terrace, it did get me going down a rabbit hole, scouring MLS for other units with huge terraces.

Then I got to chatting with my colleagues about my terraces at the two condos I lived in previously and talking about all the “pros and cons,” not to mention the “things you’d never know” about terrace living.

In case you weren’t previously aware, I consider myself a terrace expert.

I moved into a 585 square foot, 1-bed, 1-bath condo in 2005 that featured a 440 square foot terrace.

Here’s a photo that doesn’t do it much justice, but gives you the idea:

I set the bar very high with this unit as my first condo and when it came time to upgrade, this terrace made the task very, very difficult.

Nevertheless, my second condo was a 1,200 square foot, 2-bed, 2-bath, with a 1,240 square foot terrace.

It was impossible to capture the whole terrace, but here are a couple of nice shots:

Not pictured is the back of the terrace, as well as the part leading from the sliding door up to that deck, but you get the idea.

I loved having an outdoor space in Toronto and some of my best memories from downtown living were outside.

In my first condo, I would sit outside, alone, slamming the keys on my laptop as I shared my thoughts and opinions on this new forum called a “blog”

At my second condo, my girlfriend, then fiancee, then wife would have drinks on the weekend and watch the CN Tower turn different colours on a summer night.

I have also sold a lot of condos with huge terraces to clients, since every time I do so, I know that I’m helping to create similar memories for them as they enjoy the space over the coming years.

But throughout my own experiences and those of my clients, I’ve come to identify the most important questions, considerations, and pitfalls associated with terraces, and I’m going to share those with you today.

If you’re in the market for a condo with a large terrace, or if you randomly found this blog post years from now while researching your options, allow me to present my thoughts.

First, I’ll start with some very important questions that a buyer needs to ask…

What is the shape of the terrace?

This is simple math.

And maybe a bit of geometry, but you get the point.

Consider the following in an MLS listing, “Incredible 400 Square Feet Of Outdoor Space!”

That could be incredible.  If this is a 20 x 20 terrace we’re talking about.

But what if this is a 100-foot-long balcony that’s only 4-feet deep?  Then it’s freakin’ useless!

I actually saw a terrace once that wasn’t quite this bad (since this was to prove a point), but it was a luxury condo and it was probably 8-feet deep by fifty or sixty feet long.  It was such a shame.  Sure, you could put stuff out there – in that 8-foot-deep space, like a bistro table, or a love-seat facing outward.  But it’s not the same as a square.  It’s not even close.

And many of these L-shaped terraces either result in awkward spaces or in some cases a “wing” that you don’t use.  Consider the L-shape where the second portion of the “L” is dark, with people overhead, and overlooking the dumpsters, whereas the first portion of that “L” houses is south-facing and bright.  I had a client with this layout once and he said he only used half the terrace.

Consider all these new condominiums where the building design, often because of the “artist’s rendering” that is used to pre-sell condos, is more important than the functionality.  Now consider how useless that terrace is when it’s triangle-shaped because of the “sleek glass design” that results in a railing protruding on a 75-degree angle.

Total square footage isn’t the only consideration here.  The shape of the outdoor space is key.

What’s the view like?

At my first condo, I stared at a brick wall.

At my second condo, I stared at the downtown core and the CN Tower.

I’ve been on both sides of this so I could argue in favour of the value proposition of a view, or lack thereof.  But in the end, it’s up to the buyer.

Everybody’s different.

Had my first condo featured a ridiculous lake view, or been west-facing at the downtown core, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it.  So this is all relative.

A view is a feature, much like a terrace, much like a WOLF oven.

You’re going to pay for the view, no doubt about it.  But you have to ask if the outdoor space and view must go hand-in-hand.

If these are features and each has a value, then they must provide a relative level of enjoyment for the owner, right?  So is that enjoyment the function of one feature plus the other, or is it multiplied exponentially?

And if you are buying an outdoor space with a view, make absolutely sure that you research any buildings in the foreground and whether or not those sites could be turned into tall condo towers in the future.

A condo without a view is worse than a condo with a view.  But worse still is a condo that had a view only for that to be taken away…

Are there balconies above the terrace?

Here’s another shot of my first condo, but this one shows the other angle:

Notice how there’s a small balcony eight feet above mine?

When I moved into the unit, I never saw a person on that balcony.  Not once.

But two years later when that unit sold, a new owner moved in, and she was out there all the time!

I would be outside with my buddies and it was almost like she was sitting there with us.  I may as well have just asked her to join us because even with our banter and music, we could probably still hear her giggle at her Dilbert comic-strips as she read them with glee…

Not only that, she eventually started to garden outside as you can see from the photo above.

That meant water pouring down from her balcony to my terrace, often as I sat at the end of the table – that you can barely see on the right of the photo.

This particular owner aside, consider that this building is twenty-stories and there are eighteen other balconies above her.  There were six of these terraces on the second floor, meaning that there were five times eighteen more balconies that overlooked my terrace.

Privacy was at an absolute zero here.

So if you’re looking at a condo with a large terrace, you have to make not of whether or not there are other outdoor spaces overlooking yours, how many there are, and how often you feel people might be out there.

Is the terrace open air?

My first condo terrace was on the second floor with nearly one-hundred balconies overlooking it.

But even if there weren’t any balconies, there would still be one-hundred units overlooking the terrace, and zero privacy.

Many terraces in the city are open air and I would give these a massive premium.

The privacy is part of it.

Not having to experience a kid spitting on your head (as happened to me at my second condo, resulting in me counting the floors, running up the stairs, and trying to break down the door to his condo) is a definite “plus,” but I would also mention that the general feeling of the open air is worth its weight in gold.

I remember selling a condo at 233 Carlaw Street with an awesome terrace but it was completely covered.  The unit above this one had the same terrace, as did the unit above that.  So the outdoor space was great, and the terrace had a gas line for the BBQ and a water line for plants, but it felt cramped and it was definitely dark.

Open air has a great “feel” but then there’s the most tangible benefit: the sunlight.

And if you happen to be on the top floor of the building, or atop the podium to a larger building, you’ll get the sunlight, the air, and the privacy.

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Those are my questions.

Now, allow me to provide you with a few considerations and a few pieces of key advice…

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Consider the wind.

Stop me if you’ve hears this story, but here goes…

When I was a young man, I dreamt of having a terrace so large that I could have a ping-pong table out there, but not instead of a dining and/or seating area, but rather in addition to.

My dream eventually came true!

And on the first weekend that I moved into my second condo, I started to play ping-pong on my shiny, brand-new, never-used, professional table.

It only took one serve from my brother to realize something: the ping-pong ball is probably the lightest piece of sports equipment on the planet.

And when you’re on the ninth storey of a downtown condo, with open air, this means there’s going to be wind.

Playing ping-pong out there was often impossible.  Anything shy of a sunny summer day with 0 KM/H wind meant that one side had an advantage.

Now, I’m not only bringing up the wind because of my ping-pong table, but rather because most people never think about this.

Terraces are windy.  Full stop.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a “windy day” on the ground, because the wind has a way of finding you out on that terrace when you’re higher up.

This means it’s colder.

This means things blow over (like your $600 propane heating lamp which smashes on the patio stones).

This means things fly away (like my client who lost half his IKEA deck tiles during a very windy day).

This means you lose things (I lost not one but two ping-pong table covers because I stored my table in the corner where the wind did some sciency-thing and created a small tornado under the tarp, making it blow away).

And this also means you need to…

Pack your cushions.

I can’t tell you how many cushions we lost at my second condo.

So many, in fact, then when it came time to sell, I only staged the terrace and the resin-wicker furniture with throw pillows because I had lost too many proper cushions from the set that it would look odd to only have a handful.

I used to look outside on a windy day and count the cushions.

When I only saw seven seating cushions in the eight-cushion set, I would run out to the terrace, lean over the edge, and try to spot the cushion below.

Three times I was able to rescue a lost cushion; once off Jarvis Street, once in the circular driveway in front of the condo, and once when it blew all the way to St. James Park.

However, one time my wife came home and said, “I just saw this homeless dude walking down the street with a grey cushion, it was the oddest sight,” only for me to rush out to the terrace to see a cushion missing.

Finders, keepers.  Right?

Get ready to garden every single year.

This was an annual event for me, whether it was at my first condo or my second one.

Trees die.  Flowers too.

Soil erodes.  I don’t know how, or where it goes; it’s almost like the rain cycle.  Pour ten bags of soil into a planter box, and I guarantee that next year you’ll be looking at the equivalent of seven bags.

At my first condo, I inherited some very pretty evergreen trees that had needles, and while they looked great in the photos of the condo and upon my visits to the unit, they browned by fall, and were completely dead by spring.

The next year, I went to Home Depot and bought cedars.

But ask anybody about those cedar trees that line the parking lot every spring – the ones that used to be $14.99 and are now probably $29.99, and they’ll tell you the same thing that I’m going to tell you now: they’re almost certainly going to die.

I tried that twice, and both years, the trees died.

I eventually learned that if you want trees to last in small, often crappy planters, on a condo terrace, especially through Canadian winters and with our wind, you’re going to have to splurge for high-quality trees from a nursery.

I remember the sight of a massive flatbed tractor-trailer pulling into the circular driveway at 112 George Street one spring, with sixteen 10-foot cedars from Bradford Greenhouses.  It was also carrying 200 bags of soil.  The driver told me that this was the first time he’d been to downtown Toronto “since the nineties.”

My blue spruce trees were hearty and lasted a while, but it’s really hard to grow cedars on a terrace.

As for the flowers, I did have a good experience with some perennials (hostas, for example), but the annuals need to be replaced every year, and the clematis rarely comes back.

Bottom line: you’re going to be gardening every single year whether you plan on it or not.

And that’s just the gardening.  Because…

You’re going to underestimate the maintenance.

At my first condo, I started every spring by sweeping up all the crap that my lovely neighbours threw down on my terrace over the winter.

Hundreds and hundreds of cigarette butts, beer cans, beer cups (like the red Solo ones from somebody clearly having a rager!), empty bags of chips, Subway wrappers, and just about anything else that a person can deliberately throw off a balcony.  But then there’s the stuff that people accidentally drop off a balcony, like the year I found a smashed Foo Fighters CD wedged behind a melted snowbank, or the year that I found a broken Blackberry Curve.

After the sweep, however, came the cleaning.  You can’t imagine how dirty those patio stones can get, and if you’re a person who wants to walk outside in your bare feet and then back into your condo, you’ll want get the quarter-inch of dust off the ground.  When I was at my first condo, I had to pressure wash the tiles every year, then squeegee the dirty water to the back of the terrace and push it over the edge.

But that’s because…

You’ll want to know where the drains are on your terrace.

Fun fact: not all terraces have drains.

In fact, many don’t.

This isn’t a reason not to buy a condo, but you want to know this in advance.  Condo terraces without a drain not only make it impossible for you to effectively clean (like my story above where I had to squeegee the water off the edge), but will also lead to rain water pooling in the centre of your terrace.

This isn’t the end of the world, but something that will impact your enjoyment of the space.  Older condo terraces, where the patio tiles might have shifted, also slant into the middle of the terrace.  That means the water pools right into the centre, every time it rains!

Is that hot tub really worth $40,000?

Sure, you can get a really great hot tub for $7,000 – $10,000, but it’s not going to magically appear on your terrace.

Did you ever think about that?  How does a person get a hot tub up to the 35th storey of a condominium?

Well, you use a crane.  And crane rentals aren’t cheap.

Not only that, you have to work with the City of Toronto to shut down whatever street the crane will be situated on, secure a permit, and pay a fee that I cannot imagine has gotten any cheaper!

Clients of mine sold a condo last year with a killer 1,500 square foot terrace and this terrace had everything but the hot tub.  They mentioned that the house they were going to buy would have to feature a hot tub and a barrel sauna, so I just sort of expected that they would have brought a hot tub up to the condo terrace.

“We were going to,” one of them told me.  “We had the hot tub picked out and we were ready to go, but after much discussion, we just didn’t want to pay $30,000 to a crane rental company and to the city of Toronto to get the damn thing up here.”

“Not only that,” the other one told me, “We were worried that people who couldn’t access the building or the road when we shut down the street would end up finding out who we were, and taking it out on us!”

Fair point.

Another fair point is: if the condo you’re buying already has a hot tub, just think about how hard it would be to remove it if the damn thing stopped working!

Sure, there are hot tub repair people, but these things don’t last forever.

It’s one thing to consider spending $30,000 to crane a hot tub up to a condo terrace, but it’s another thing entirely to consider spending $30,000 to crane a hot tub off the terrace and to a garbage dump.

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Well, that was a mouthful!

But as I said, I have so much experience with outdoor spaces and I’m so incredibly passionate about them!

I’m sure I’ve shared these photos of my old terraces before.

In fact, I’m sure I’ve told some of these same stories before!

But as the years move along, my opinion on the value of outdoor spaces hasn’t changed.

For the right buyer, an outdoor space is worth its weight in gold.  These aren’t for everybody, but for those who see the value and pay for it, not to mention – put in the work, and experience the pitfalls, it could create some incredible memories.

I certainly know it did for me!