Cliff Barron here with my update for Milton, Georgetown & Glen Williams for the week of November 29th to December 5th, 2020 - comparing sales of last week to the year before. 

But before I get there, for the past couple of weeks I've talked about investing in real estate and how it works - a rough synopsis. The first video that I did was about renting. The second video I did was about possible profit margins you can make and cashflow positive, etc. Today, I want to talk about the negatives of investing in real estate. Most agents just don't want to talk about it, but it does happen. So let's see - you buy a property and you want to rent it out. A lot of people will go online on Kijiji and rent it out themselves. That's where not all - but the majority of scams happen, because people don't do their due diligence properly on their own because they don't have the experience.  Then they end up leasing to somebody and it doesn't work out. So, as an example, I have a client right now who bought an investment property with the money they saved. They don't have a lot of money, but they managed to scratch together about $100,000 over a number of years.  They bought an investment property and they put it out on Kijiji - they leased it out on their own without an agent.  Even with an agent, there are still risks.  Somebody came in who looked great on paper. They accepted him as a tenant (he and his kids) and I think it's been nine months now and they haven't received a single dime. Apparently according to this guy, they're never going to see a dime either.

So you have to remember, when it comes to landlord and tenants, the tenants have virtually all the rights. If you don't pick the right tenant and the tenant just digs in and has a fight with you about whatever and doesn't pay the rent, there's hardly anything you can do - which is incredible that something like that would be legal in any country. But it is. I guess they assume that old landlords are just loaded and driving around in Rolls Royces and smoking cigars, but obviously that's not the case.  A lot of them are hardworking folks that are just investing their money. So you have to be really careful.

So the downfall of renting as well, is pricing.  You have to find the right tenant and you have to price your property correctly because you don't want it sitting vacant.  Vacant is money and money comes off of your bottom line at the end. So your percentage return reflects on getting it occupied ASAP.  Price it competitively. You don't go too high and end up begging for a tenant because you're so high and then accepting a tenant that's not very good. It's better to go at market value or even just slightly below market value so that you have the pick of the litter. You can really pick and choose which tenant you're going to go with. 

Another thing to keep in mind too, when a tenant defaults on a lease (doesn't pay the lease), it doesn't go against their credit.  There's no way for you to know, because you're not a credit agent. You can't go to Equifax and put a complaint in because you're not the bank - you're not one of those big corporations, unfortunately. 

Hopefully that answers a few questions about investment. I think I've covered most of it. If there are any questions that I didn't cover here, please let me know. I'm always around, I can help you out. I've been doing this for a long time, so I can definitely help you out!

Now let's get to the sales for Milton and Georgetown/Glen Williams. They're all doing well. Everything is still rocking along - sales last year  showed 25 sales in Milton this year, 41 for the past week. So you can see the numbers are still high. Usually this time of year, it starts to really die off, but it's not, I'm still showing properties and I have to have the book half hour appointments instead of an hour. When you go to book and it's booked up, booked up, booked up until the next day. You can't even get in a single day because of COVID. They don't overlap showings anymore, and just the number of showings is incredible. This time of year, usually you get one, maybe two, three showings, every two or three days. But now it's like, six, seven, eight showings a day. It's on virtually everything and everywhere from Kingston to here - it's just unbelievable!

So let's do the detached sales in Milton: 26 of them sold $1.123M on average, 5 days on the market. Townhouses: 11 sales, $732k on average, 4 days on the market. And semis: 3 of them sold for $833k on average, 5 days of the market. So things are still moving along in Milton very well as opposed to 25 sales last year, 41 this year. 

So then we get to Glen Williams and Georgetown.  We had a really, really busy week in Georgetown, Glen Williams. Last year, this time 7 listing sold, this year 17. So that's a massive increase. And I remember last year, the way it started to slow down - actually it started to pick up in January. But this time last year it was completely stone dead in Georgetown. So we had 6 sales of townhouses, $735k on average, 4 days on the market and 11 sales of detached homes $1,080,000  on average and 18 days on the market. We didn't have any really big sales, like 2.2 million or 2 million sales that skew the numbers up. 

So those are pretty interesting numbers and things are busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, everywhere. People say, "Where can I get a deal on real estate right now?" It's difficult - where do you go? It doesn't matter where you go, everything's gone up and everything has multiple offers, everything is in a bidding war, so it's interesting. Anyways, that's my update for this week. Any questions, let me know. Cliff Barron for Re/Max. Send me a DM, PM phone call, text, email, whatever works. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, take care.