Cliff Barron from Re/Max here, with my update for Milton, Georgetown and Glen Williams, for November 8th to the 14th, 2020.

Before I get there, I'm going to talk about investing in real estate. A little known fact, but real estate has produced more millionaires in Canada than any other business - so there's definitely something there! In the next few blogs, I'm going explain how leveraging (using somebody else's money) to build your wealth, works. 

For today, I'm going to talk about renting.  If you're a landlord, when you rent/lease a property, you have to go to market value. You can't go higher than market value - there are negatives in that. I've had it so many times where I've said, "You know, I think your condo should be worth about $1800 a month." And they go, "No, no, I think it's worth $1950 a month."  In leases, there isn't a lot of room in the price.  Not a lot of negotiation room.  So, you don't want to go too high, especially if all the others are at $1900.  And if you go to $1950, you're going to price yourself out.  So, what happens is they go to $1950 - they convince me to do it.  I say, "Okay, well, we'll give it a shot. You never know, you might get lucky."  We list and sure enough, two, three weeks later, there's nothing.  Very, very little as far as offers and showings go.  So the landlord (my client), tends to get desperate. And if there is an offer coming in, they won't really do their due diligence on it. They'll just jump at it and say, "Take it, let's take it, let's take it".  Meanwhile, if you price it right, you have more to choose from and you can do your research properly. So number one, you have to price it right. 

Number two is this: you ask for a letter of reference, an employment letter, some pay stubs and a credit check.  Just to let you know, references mean nothing because they're almost always made up. Even pay stubs and letter of employment - they can be fudged a little bit.  But credit checks can't.  They are very difficult to fudge. So, you should base a lot of your decision on the credit check.  If it comes in good - if they're in the high seven hundreds - 750 - they should be on paper a good tenant - which is the way to go. 

Next week, we're going to talk a lot more about this, though, I'm just kind of scratching the surface right now about how it works.

So, on to the sales for Milton, Georgetown and Glen Williams for November 8 to the 14th.  Milton numbers are still good - 41 sales, as opposed to 33 last year, and the exact same number of sales as there was last week.  So sales are still active, Milton is still active.  11 townhouses sold for $730k, 7 days on the market. 7 semis at $872k average, which is the highest I've seen, at 7 days on the market.  And 23 detached sold for $1.123, 8 days on the market.  So things in Milton are still very busy. 

And then we move on to Georgetown.  Things have slowed a little bit in Georgetown but in Glen Williams there's been some nice sales. There's a nice one that just sold on Mountainview.  I'm very happy for them because that one was on the market quite a while. Not my listing, but I'm just pleased they sold it.  So let's see - 11 sales of detached.  There were no semis and no towns sold the past week in Georgetown and Glen Williams - as opposed to 14 last year. So you can see we've kind of dipped a little bit. This time of year traditionally starts to slow as we get closer to the Christmas. But this is slowing a little bit more than last year, but then again last year things started to kind of pick up - it was really weird.  November, December, January started to really pick up and then COVID hit and every everything just stopped, basically.  So, $1,000,056 on average and 3 days on the market for detached in Georgetown and Glen Williams. 

That's about it for this week.  If you have any questions, let me know! Talk to you soon. Thanks and take care.