Cliff Barron here with my weekly update for Milton, Georgetown and Glen Williams for the week of October 18th to the 24th, 2020. 

Before I get to that, I'd like to talk about closing. Say there's a fluke amd you actually get a chance to do a home inspection. In this market, it's kind of rare, since there are multiple offers a lot of the time. In my previous video I talked about the fact that you have to basically waive home inspection and financing pretty much to get to even stand a chance of buying in this market because the market is so crazy. But say you do put the home inspection clause in and the offer is accepted - then you do your home inspection and find there are a few things that you would like repaired before closing.  What do you do? You negotiate with a seller or seller's agent back and forth, and then finally it's agreed upon that the sellers will okay a list of 10 things - maybe repair three or four things in a workmanlike, satisfactory manner. And again, as I've said in one of my previous videos that you should book a revisit just before closing so that you can make sure those things are done. But what happens if they're not done? That's the question.  If they're major things, like if they've taken out all the appliances, then that's a breach of the contract and there's a chance you won't close.  But if they're minor things, (as I discussed in one of the previous videos) your lawyer can do what's called a "holdback" on closing to get those things repaired. But that's only if you know about them. Sometimes you'll do your revisit, and then you come and close the house and a few things aren't fixed here and there. There's nothing you can do.  Well, there is - technically you can take them to court, that's what you have to do. You close the property, you take them to Small Claims Court and try and recoup any of your losses - but most of the time that doesn't happen. So, what I'm basically saying is, from a buyer's perspective you do whatever you can to purchase. But from a seller's perspective, just be nice and do the things that you're asked to do - and that's it. Make it a smooth transaction between the two parties. I recently had one where the buyers were very, very unreasonable and it was just back and forth and back and forth, and the sellers got their back up.  Now the sellers really regret it selling to them. And guaranteed they told everybody in the neighborhood about these neighbors coming in that weren't liked. It just caused so much pain that was completely unnecessary. It's supposed to be a win-win for both sides of the deal.  So do your part on one side, do your part on the other side before closing and everything should close fine. Hopefully that answers a few questions -it should give you a bit of an idea. 

Okay, let's see, for Milton October 18th to 24th - still busy. It's still doing well, and actually this week I noticed the detached homes sold on average for $1.234M.  That's the highest I've ever seen in Milton.  9 days on the market and there was 49 sales last week as opposed to 35 same time last year. So we're still up over last year.  Relatively speaking, we had more sales last week than we did the week before.  So, it's busy, really, really busy - still in Milton, it's still kicking along.  The average townhouses $735k, semis -3 of those sold for $860k and all these were 5, 9, 6, and 5 days on the market. So things are still flying along. 

Georgetown and Glen Williams has slowed just a little bit, but that doesn't mean much. You know, you've got to take that with a grain of salt. If Milton is really busy, Georgetown is going to be following within days.  That's the way it seems to work - it always goes Toronto, Mississauga, Milton, Georgetown and kind of keeps filtering out from there. So if you want to predict the Georgetown market,  look at Milton. If you want to predict the Milton market, look at Mississauga, etc. You know what I mean? That's kind of the way it works. So there was 12 sales last week in Georgetown and Glen Williams as opposed to 10 last year. So we're still up over last year, but we're down a little bit from the week before. It slowed a little bit from the week before, but the average price went up. 9 detached sold for $1.1 million, 4 days on the market, and 3 towns sold $775k which is the highest I've seen for townhouses in Georgetown. 

So that's encouraging. It's all still very, very, busy, compared to a normal fall market. Usually at the end of October or November, it starts to slow. And then in December, it gets really, really slow. But this year it's so unpredictable. We don't know what's going to happen,  but I have the feeling it's going to be pretty steady. 

Any questions, let me know.  Hopefully this helps you out and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.