Cliff Barron here with my weekly update for Milton, Georgetown and Glen Williams area for the weeks of July 26 to August 1. But before I get there, I'd like to answer a question someone had the other day about a home inspection- how does it work? Usually, when an offer comes in, there's a five day conditional period upon the buyer doing a home inspection. Basically, what happens is that the buyer comes in, along with their agent and their home inspector (they're not allowed to bring in 15 family members or anything) to take a look at everything. It's supposed to be the agent, the home inspector, and the buyer - that's it. The inspection usually takes three to four hours. I've seen agents bring in inspectors that have taken an hour and a half - basically those inspectors are useless. To properly inspect a house, it takes a good three to three hours - to go top to bottom - roof to foundation - everything. Inspectors that come in and finish in an hour and a half aren't doing a proper job - they're just breezing through it, probably keeping the agent happy just because they want to get more business going - they're not really doing a service for the agent's clients. So, the agent comes in with their home inspector and their clients. The purpose of the home inspection is an education process. First of all, to find faults that you initially didn't see, because when you bought the house, you may have only been in there for 20 minutes or half an hour or so. In other words, when you're looking at a house, you're not gonna open the hatch and go into the attic and look for mold or look for proper insulation depth. You're not going to pull off the cover to the panel box and look to see if there's the copper wiring or aluminum or any double tabs or anything like that. And it's hard to find cracks in the foundation when you're just quickly going through it. So, that's the purpose of the home inspection - to find those big things - cranks in the windows that don't work, plugs that don't work, seals broken on windows, things like that. The home inspection is done so that the buyer can educate themselves and decide whether they still want to go through with the deal. I've had agents who did home inspections and just purposely used that as a negotiation tool to get the price down because they thought they overpaid when they put the offer in - and then they do the home inspection and they try to get so much off. Meanwhile, they knew a lot of that stuff coming in. If there's something major like mold in the attic, that's a totally different story - you'd have to renegotiate your offer.  You have three options: you either renegotiate your original offer, walk away, or take it as is. So, I hope that helps clear a few things up for some people and answers a few questions. 

Now to get to the stats.  I didn't do last weeks, as I was away, but this week, things are looking good. We had 46 sales this week, as opposed to last year, same time - 46. So, we actually increased two weeks ago. This we've matched so we're still busy, considering the COVID delay. Normally at this time of year - July and August - it's stone dead. It's one of the worst times of the year to sell believe it or not, because everyone is away.  Right now though, there's nowhere to go -they're going to cottages,  that's about it. So let's see, we had 46 sales - 27 of those were detached, the average was $1,000,020 and 8 days on the market, so they're moving pretty good. 3 semis sold average of $819k, and 5 days on the market. 16 towns sold at an average of $710k, 10 days on the market. For a lot of those towns that sold, the average is a little bit lower because they're the three level stack towns, which aren't as desirable as two level because people just don't like stairs. Condo sales in 2019 we had 7, and in 2020 we had 7, so we're basically on track from where we were last year. And $517k on average, 13 days on the market. The interesting thing is that they're 13 days on the market- usually there's a condition in the offer that says the buyer has to get or the seller has to get the condo status certificate, which is the condo documents. That takes about 10 business days. So if you subtract 10 business days from that 13 they're selling within about 3 days. I sold one last week in about 2 days - it was pretty quick. 

Then we move on to Georgetown & Glen Williams. This is interesting  - in 2020 we had 17 sales last week, in 2019 we had 9. So things in Georgetown/Glen Williams have really picked up and it's funny because I've noticed this comes from Toronto and then it filters to Mississauga, then it filters to Milton, and then it filters up to Georgetown. So Georgetown is always on a little bit of a delay behind Milton but if you want to see how the Georgetown market is going to do, just look at Milton a few months earlier.  I'm seeing townhouses in Georgetown really starting to fly and prices going up, because there was a bit of a gap - the detached were pretty high and the towns were low, but now the gap is decreasing. So what happened in Milton, when that gap decreases enough, all of a sudden the bigger detached start to fly. So you'll see a lot more sales are detached over a million coming up as well. The average was 14 sales of detached $860k on average, because there were some small detached sold 6 days on the market. And then we have 3 sales of townhouses at $721k on the average, 6 days on the market. $721k is a pretty high average for towns in Georgetown. 

Anyways, that's it - hopefully this helps you out for this week. Any questions, let me know - send me a DM, PM, email or old fashioned phone call, and hopefully I can help you. Thanks, take care and stay safe.