Cliff Barron from RE/MAX here with my evaluation for Milton, Georgetown & Glen Williams - March 7-13, 2021. 

I've got something for you. If somebody in your neighborhood sold their house and you're curious about what it sold for, let me know. 

But apart from that, I've got a story for you. Like I said, last week I'm going to start doing stories every week.  I've been in this for a long time and I see so much. So, here's a story for you. It applies a lot now because of the situation with tenants and landlords and all that sort of stuff. So, true story: I'd say about maybe eight years ago or so I had some clients - good clients of mine - that have bought and sold with me throughout the years. They decided they wanted to get into the investment game, so they wanted to buy a property for investment. They wanted to buy it, rent it out, watch the equity grow, and then in the next five, seven, ten years, whatever - sell it.

So, they bought through me - they bought a nice semi in Milton and they said, "Okay, Cliff we want you to lease it out for us." Usually when you lease with an agent you get better quality tenants. That's why they wanted to go with me instead of like putting it out on Kijiji or something like that, themselves. My job when I lease a property is to promote it as best I can, and I promote it everywhere online, including Kijiji. I put her on Kijiji as well. The only thing is with Kijiji (I didn't notice at the time - this is a while back), scam artists tend to take those ads and duplicate them and publish them as their own. So, I listed the property for lease and I think it was maybe $1700 a month, something like that back then (probably be about $2400 or $2500 now) and I'd say it was about three days later I was getting inquiries, I was showing it, that sort of stuff.  I had gotten an email from a lady and she basically said, "Hey Cliff, I've been talking to the landlord and he said to me that I have to talk to you to get the keys". And I was like - what? That doesn't make sense. So, I emailed her back and I said, "That's interesting. Who's the landlord?" And she said, "His name is Mike." And I said, "Hmm, that's interesting too because there is no landlord named Mike.  That's not their name." So I dug a bit deeper.  I asked, "What have you been communicating with the landlord?" And she said, "Well, basically the landlord said to me that I don't have to see the property. Just send over a $700 Western Union transfer basically to secure the property." She also told me it was listed for $1200 on Kijiji. And I said, "That's crazy."  She was worried saying that she has to work on this really quickly, otherwise she will lose the rental. And I said, "Hold on a sec - you're being scammed. You're completely being scammed."

So, it turned out the scammer had duplicated my ad.  He posted at $1,200 a month and it was a Nigerian guy. I didn't know this - she told me later on.  They found out he was investigated and everything. He was a scammer. He was doing this with multiple different ads People would send over their $700 deposit and never see anything, never hear from the guy again - that was it. 

So, the moral of the story is if you see something listed on Kijiji for lease and it's really cheap, it's most likely a scam. Be careful on Kijiji there's a lot of scams in other departments too. Okay, that's my lease story. The least of my lease stories!

So, for March 7th to 13th I'm going to do Milton first.  It's busy.  Really, really busy again, still busy. It starting, kinda, you can kinda feel it, sort of, kind of starting to get to the max - in a way. Check this out: two storey detached homes - there was 40 sales, which is a lot, a big volume - $1.328M on average. That's a huge average! 40 sales on that average. That's massive. And then when you look at split level backs, that sort of thing - 3 sales, $897k on average. Townhouses, 31 sales $869k on average - approaching a million. For some reason I didn't do semis but I'll do that next week. Condos, we had 11 sales $580k on average - of a condo. That's way higher than Mississauga and way higher than Oakville, too, believe it or not. Condo towns 3 sales, $710k on average. So in other words, the market is still good in Milton. 

Getting to Glen Williams and Georgetown. I've never seen this before in that area - the average for two storey detached $1.385M. And there were no large Glen Williams homes or rural properties that sold included in those stats.  7 sales $1.385M on average. And it's funny, like I was telling a client last week - I sold a house in Georgetown in October for I think just over a million. That same house now is, $1.15M, $1.2M believe it or not. It's gone up that much since October. Townhouses, there were 2 sales $755k on average, and 1 sale of a semi at $965k, which is huge. That's big for Georgetown. 

Anyways, any questions let me know. And like I said earlier, if there's a sale in your area you want some info, just send me an email or text, phone call, whatever you like and I'll get that for you. Have a great week and stay safe!