We made money on the Toronto housing market. Now what?
The house went up for sale in April 2021 and sold in early May for $1,075,000. After realtor fees, closing costs and other debts were paid, we walked away with about $688,000. Our plan was to buy a three- or four-bedroom home in Winnipeg, with a large yard and a pool. We were prepared to spend between $500,000 and $550,000 on a new home, leaving us with some money to spend on furniture and a new car and to invest the rest. Plus, with no mortgage, we were going to be able to put away a substantial amount of money for retirement every month. (Want to know if it makes sense to sell in a larger city and buy in a smaller one? Read this.)
House hunting in a new market: Expect the unexpected
At the end of May, I boarded the plane to Winnipeg to start hunting for our dream home in the Prairies. However, instead of snapping up a sprawling house with a pool like I’d envisioned, my search was a struggle. Turns out, the Winnipeg real estate market had more in common with Toronto’s market than I thought. Both markets were fraught with bully offers, bidding wars and low supply. I looked at as many houses as I could in the neighbourhoods of my choice, but they all had deal-breakers, like train tracks steps from the backyard, located on a busy street or a transit stop on the front lawn. The best of the worst? The house that had an entire fish store in the basement. Have you ever smelled a lot of fish in a confined space? If not, consider yourself lucky.
Rethinking our original plan
That’s when I started to take our lifestyle into deeper consideration. My husband loves to walk everywhere and hates driving. Living in Winnipeg meant buying a second car, so he could get around. Our son can easily navigate the city on the TTC, but I envisioned a life of driving him everywhere in Winnipeg. Sure, once he got his license, he could drive himself, but that also meant giving him the keys to my car or helping finance one of his own. Working in the media, I was also better off in Toronto where I would have access to events and opportunities within the city. (Read more about the real costs of leaving the city.) Living in Winnipeg would mean frequent travel back and forth between the cities. Plus, my son, who is close to graduating high school, said he would want to move back to Toronto for his post-secondary education. He’s our only kid. Did I want to live a province away from him?
After about a month of coming up empty-handed, I had an idea: What if we just stayed in Toronto? After all, we both work from home, so it’s not like moving to Winnipeg was written in stone. Staying in Toronto meant my son could stay in his school with his friends, we could stay close to our circle of friends, not need another car, and live in a city that had amenities and opportunities at our doorstep. There were definitely pros to staying in Toronto but now the real question was: Could we even make this new plan work?
I mean, we just sold our house. And the house prices in Toronto were climbing, almost daily. I wondered if we were too late. Maybe we had priced ourselves out of the Toronto market. And, if the only house we could afford in the city was small and had the same issues as our last home—like no parking or storage—was there any point in staying? I’d be lying if my heart hadn’t broken at the thought that we had just made the biggest mistake of our lives.
But, there was only one way to find out: Trying to make it work. My husband quickly called our realtor to start searching for houses in Toronto. If we were going to make this happen, we wanted to make this pivot worthwhile. That meant it couldn’t be a lateral move—or worse, a step in the wrong direction, financially, or in terms of our living conditions. We’d now be trying to squeeze into the Toronto market, the very thing we were set to leave.
So, we compiled a list of “asks”: Stay in our east-end neighbourhood, get a house with more square footage and legal parking for under $1.2 million. We knew it would be a challenge, which is why we enlisted Taylor Jones, a realtor who specializes in east-end real estate. For any buyers trying to navigate the real estate market, finding a realtor who specializes in your desired location is key—especially in a competitive market.
“You want to deal with someone local who has many years of experience in both buying and selling real estate in the area,” says Jones. “More experience should give a buyer more confidence that a realtor has their best interests in mind and is willing to get them the best price possible.”