Real estate is emotional. Why? Because a home is more than walls and a roof, it’s a canvas and container for our lives, our families, our communities. As part of an ongoing series, we’ve asked local writers to share their stories on real estate and housing. Want to write for the Star’s Home Truths series? Email [email protected].
They say you find the one when you’re not looking. That wasn’t true of my husband — the bright light at the end of a years-long carpal tunnel of dating apps — but it was, at least somewhat, true of my house.
Three years ago, I wrote about my first failed attempt to buy a home. My partner and I both had above-average incomes, a decent down payment saved up, and, as the Star’s housing editor, I had lived and breathed the Toronto market for years. But our search was perilously timed with the pandemic price run-up and we quickly found ourselves sidelined.
The following summer, as the due date approached for our second child, we sucked it up and left our Harbord Village apartment and rented a three-bedroom house further north near Eglinton West.
But we kept looking.
My partner got a new job. We were offered more financial help from family. But as skyrocketing prices gave way to climbing interest rates, our budget was always just a step behind.
Then, one day in January 2024, my partner came home and said: “I think we should get married this year.”
We’d been engaged for a while but, in our 40s with kids, we thought our focus needed be on buying a home. But what was the point of delaying big life events for something that might never happen?
We put our search on hold — or so we thought.
A wedding, a honeymoon and an open house
My nights looked differently from that point on. I sat on the couch after the kids went to bed and searched dresses and floral arrangements instead of property listings.
But my days didn’t change. My job assigning housing stories requires me to be constantly checking listings, reading market news, scrolling social media housing fights (the “is it speculation or population” ones get particularly heated — spoiler: it’s both) and gauging trends. Around mid-summer, amid multiple rounds of dress alterations, I noticed the market start to shift, with interest rates and prices trickling down.
Two weeks before our September 2024 wedding, while working from home, I came across a decent-looking Dovercourt rowhouse that sold for under $800,000 — a number I hadn’t seen in ages. I looked up from my computer and told my husband: “I think we should buy a house.”
“I can’t even think about that,” he said, as he stewed over the increasingly sketchy forecast for our outdoor wedding at a brewery in Prince Edward County, where I grew up.
Instead, we spent the next two weeks drafting multiple back-up plans in the event of rain and scouting for clear umbrellas. When the day came, it was cold and windy, and perfect. I got to be a cool bride in a black leather jacket as we ate under the brewery awning and then danced in the tap room. My by-now feisty toddler kept the yellow bows in her hair, and the rain held off long enough to make s’mores with my kindergartner around a fire pit.
We came back to Toronto elated and took a three-day staycation honeymoon. On Day 4, I went back to work, and soon spotted a listing for an older detached home in Rockcliffe-Smythe listed for $699,000.
This was obviously the starting price meant to spark a bidding war (the open house and offer date were clear giveaways). But renovators — usually hawks for these types of homes — had gone dormant for months. How many people would possibly show up?
Turns out a lot.
A window of opportunity gets jammed
When we showed up, the house was crawling with other, young(ish) couples, some with a parent in tow. While we liked the house, we were immediately put at a disadvantage. On the way over, we had called up our previous Beach-based realtors and were told, due to Toronto’s traffic woes, they were no longer working in the west end.
It felt like our tiny window of opportunity was closing. Interest rates were expected to keep dropping and new federal policies set to take effect in the new year added to the likelihood of another price run-up come spring.
We needed to find another realtor, fast.
On a friend’s recommendation, we called up Mia Macdonald, a realtor with Keller Williams Portfolio Realty, who echoed our fears. “If only you’d called me a couple weeks ago,” she said. The market was getting “spicy” again, but it wasn’t too late. We just had to hustle.
And Mia hustled. Over the next couple weeks, she previewed homes while we were at work, writing off a musty home here and “a flip that was a flop” there.
She took us out to a newer condo townhome farther west that showed promise. It was part of a larger development with its own playground, but it was couched between a busy throughfare and train tracks. I can never understand why a city that says it wants young families puts starter homes in the least family-friendly locations. In the end, the maintenance fees pushed the carrying costs over our budget.
“Do you think there’s something out there for you?” Mia asked, as we pushed our kids on the complex’s swings. “‘Cause I do!”
I tried to stay positive, but my enthusiasm was waning as listings in our budget thinned out.
The longest half hour of my life
Then she messaged me one evening when the kids were in bed and my husband was out getting groceries. She had a house I might want to see. We made a plan to meet up at 9 p.m.
I stopped in front of the older, squat brick home in a quiet York neighbourhood. It wasn’t staged and as soon as I walked in, I thought: I can see my life here. There were only two bedrooms but one was big enough for the kids to share, but the home had a renovated basement if that proved a disaster.
The other bedroom was small, but all we needed to fit was a queen bed. Mia googled the length and lay down on the floor. “I’m 5’3,” she said, “is there room?” It would work.
My husband met her there in the morning and by the evening we’d put in an offer. It was slightly over our budget, at just under $900,000, but the owners had recently turned down a lower bid. Then we sat at our dining room table, the phone between us, as the clock ticked down on our offer’s expiry.
The sellers made a counter-offer, asking for another $5,000 and an earlier close. We decided to agree to the latter, but not the former. Mia called back, another offer had come in. I fought the urge to up our bid, imagining who that other buyer might be. Were they first-timers too, pushing themselves above their limit? I didn’t want to do that to them or us. We stayed firm.
And we waited. For a half hour. The longest of my life — and I went through more than 20 hours of labour with both of my kids.
Then the phone buzzed. “Congratulations,” Mia said, “you got it.”
We looked at each other, calmly thanked her, and hung up. Then we yelled and hugged. We were in!
A month to moving day
Over the next month I spent my nights cleaning and packing as moving day approached.
To accommodate the earlier close, we’d asked our property manager to allow us to assign our lease to someone else. At first they first refused, saying our month-to-month was exempt from the rules. Once shown evidence to the contrary (shouldn’t a landlord know this?), they let us out early instead.
Then something surprising happened. Not the landlord relisting the home for $250 more a month, a 9-per-cent increase in just two years, but I was surprised by who came to view the house.
I had expected the next renters to be people like us — a single young(ish) family stopping in on their own way to home ownership. One family came through like that, but there were also four roommates in their 20s or 30s; two couples, one with a baby; a mother, grandmother, two adult children with one’s girlfriend; two couples, one with a toddler.
My kids loved meeting people streaming through the house — they always seemed to show up right before bedtime — but I felt an increasing unease.
I had felt so proud of finally becoming a homeowner, but we had above-average incomes and, most importantly, family help. Most people didn’t. This city had become so unaffordable that it wasn’t just the dream of homeownership that’d been pushed out of reach, but the dream of just having a stable rental with enough space for your family or to live alone as an adult.
From renter to homeowner
Since moving into our home last November, I’ve felt a familiar sentiment creep into my psyche. I’d wanted prices to go down so badly and now that I’m a homeowner I’ve found myself looking at any sale on my street and hoping it went for more than we paid. I’m annoyed by construction of new homes nearby and when there’s no parking spots when my parents visit.
A friend recently asked me why I hadn’t yet written a follow-up to my home-hunting story of 2021.
“It’s been months,” she said. “You’ve left people hanging!”
But I didn’t know what my takeaway was. That you can’t time the market? Though prices did go up slightly in the fall, the hot spring I was trying to beat never materialized as no one anticipated the Trump effect. Just get in when you can.
But when I sat down to write this, recalling the last six months and the elation of colour-drenching an entire room a deep, dark green that any landlord would hate, I came to a different conclusion: help someone else get in, when you can.
I’ve spent the last seven years as housing editor watching the housing crisis worsen. For homes to become affordable in Toronto, it’s clear we need to build more of them and for prices to come down. Any policy that keeps prices the same subsidizes homeowners like me — and I already have the advantage: if I stay here, in 25 years I will be mortgage free. I could sell my home to fund my retirement or live in it without the burden of monthly payments.
And any minor inconvenience of new neighbours is nothing compared to what it felt like to live in fear of being evicted at the whim of a property owner for their own use or for renovations; to not have enough space for a growing family; and to be vulnerable to a landlord who might not know or care about rental law (though I did miss them recently when the A/C broke down).
A stable, sizable rental apartment. A multiplex unit or townhome near schools, parks and transit. An old bungalow to fix up over time. These are what families like ours are looking for.
They, too, should be able to find the one. All we homeowners need to do is make a little room.
Amber Shortt is the Toronto Star’s housing editor. She writes a weekly newsletter on Toronto-area housing and real estate issues — sign up here — and can be reached directly at [email protected].
