List your house with us. If it doesn’t sell we’ll buy it.*

We’re seeing more of this sort of offer these days. Billboards bigger than Amherstview. And boy, it sound great, doesn’t it?

Well here’s some of the small print,

I despair regularly at the current state of the real estate market. Clients this week found a house they loved, and in the days leading up to the offer review they talked several times to their mortgage broker, and paced back and forth so much they likely wore a groove into the hardwood. We must have checked the math with them a dozen times. This was a momentous and difficult decision for them. They were likely equal parts excited and terrified.

Here’s a curious (terrible, horrible, no good, very bad?) fact:

Right now, it seems the best way for realtors in Ontario to obtain the possible highest sale price for a property is to underprice it, often dramatically. When you see houses sell for silly amounts over the asking price, this is a good part of the reason why. Here’s how it works.

A house in Kingston sold today for $550,000 over the asking price of $800,000. It’s the biggest difference we’ve seen between list price and sale price.

Mask mandates have been dropped, but should that mean that the business of real estate should follow suit? We don’t think so.

Another attempt to imagine what life might be like if things had played out just a little differently.

There were 28.9% fewer real estate listings in January than in the same month last year. And there were a whopping 71.7% fewer than in January 2020, which is really quite remarkable. It’s as if a stream has been dammed. Buyers and agents descend on any decent listing like vultures…

Another in a series touching on some of my favourite things. This one is focused on the south coast of England - a rocky beach, and clouds piling up just over the horizon.

A few choice words on the thoughtlessness required to block access to the needle drop box behind the Integrated Care Hub. Because aren’t times tough enough?

It’s all-too-popular these days to approve showings of thirty minutes, rather than the traditional hour. And I get that no one wants strangers in their house fogging up the the windows for any longer than necessary. But that’s not the reason for this move, and I don’t like it.

I look for signs that it’s getting better out there, pandemic-wise. And if I can’t find those, I’ll lean on predictions from people I respect. That’s what’s happening here.

He grew up in Leeds. This was in the ‘70s, when the world revolved around Billy Bremner and then, when Billy went off to Hull, Gang of Four. In ’80 he moved to Mississauga, lived not far out of the shade of the Square One Shopping Centre …

Another in a series of sketches in which I try to imagine what others might be thinking and going through. A reflection, I suppose, on circumstances and good or ill fortune

“By the end, it felt that the song had been implanted more or less permanently in my head. It felt sculptural somehow, as if I could run my hands over it, and it felt organic too, as if its meaning might continue to grow.”

I find those dividers that have been installed on so may of our park benches so that people can’t sleep on them to be a really hostile, oppressive sort of urban architecture. A park in Montreal shows there is another way of going about things.

An imagined history, a snippet of conversation anyway, from inside a house gone to seed.

I walk often down to Belle Island. A community of unhoused neighbours has appeared among the trees. The inhabitants either couldn’t give a damn what I think or they eye me warily. Both strike me as reasonable reactions to my presence. I can only imagine what they say to each other.

I was worried, I’ll admit it. I didn’t like albums two and three nearly as much as I wanted to. But the debut was something else and so I hoped for a return to form, a fulfillment of all that promise.

Real estate has changed a lot the last year and a half. Most of those adaptations are positive, but I can always find fault, you know I can.

There’s not a lot of balance when it’s really busy. One morning this week I attempted to make a little sense of things, or at least record a few instants that otherwise would have been lost to the wind.