I just flew back from a vacation in the States. This is the time of year when the Real Estate Market in Halifax, Nova Scotia and surrounding area just starts to wake up. If you know someone ready to buy or sell a home please contact me. I am never too busy for your referrals. Here is a photo I took from my iPhone flying into Boston for a connecting flight to Halifax.
So while I was away the Real Estate Market received a bit of bad news. January home sales were down slightly. (About 2.8% from December)
And there are new Mortgage rules coming that are going to make it even tougher for new home buyers to get Mortgages. Specifically, in the past, new homeowners were only subject to the standards of a three-year, fixed-rate mortgage. This standard will be raised to five-year, fixed mortgage rates as of April 19.
Below are images you can click on the read the full news articles on these two points:
Family farming has been made unprofitable by the provincial and national agricultural policies of the past decades. Increasingly farmers feel pressured to sell their farmland for development. That temporarily solves the farmer's financial problems, but the long term consequences for us all is devastating . . .
We need solutions to help farmers and in my opinion we need to keep real estate development out of farm land. Below is a video I helped film and edit on a local food project in Nova Scotia; it just makes sense.
From the opening line of the video, "Maybe you, maybe you got to go out on the street and say dammit all, look are we crazy? are we are going to lose a history of 400 years of food production because nobody thought about it? Start thinking about it!" The "radio show" 4 minutes into the video is hilarious :-)
Did you hear the entire interview with the farmer from the beginning quote? It starts 13:45 into the video.Paul Colville is on-fire and pretty much sums it all up here.
Let your voice be heard please come to the event on Wednesday the 27th at the Halifax Forum by the The Nova Scotia Agricultural Land Review Committee. Yes this is today! The Halifax Forum is on the corner of Young and Windsor. The meeting is in their multipurpose room which you enter from the Young Street side.
When I speak with people everyone is so happy that their Real Estate value is going up throughout Halifax and Nova Scotia at large. Because their homes are worth more, right? Real Estate prices in Nova Scotia were up an average of 4.2% in 2009. But the flip side of that is the property assessments are going up too. Assessments were up an average of 6% in 2009. So why 6% if prices were only up 4.2%?
That's a good question!
Click on the thumbnail above to read the very short article on assessments.
You know as a real estate agent I deal with people trying to get mortgages all the time. Just in the last month I had two qualified buyers, with good jobs, be told the big NO to their mortgage application by BMO, in this case. Let's help the economy in Nova Scotia by banking locally. Personally I use one of the credit unions in town. Here is the great video worth watching from Waylon's post.
Here is fun tag cloud tool called wordle. You enter the URL of a web site or a blog, and it scans all the content and generates a list of the most frequently appearing words, then displays them. Larger size words occur more frequently. Below is the tag cloud for iListinHD.com
Notice that Halifax Realtor®, Nova Scotia Real Estate Agent, Selling your house and MLS® all come into play. Which makes sence as selling houses in Halifax through the MLS® as Realtor® is what I do! (Click on the image to make it bigger).
Why work with a Halifax REALTOR® like myself? Well here is fantastic web site made by CREA, (the Canadian Real Estate Association) which spells out all the benefits of working with a REALTOR® if you are buying or selling a house.
Click the photo above to get started on this journey. Wow, CREA did a good job on this. Or here is the direct link to forward to others! http://www.howrealtorshelp.ca/
I thought people might find this interesting. Here is really neat interactive map of Canada from CBC News. It shows house prices and their changes over the last few years. The data shown is gathered from Statistics Canada and CREA. It is very interesting to see what home prices are throughout our great country. Click on the map on above to go to the full story and interactive map.
