Spring house hunting: What $500,000 will get you

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 3:32 PM - 5 Comments

Spring house hunting: What $350,000 will get you

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 3:32 PM - 0 Comments

Spring house hunting: What $150,000 will get you

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 3:32 PM - 13 Comments

Autumn house hunting

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 4:39 PM - 24 Comments

By the end of the summer, it became clear Canada’s housing market is in the best shape it’s been since cratering last winter. In Vancouver, for instance, the number of sales in September was up 124 per cent over the previous year; in Toronto, sales were up 24 per cent. But as economists love to remind us, when demand goes up, so too do prices. Combined with an already short supply of houses on the market, this helped raise the average selling price by 11 per cent from the same quarter last year.

So, how far will your hard-earned cash take you in today’s market? Click below to find out.

Autumn house hunting: What $1 million will get you

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:28 PM - 0 Comments

Click below to see what’s available in some of Canada’s largest markets.

Autumn house hunting: What $500,000 will get you

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:28 PM - 1 Comment

Click below to see what’s available in some of Canada’s largest markets.

Autumn house hunting: What $350,000 will get you

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:28 PM - 1 Comment

Click below to see what’s available in some of Canada’s largest markets.

Autumn house hunting: What $150,000 will get you

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:25 PM - 1 Comment

Click below to see what’s available in some of Canada’s largest markets.

Vultures in the desert

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 5:55 PM - 19 Comments

In her form-fitting power suit, in a beige-toned Calgary hotel conference hall, Nancy Bacon greets a crowd of would-be real estate investors with a question: “How many people in this room like to be told what to do?” Bacon, VP of financial planning development with CBI Group, is flattering the Calgarians in their after-work jeans, who like to think they don’t need Sarah Palin to tell them what a maverick is. And CBI is pitching a scheme only mavericks could love: invest a minimum $10,000 in a foreclosure acquisition fund created to make massive real estate purchases in one of the worst-hit subprime cities in the United States—Phoenix, Ariz.

As of February, prices there had fallen 35.2 per cent in a year, and by slightly more than half from their peak in June 2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. That annual decline is the worst in the country. One in 40 Phoenix homes received foreclosure notices in the first quarter, according to RealtyTrac, which monitors U.S. foreclosure data, the country’s ninth-highest rate—visible on the desert cityscape as discrete patches of unwatered browns amidst a checkerboard of green lawns.

ALSO AT MACLEANS.CA: For those house hunting in Canada, here’s what you can get these days for $150,000, $350,000, $500,000 and $1 million.

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