Rewind: Browsing for a Home

Looking for a house to buy is hard work, especially when you aren’t even sure exactly where you want to live. If we could have afforded it, I would have bought a house in Oak Bay without question. However, house prices there are ridiculous, and there are few properties with suites (“mortgage helpers”). Of course, I looked, but do an mls search in Oak Bay and the least expensive house is often over $600,000! They say to buy the worst house in the best neighbourhood, and while this maxim is generally a good rule of thumb, it’s not so black and white. We couldn’t afford a house in Oak Bay. Well, actually we COULD, but then we would be absolutely stretched to the maximum debt to income ratio and we were not interested in putting ourselves in that position. We had to leave ourselves some room to breathe in case of job loss, increase in interest rates, etc.

So we looked at houses all over town — old and new and newly renovated. We had little idea of what we were looking for.

• Fairfield. The cheapest house at the time we were looking was $525,000 and needed major renovations. It was also TINY.
• James Bay. Way too expensive.
• Fernwood. We looked at a lot of houses in Fernwood, thinking it was still a “reasonably” priced area with lots of potential to increase in value. Nothing. The cheapest house we looked at, around $400,000, seemed a tear-down to me. There was one I really liked, but it hardly had a yard at all. I wanted lots of greenspace to garden.
• Oaklands. I love the Oaklands area. We couldn’t find anything here.
• North and South Jubilee. We spied a couple houses in these areas, but for the price they just seemed too much. Small houses with big price tags. 1,200 square feet? No suite? Postage-stamp-size lots? For close to half a million dollars? There was a cute house near Oak Bay border that I really liked, but it had an odd layout and no bathroom upstairs by the master bedroom. I thought it was a possibility, for the price of $420,000, but Tyler said no way. And that house didn’t sell for MONTHS. He must have known something wasn’t quite right.
• Saanich, Hillside, Quadra Village, Burnside, etc. We looked all over and just couldn’t find anything quite right for us.

I learned a lot by looking for a house. Never owning a house before, I hadn’t ever even thought about assessments and what they meant. In many areas and depending on the age of the house, the house was assessed at a lot less than the land, like the house we rented in Oak Bay for example. I came to realize that it is the LAND that holds so much VALUE. So buying a new home on a tiny piece of property, especially in a new subdivision, would just be silly for us. Even an older home on a small property doesn’t make sense. We wanted something that had lots of potential. We wanted to buy a home that would always have a lot of value. We also realized we didn’t want to buy a new home or a newly renovated home, as we would be paying more. But we also didn’t want to take on a total home renovation project for our first home. We had to find some middle ground.

During our search, our landlord told us that he had decided to sell the house. He felt pretty bad, because he knew we wanted to stay there for a few years and he really liked us. I even ran into him downtown around Christmas time and he told me, once again, that we were the best tenants he ever had, by far, and he was so happy we had found a wonderful home to buy. I miss him a little bit, actually. Jerry and I had a rapport with one another. As well, it had only been a few months since Tyler and I had rented the whole house from Jerry, and rented out the lower suite ourselves. Our friend Jenny had moved in, so it was a bit of a shock to her that the house was going up for sale, quickly at that.

We loved that house. There were lots of things that I didn’t love, the DIY repairs and such, but the house had an energy that just always felt right and good. The asking price was $860,000, way out of our price range of course, but we pitched Jerry an idea for us to all go into “business” together so that we could eventually buy the house from him. He actually gave it some thought, but they needed the money. They were moving back east to go back to school. I thought that would be the case, but I was glad I tried. I really do love that house. And its location a block from Willows Beach makes it highly desirable. (Oh, how I yearn to be back there. Location location! I miss that beach.) The listing is still online if you want to take a look.

But at this point we realized buying a house was the right direction for us. Was it coincidence that Jerry decided to sell the house the same time we decided to buy? We didn’t want to rent again, and we didn’t want to move again for at least five years. Knowing that we would have to move once the house sold, which we thought would be quick, we really set about to find something.

And that’s when I came across the listing for our house. I had looked at it months earlier, in fact, and LOVED it, but since it was in Sooke, I felt it wasn’t an option for us. We discussed moving out of town a bit, but had decided against it. Coming across the house a second time, however, we thought we could go have a look at least. And that will be the subject of the next posting…

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