Welcome to this month’s installment of Dear Urbaneer, where I answer real estate queries from my inquisitive followers and clients. This month’s question comes from a prospective purchaser who is curious about what digital resources can assist her in her search for her ideal property.
Dear Urbaneer:
I’m a single pragmatic professional in my 40s who rents, but I’d like to buy. I’ve been looking at listings online and touring open houses that pique my curiosity, but when I try to imagine myself as the homeowner of a particular property, it can be difficult to envision.
When I look at real estate, I think about things like walkability IRL and whether the property gets enough sunlight in winter, since it can be a tough season to navigate. In February, I saw a cute bungalow with loads of vintage charm, but I wasn’t certain my furniture would fit because the house was virtually staged on MLS but vacant in person, and I’m not great with measurements. Last week, I drove past an apartment building under construction on the way to an open house, so I asked the realtor whether there was a lot of development occurring in the area. The open house was pretty busy, leaving him a bit distracted, I suppose, because he smiled and told me the condo market crash has ensured very little will get built for the foreseeable future, but houses like the one we were standing in were selling quickly and often over their asking price. When I asked about the building under construction, he said he didn’t know the specifics, but if I googled the address, it would all be online. It left me in a conundrum, because I know a lot about real estate that is available online, but it’s not always the information I feel I need before I make a decision. Are there digital tools I’m missing?
Signed,
Doing Due Diligence.
Here is my reply:
Dear Due Diligence.
Let me start by saying you can never ask too many questions. The more informed you are, the greater the opportunity to select a dwelling that aligns most closely with your wishes, wants and needs. That said, the number of questions one can ask about the property market today is also almost infinite, and the capacity to understand and process it all can feel daunting, especially given the price of real estate is one of the biggest expenses most Canadians will make in their lifetime.
Let me be clear. Making the decision to buy a property, viewing a selection of open house listings, and wanting to make the right choice when so many variables are unclear will overstimulate anyone’s prefrontal cortex and impede their decision-making. Buying a property may remain overwhelming until you feel sufficiently informed and confident enough to act on a purchase. Do not succumb to the Fear of Missing Out, as it’s a false narrative that serves no one but the unscrupulous. Breathe deep and take your time.
Most realtors hosting an Open House should be able to answer your questions, and if they can’t, they should offer to find out and provide you with a satisfactory answer. However, the onus is on you to ensure the realtor truly understands your question by taking your point of view into account. This is because the lens we each evaluate real estate through is unique. For example, an investor purchasing a property to generate a return on investment through rent or future resale will have a different set of criteria than a buyer seeking a home to put down roots and raise a family. The purchase of an investment is rational, prudent and pragmatic. It is analytical and emotionally devoid, whereas the purchase of a ‘home’ inherently involves additional layers of complexity.
Some readers may disagree, but I believe when you’re seeking a dwelling to personally occupy, the process of choosing a property and its location becomes infinitely more complex. In addition to defining your practical needs, such as the number of rooms required for sleeping, living and working, you must determine what locations are optimal for every member of your household, including prioritizing proximity to work, school, leisure, and extended family. You’re also subjectively assessing which neighbourhoods, what property types, and which architectural styles best reflect your social values and affiliation to your community, all while defining your budget, evaluating your job security, and being objectively realistic about your future earning power.
The cost of buying and selling real estate is high, what with the land transfer taxes, real estate fees and extraneous closing costs, so purchasing property should not be limited to who we are at that particular moment in time, but include forecasting who we intend to become in the future. The notion of moving up and down the property ladder as we age, or as our status, identity and family size change, has become prohibitively expensive. At the same time, few of us can afford a Forever Home as our first purchase, so what you buy must be incredibly strategic. Do you want to embrace urban cultural amenities, raise children, or both? Whatever your particular case, research on housing and identity indicates that owning a home, as part of the Canadian Dream, is seen as a sign of financial and personal success, as well as reflecting you’re “biographically on schedule”.
For all of these reasons, completing one’s due diligence is essential and a proactive step to protecting one’s future asset value. It’s wise to anticipate any factors that might affect your home’s value and your quiet enjoyment.
A property inspection is an important step in your home hunt, because it ultimately can influence your purchasing decision. Fully understanding the condition of a property informs your purchasing decision, guides your pricing strategy, shapes your budget, and clarifies both the potential and limitations of a particular home. I wrote recently about property inspections in Dear Urbaneer: What Is & Isn’t Covered By A Home Inspection?
What I want to address is the growing number of tools and apps available to consumers that can help round out your housing search.
Here are some suggestions:
Generative AI
You’ve probably dabbled in Generative AI, which is gaining traction with consumers for everything from routine internet searches to helping with daily tasks, from menu planning to travel itineraries, to work-related tasks. But you may not know that Gen AI, like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, can be helpful for dwell hunters.
It’s helpful for narrowing down decisions, defining a wish list, and articulating questions to ask during showings.
It’s also really good at breaking down data and collating large chunks of information, so if you want to do a deep dive into market activity and data trends, it can help you there – provided you have the information already or can point to the sources.
Generative AI can also help you visualize a space in a home using listing photos. Ask things like “Can I configure the space for an island?” “What furniture layout would work best in this space?” “How can I add more storage to this floor plan?” and so on.
Remember, though, Generative AI output is a direct product of what’s input, so prompting matters. The more detailed, the better. And always ask for verifiable sources, and double-check facts, because while a helpful assistant, it does make errors.
How Well-Located Is A Property?
In a city like Toronto, where walkability, cycling infrastructure, and access to transit are all highly coveted lifestyle features, it can be helpful to consult tools like Walk Score, which also looks at Bike Score and Transit Score during your house hunt.
These tools help quantify how easy it is to accomplish daily errands without a car, whether by foot, bike, or public transit.
- Walk Score evaluates proximity to amenities like grocery stores, restaurants, parks, and schools.
- Bike Score assesses cycling friendliness based on bike lanes, hills, connectivity, and cycling infrastructure.
- Transit Score measures access to public transportation routes and frequency of service.
These tools offer insight into how connected, convenient, and car-reliant (or not) you may be in a particular neighbourhood.
Shadowmap For Light Conditions
The presence of natural light in a home is linked to better health and wellness, and generally makes a home more beautiful and usable, which I wrote about recently in this post Dear Urbaneer: What Is Wellness Lighting Design, And Can It Really Improve Health At Home?.
There is a functional aspect to light distribution in planning gardens, heating and cooling systems, and window treatments.
While you might be able to anticipate what kind of light exposure you’ll have (or not have) depending on the directional exposure of your home (south versus north-facing, for instance), it can be hard to really understand in usable terms what light you’ll have access to at various points during the day, in different rooms, and inside and outside your home.
Shadowmap makes use of high-quality maps and 3D data to gauge the amount of sunlight exposure in a home, with precise visualization of sun and shadow- and the best part? It’s done virtually, so you can examine various locations without even leaving your armchair.
You simply enter the address you are interested in and use the time and date sliders to see sunlight and shadows in the home, yard, and surrounding buildings across different seasons.
According to the app’s testimonials, consumers have found it useful for everything from home additions and garden planting to new builds and apartment and house hunting.
This kind of tool is also useful for homeowners interested in solar power (or in the possibility of having it), because, obviously, access to sunlight is a crucial factor.
One last thought about light! Don’t forget to consider light pollution, and how it can disrupt your sleep cycle, which we wrote about here: Dear Urbaneer: What Should I Know About Light Pollution?
Old Google Street View Maps
Consider it a curb appeal retrospective. By changing the dates in Google Street View Maps, you can take a look back at how a home has changed over the years, along with the surrounding streetscape.
It’s as easy as opening Google Maps and inputting the address of a home you’d like to investigate. Drag the yellow pegman to the location you’d like to view, and click on the black information box in the top left corner where it says” see more dates”.
A carousel of images appears at the bottom with photos from over the years and seasons. Some addresses go back a fair bit, and some are more recent, and it’s not totally precise, but it is cool, and gives you a general sense of how a streetscape and home have evolved over time.
Note: these instructions are for a desktop/laptop computer. If you are using a mobile device, the steps are similar, but you use the Google Maps app to get to “see more dates”.
Development Pipeline
While you may fall in love with a home today, it can be helpful to understand the probability and timeline of development surrounding the home you’ve got your eye on. Check the Development Pipeline Dashboard for the city of Toronto, a database that tracks development activity trends and chronicles land use planning policy.
This is particularly important in a city like Toronto, where development is ongoing. Depending on where you are looking, you might have a high-rise down the street in a few years, or other high-density housing.
This matters for a few reasons. Over time, future development can alter sunlight exposure, privacy, skyline views, traffic flow, and even the overall feel of a community. For condo buyers in particular, these changes can directly impact daily livability and long-term value, affecting everything from natural light and balcony usability to shadowing and resale potential.
This shouldn’t necessarily deter a purchase, but it can be helpful to have this information before a purchase, so that you can anticipate it.
Visualizers For Furnishings and Decor
Does your couch fit in the living room in the home you want? How should you arrange your furniture, or should you plan to buy new items? There are tons of free style apps that let you digitally recreate a room and try out various pieces of furniture.
With Floorplanner upload or recreate a property’s floorplan digitally, then experiment with furniture layouts, room flow, storage solutions, and renovation ideas in both 2D and 3D. Users simply input room dimensions or trace an existing listing’s floor plan, then drag and drop furniture and decor elements to test how a space may actually function day-to-day.
Roomstyler is similar to Floorplanner, but Floorplanner helps you better understand spatial requirements, while Roomstyler is more geared toward generating design and decor inspo. It’s a great way to try on different aesthetics, which can be helpful if looking at a home that is dated, or has a style that does not match your own.
HouseCreep/ Died in House
I wrote years ago about HouseCreep, a crowdsourced, online community that chronicles the “dark history of homes”, from anything from violent crime to grow ops to paranormal activity.
In recent years, another similar service has come online, called DiedinHouse.com, which does a deeper dive into stigmatizing events associated with an address, from meth labs to fire to proximity to cemeteries, information about registered sex offenders, as well as any deaths that have occurred at the property.
Note- this is a paid online tool, with varying levels of access. For Canadian addresses, only the basic search feature is available, which pulls information from their proprietary database.
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The Value of Analogue Experience
Although a lot of research can be done online, there is no denying the value of going analogue when dwell hunting- visiting neighbourhoods during different times of day, eating in local restaurants, visiting local shops, walking the streets, and talking to local residents will get you closer to making a decision.
This can go a long way to understanding whether a particular home is right for you, which can be very challenging to gauge virtually.
What’s also important to understand on your journey to a property purchase, is that for all of the boxes you may be seeking to tick, and all of the benefits digital technology can provide, the ‘perfect property’ you may be looking for rarely exists in reality, even when your purchasing power is sizable.
Furthermore, having sold hundreds of properties, I’ve come to learn that those Buyers who trust their intuition – even while falling head over heels for their prince charming of bricks and mortar that lacked their ‘must-have’ criteria – rarely regretted their decision, even decades later.
Think you’ve found the one? This post offers my housing matrix to help you assess –> If This Is The Right Home To Buy?
Finally, technology may offer data, but it’s really important to have someone you trust to guide you and your best interests at heart. Find your real estate tribe and rely on their wisdom. It can be priceless.
Wondering what we do? –> Dear Urbaneer: How Do You Help Buyers Make The Right Real Estate Purchase?
Thank you for your excellent question!
Here are some related blogs!
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Superior Cycling In Toronto? There’s An App For That!
City Of Toronto Debuts A Revamped Maps App
Seeking A Smarter Commute? There’s An App For That!
Seeking Good Schools In Toronto? There’s An App For That!
Since 1989, I’ve steered my career through a real estate market crash and burn; survived a slow painful cross-country recession; completed an M.E.S. graduate degree from York University called ‘Planning Housing Environments’; executed the concept, sales & marketing of multiple new condo and vintage loft conversions; and guided hundreds of clients through the purchase and sale of hundreds of freehold and condominium dwellings across the original City of Toronto. From a gritty port industrial city into a glittering post-industrial global centre, I’ve navigated the ebbs and flows of a property market as a consistent Top Producer. And I remain as passionate about it today as when I started.
Please consider contacting me at 416-845-9905 or emailing me at Steve@urbaneer.com. It would be my pleasure to assist you.
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Serving first-time Buyers, upsizers, downsizers, and people building their long-term property portfolios, our mandate is to help clients choose the property that will deliver the highest future return on their investment while ensuring it best serves their practical needs and their dream of “Home” during their ownership.
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-The Urbaneer Team
Steven Fudge, Sales Representative
& The Innovative Urbaneer Team
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