Real Estate Part VIII: Denouemont

After the Mont-Royal disappointment, we continued looking. We began settling in for the long haul. After all, it was coming up on a year of looking and we hadn’t found the place of our dreams.

On the first Sunday in June, Carrie was out of town but I saw a few promising places in the paper, so I went on my own. Of particular note was an old industrial space on Normanville in the Petit Patrie, just south of Rosemount. The place was a just-renoved ex-industrial space, on a mixed use block. At the end of the block was the old incinerator, decomissioned several years ago and now under consideration for a variety of uses. The area is in transition. North of Rosemount (the cross street at the corner), Normanville is one of the most beautiful streets in the Petit Patrie. South of Normanville, it’s a little grey still, and there was at least one business still on the block.

/></p> <p>But the place was amazing. They’d carved the building into four quadrants and doubly insonorized the walls, so that one wouldn’t have neighbors above or below and each unit would have two floors. You bought roof access and a bit of outdoor space on each floor with the condo, and they’d carved some beautiful skylights that went all the down to the first floor (it’s hard to explain and the pics are no longer on the net). The place was breathtaking, though it did have a few flaws. I didn’t like what they’d done with the kitchen. I found it to be the kind of kitchen that looks good for showing but wasn’t well laid out for cooking and was inefficient with storage (and there wasn’t nearly enough). The bathrooms were beautiful but there was zero, and I mean <em>no</em> built in storage.</p> <p>Nevertheless, the place was a sight to see. I took Carrie and Sandra to see it and they both loved it. Really loved it. I came around, despite the kitchen, and there was something to be said for finishing a place yourself. And it was in the Petit Patrie, a neighborhood we knew we loved, and a 10-minute walk from the Rosemount metro stop. But the sellers wanted $439k for it, which seemed like they were charging extra for the “privilege” of finishing the place yourself. So we decided we would bid but lowball them. We offered $390k, and then we waited. After making the offer, I started to get nervous about the cost of finishing the place. You never really know how much that sort of thing costs, and this condo was already close to the top of our price range. And I felt like I was paying extra to rectify the seller’s bad design decisions regarding storage in the kitchen and the lack thereof elsewhere.</p> <p>While this was going on, another week had passed and it was Sunday again. There was an intriguing open house in Villeray. We went up there and the power was out on the buzzer. The only reason we got in at all was because some other people were leaving. We came in and were totally blown away. The place was beautiful and finished. The design was amazing, the light was good, and it came with storage and garage. It was also big enough — 2000 square feet (or just under) but with lots of wall space for our books and tons of storage. The condo looked out on a beautiful, tree-lined residential street. The Jarry metro station was half a block away. We walked around the neighborhood and checked out the amenities. They looked pretty good (and in fact we’d checked out a house in the neighborhood so we already knew a bit about it). We called our friend Debbie, who lives several blocks away, and asked her opinion. She raved about the neighborhood. Suddenly, we weren’t so certain. One place was in the Petit Patrie, a neighborhood we knew we loved. The other seemed like a better place. I could give you adjectives, but the bottom line was that after a year of looking, we just knew we loved it.</p> <p>We returned the next night with Sandra so she could see it. She was also impressed. The current owner showed us around and when she asked him was what wrong with the place, he said “we have to move. That’s the only thing that’s wrong with it.” We would, of course, do a few things to make it our own, but it was just right.</p> <p>I don’t remember the sequence exactly, but it seems like the next day the counteroffer for the Normanville place came in. The guy dropped the price a lot — to maybe $415k, with an absurdly early closing date (they obviously needed money from the sale). But this time it was us who had to walk away from the negotiations. We told Sandra to apologize profusely on our behalf, and that we’d be back if the negotiations on the other place fell through. Our dream home was listing for $399k. With some counseling from Sandra, we came in at $385k with our first offer. She tells us that she went in and made a hard sell — she told the owners and the agent that we were bidding on another place, and so they were in competition for our money. Apparently it worked. The sellers accepted our first offer. We were elated. I’ll spare you the mechanics of buying except for a “what we learned” aftermath post, but I can tell you that since we moved in, I haven’t had a moment of buyer’s remorse. At first, we thought it was a choice between quality of neighborhood and quality of place, since we thought the Petit Patrie was a more happening neighborhood. It turns out that we were wrong. The Petit Patrie is great but Villeray, or at least the part of it within walking distance of our place is wonderful, <a href=as I suggested in a much earlier post.

A few pictures are below. We’re “moved in” but not fully settled. There is still much decorating to be done, there is no overhead light in the dining room and 3 months later, my studio still isn’t hooked up. That’s what winter break is for. . . .

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Baseball scandal

I know I’m supposed to be scandalized by the latest revelations, assuming they’re true (right now, they are unsubstantiated allegations). And yet, I can’t help feel that there’s a kind of arbitrary logic at work here. Some kinds of drugs are okay, others are not. Last I checked, nobody is going after University of Florida football team records because they had exclusive access to a certain hydrating sports beverage. Yes, performance enhancing drugs are bad for you and cheating. But so are so many other things players do. And if we start putting asterisks next to records, let’s remember that Babe Ruth was playing in a league that kept out black players.

Okay, now I must go enter grades and watch football.

R is for Responsibility

Yesterday’s Gazette featured an article entitled “Professor Shortage Looming, Feds Told: Schools Urged to Boost Post-Grad Ranks by 35%”

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada made its annual pitch for more federal money by saying that we try to lure in more than 150,000 postgraduate students because nearly have the country’s 40,000 professors are about to retire and we need “more PhD trained students for the Canadian economy.” Now, I’m all for skillful use of rhetoric in trying to get more funding for education (Hey Quebec, how about full rides for your doctoral students and fair wages for TAs?) and I’m not sure about the math here, but it does raise a question. What proportion of graduate students normally go on to be professors? Is the fraction less than 20,000/150000ths? Because if it isn’t, then we’re seeing a certain level of irresponsibility. Doctoral students, especially, ought not be treated as a revenue source by universities. Otherwise, you wind up with a reserve army of underemployed PhDs. Not that that’s ever happened before in the United States or Canada, where I hear horror stories of what it was like in the 1980s and 1990s in some fields.

In the coming years, scholars in Communication Studies departments across Canada will also have to start considering placement issues in admitting PhDs as more and more doctoral programs come online, especially in Ontario. That, however, is a can of worms for another post or another forum.

Real Estate Part VII: Bad Taste in Love

Cast back out into the forest, we went back to looking for unusual places. One popped up in the paper that seemed intriguing. On Mont-Royal Est, it was a couple blocks east of the heart of the Plateau, not far from the Mont-Royal Metro and located near lots of shops and services. There was even a municipal parking a block away where we could rent by the month (finding a spot for your car is not an insignificant issue in the Plateau).

An old apartment that was being turned into a condo, the place was easily 2000 square feet and had a promising layout. There was one closed bedroom, two closed rooms at the front (his and hers offices?) and then room for living room, dining room and music. The kitchen and bathrooms needed some work. On the plus side, we were told that the place was pretty well insonorized from the upstairs and it certainly was well insonorized from the downstairs. But the downstairs was an issue: it was a restaurant. It didn’t feel hot or anything but there was faint humming in one corner of the apartment (no doubt from the giant exhaust fan).

This is where things got interesting. The place had a lot of potential and a really awesome location (though for better or worse we would have a front row seat for every protest and parade to come down Mont-Royal), but the restaurant thing was a big issue: noise, smells, vermin and possibly fire were our concerns. So I asked around about what we could do. Some of the issues could only be determined with an inspection. But the thing that killed it was that when we called around to insurance companies, not a single one would consider giving us homeowners’ insurance. This was, naturally something of a deal breaker, but we were still holding out. After all, there are people all over Montreal who live over restaurants. Oh wait, they’re probably not insured. . . .

So I was out for drinks on Sunday night after a somewhat disappointing Marc Ribot show. One of my companions was someone I’d never met and when Derek mentioned we were both looking for housing, the conversation naturally turned in that direction. I told him of our problems finding insurance and he replied “oh, that place? It just burned. I live right by there.” A drive by the next day confirmed. The insurers knew something we didn’t. There had been a fire. You could see damage on the building up to the 3rd floor and the restaurant was boarded up. Sandra called their agent to find out and got the most amazing response. The seller’s agent said the owner had had some “dealings with politicians” and that after a dispute she was beat up and left for dead as they lit the place on fire. Turns out she was hospitalized but fine, but come on now — I think “politician” isn’t exactly the word I would have used to describe her business partners. Although the seller’s agent said that the 2nd floor was “not affected at all by the fire,” we very quickly lost interest in the place.

Real Estate Part VI: The Spring of Our Discontent

I’ve decided that it’s worth concluding this series in proper form even though it’s been awhile because at least 3 of this blog’s readers (which, for all I know, is a good portion of the readership) asked for it. To see where we left off in the story, have a look at Real Estate Part V.

The winter wasn’t much to write home about. After the Rosemount place, the only other place we really loved was a 5th-floor loft on St. Laurent, in the same building as Laika, a bar we sometimes visit. Easily within walking distance of McGill and lots of fun stuff in the Pleateau, it was the offices of Parachute — a journal we liked that was folding — the view was astounding and we could imagine converting it to a residential space. The carpet hid beautiful hardwood floors, there was tons of space, but we would have had to install a proper kitchen and bathroom, not to mention updating the electric. Also, the condo fees were pushing $500 and we had no control over our heat. And it was HOT in there. For $375,000. So although we fantasized about it, it was really a no-go.

As winter turned to spring, more places came back on the market. We had taken to purchasing the Saturday La Presse and reading through the real estate listings to see what the good open houses were on Sundays. By March, things were starting to open up again and we saw plenty of nice-looking open houses. I remember a day of driving around the Plateau, thinking how beautiful it was, and seeing all these too-small places with beautifully sculpted backyards and just steps from St. Denis, St. Laurent or Mont-Royal. I remember a beautiful detached house — yes, a HOUSE — on St. Christophe just below Sherbrook, which was perfect in every way except the location wasn’t very interesting (on the plus side, you could walk to school) and was out of our league at $540,000.

But then we saw it. In the paper, a modest listing for a place in the Village, $374,000, 2000 square feet. We drove by and it was one of our top three from the summer (1200 Amherst), and it was back on the market. Alas, it appeared that they had ruined the place by building lots of small rooms inside it. Though we couldn’t quite tell what was going on. So we called Sandra, who called their agent, and we found out what happened. A law office had purchased the condo, begun the process of renovating it into offices and then was told by the condo association that they couldn’t have a business in that unit. Apparently there was a legal fight (this turned out to be an issue later) and the lawyers lost. So they were trying to get out.

We visited the place and even got to see the roof and storage (which we hadn’t before). We talked to a member of the condo association who seemed like a decent guy and gave us the honest ins and outs of the building. Yes, the neighborhood got loud on weekends but it was a fun place to live, he said. He explained the issue with zoning for business. We remembered the commute to work, which was nothing. We checked out the neighborhood and found some nice new places that we thought we’d like to go, even though the Village has a bunch of clubs in which we’d have no interest. We were satisfied. We were ready. We were going to make our first offer.

There was, however, a sticking point. The place sold for $340,000 in October. No doubt, that was below value. But the lawyers hadn’t added value. They’d done a bunch of construction to the place that we wanted undone (and to their credit, which they were in the process of undoing). Now they were listing it for $374,000. If you do the math between the construction and buying and selling costs, they weren’t making much on the place, but they were still trying to turn a small profit. And we were being asked to pay a $34k premium for being indecisive in October.

We bit. We bid $348,000. Now, at this point, I should say that we learned a couple important things. In Pittsburgh, the bidding process involved our agent making an appointment with the sellers’ agent and everyone sitting down together (except us) and phone calls back and forth and an hour of price haggling. It being Quebec, making an offer on a place involves filling out a ton of paperwork and then waiting a few days to hear back. So the negotiation I am about to relate took over a week. Which is quite an emotional ride. They balked at our $348k bid. They said they’d take nothing less than $361,000. We were willing to go there but in the spirit of negotiation, decided to test them, figuring they could say no twice. So we bid $355k.

Pause for effect. I can’t believe how much money this is. Remember, our last home cost $89,500. It is an obscene amount of money we were talking about. It is safe to say that I was completely freaking out at this point. Carrie a little less so, as she had her eyes on the prize.

Anyway, days passed and we waiting. The deadline on the offer was Saturday night. We were at a party with some of our friends and colleagues. It was a topic of conversation (as these things tend to be). At the 11th hour, we finally hear from our agent, who, along with their agent, agreed to cut their fees a bit so that the final price would be $358,500. We were satisfied (we would have paid $361 in the end, after all) and there was much celebrating.

But the signed contract never came.

Sandra called us to tell us the bad news. The sellers were also at a party Saturday night, and it was also a topic of conversation at their party. And guess what? Their friends thought they could do better. Their friends were sure that they could get asking price or close to it. So they never signed the deal and said now they would only take something closer to asking price. We were furious. Sandra was furious. They hadn’t negotiated in good faith. They had buyers in hand for a place that sat on the market for months the previous summer and they were dallying around. In fact, the only reason they got it for $340k was because the previous owner originally wanted $385k and held too long on his high price and then had to get out in the fall.

After an expeirence I had in college (the subject of another blog post), I had decided that I would make no more life decisions out of spite. And we did want the place. I had in my mind that the place was worth about $360k to me, given that they’d paid $340 in October. Don’t ask me how I came to that number. I have no idea. But I was, in my mind, firm at $360. $361 is fine (what’s a thousand at that point?) but this was getting silly. I don’t know whether Carrie had a number or not, but we came back one last time. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was either $365k or a little more. The sellers came back at $372k and I was done. Carrie was beside herself as well, though maybe she would have gone there if I was considering it. I don’t know. To me, the place just wasn’t worth it, the sellers were the kind of people you call lots of bad names and the best advice I’d gotten on real estate prices was that you make money when you buy, not when you sell.

Frustrated, we took a break from the whole thing for a bit. We’d never actually tried to buy a place and failed. It turns out this is completely normal. Our friends Bart and Jill told us they made 3 offers before getting their place. We should just expect it in this kind of market. Sandra sent us some new listings (her faith was no doubt renewed as we had really tried to buy the place). We started looking again a week or two later.