What Waterloo Reddit thinks about Toronto buyers

Toronto's CN Tower

Real estate buyers from Toronto have been getting lots of press and negative talk from local realtors and resident buyers. I think most of it is unwarranted

 

I read lots of news. I get it from a lot of sources, mostly through my RSS feeds, email subscriptions, and google alerts. I also keep in touch with my facebook feed, twitter and sometimes even Reddit – a user generated content site.

The other day a link popped up that caught my attention. It was on the Waterloo subreddit. This is what it said.

Recently witnessed a bus-full of GTA real estate investors touring open houses in Waterloo. Is this the new Waterloo?

It is sometimes the comments that I most like about reddit. They give great insight into the minds of Redditors.  Now I didn’t fact check any of these comments. Here they are as they appeared in the comment section under the story.

First of all, here is the link

From the sublime

Detached houses are harder and harder to come by. Also, prices in the GTA are way worse than ours. People move in out here because they can afford it, the commute isn’t completely crazy (by GTA standards) and property values are climbing fast but not quite Toronto bubble style. So, supply is low, demand is high and a $600000 detached home seems like a bargain when the same house goes for $300000 more 20 minutes up the 401.

We got out bid by people coming from the GTA a couple times.

Detached property values in K-W actually rose more %-wise than Toronto over the past year.

We have 10,000 more people coming to this area from Toronto though

https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/more-than-one-third-of-local-tech-workers-commute-from-toronto-city-1.2588732

Yup. Absolutely it’s happening. In a post in this sub a few days ago, a poster was complaining that he kept being outbid on houses in the $650 000 price range

I advised him that if he really wanted a shot at a actually getting the house, he should offer about $725K – $750. This was because buyers in the area are not only competing against “Mr. & Mrs. Jones” for the house but also competing against real estate investors. These investors (using rough numbers here) realize that paying 725K today for the house listed a 650K is a GREAT INVESTMENT as the house (again, using rough numbers here) will be worth 750K next year. And, 825K the year after that. And 900K the year after that… And so on, and so on…. Even if (when) the K-W market cools down, paying well over asking price today will still result in a very handsome return on investment over the next few years.

Ex-Torontonian chiming in, bought under asking in December 2015. Didn’t expect the bubble to start here this quickly.

Now that more companies are supporting work-from-home arrangements, I think we will see more people moving out of TO to places like K-W. You can still commute to Toronto 1-2 days per week and work from home the rest of the time.

Just a word of warning folks, Torontonians are in on it now. Even my relatives are thinking of selling their houses and buying up here so that they can essentially be mortgage free and still live close to a city.

Could you tell all your relatives to stay where they are so that my husband and I can afford to buy our first home in the city we grew up in? Thanks.

Guess they’re really hoping for that all-day Go service to Toronto which is promised in “a few years”

Everything you all are saying about those darn Torontonians rushing to buy our houses these days has already been said in the last 20 years about Kitchenerites and Waterloovians buying houses in Mannheim, Heidelberg, St. Agatha, Haysville, New Hamburg and every other little town between here and Stratford, moving to their quiet little towns, driving up prices, bringing traffic and our darn “big city ways”.

Personally, I find it all amusing in an ironic, karmic sort of way. 🙂

fingers crossed Please carry over into other forms of housing and make my condo more valuable for when its time to sell….

To the ridiculous

How many of these posts are fuelled by real estate agents trying to up the frenzy haha

For the record

My 2 cents here because commenting on that reddit story will bring me nothing but down votes and misplaced negativity

There are people moving here from Toronto. There are also people moving here from Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa, Australia, Shanghai and Mumbai. I moved here from Taipei. Chances are, you or your parents moved here from somewhere else too. You can complain if you want, but change happens. If nobody ever moved, we’d still be living in the ocean.

Also, there are also investors interested in our market. Again, there always have been.

And finally, as a real estate agent, I would like the frenzy to stop. I prefer a balanced market where market price is found by buyers and sellers carefully and reasonably negotiating the price and conditions of a home sale.

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