Your family, friends and the real estate industry keep telling you the upside of buying a home or condo -- like not throwing your rent money down the drain.
But you are paralyzed by the downside -- like not being able to pay your mortgage.
You work hard for your money (sometimes at a job you don’t even like) so your home would have to give you enough benefits to outweigh your sacrifices.
And yet, when you talk to friends, you find they are unhappy, stressed or worried about their own homes. Some worry about the sheer weight of having a mortgage - and the things that they’ve had to give up to keep up with it - like restaurants (when they hate cooking). Others have bought cheaper homes in more outlying areas only to suffer a soul (and family life) destroying commute.
Their homes don’t seem to enhance their lives -- only hinder them.
It might even be worth all the stress of buying in a high-pressure real estate market like Toronto if you could at least be guaranteed a million dollar nest egg at the end.
But the Toronto market is not only expensive - it’s always changing. And that means going up as well as down.
You only have to open a paper or go to a dinner party to hear about some financially disastrous real estate decision someone has made.
And yet -
You can’t help but feeling that by not buying a home, you may be missing out on living in the kind of space that you (and those you love) would thrive in.
As a real estate analyst whose research is frequently cited by lead institutions such as the Bank of Canada and leading media such as the Globe and Mail, BNN Bloomberg and CBC, I have warned about downturns including the 2016 bubble and told consumers where not to buy in 2017, analysis that was confirmed when the Bank of Canada cited my research in measuring areas of decline in 2018. I’ve also seen first-hand the devastating fall out from bad real estate decisions made by regular Torontonians through the emails I get from the public desperate for my help in fixing (usually unfixable) situations after the fact - some of whose stories mirror this awful story about a family that tried to buy their forever home in Stouffville.
But in my own real estate practice as President of Realosophy Realty, a Toronto-area real estate brokerage, I’ve seen hundreds of life-enhancing decisions made by our clients, that have allowed them to live well on their own terms -- whether they choose to live in the city or suburbs and whether they spend more or less than the average on their homes.
How have they been able to do this?
By observing the principles of what we call “Defensive Home Buying” - a strategic and practical action-based approach to real estate - shared by all of the brokers, agents and team members at our brokerage, Realosophy.
For us, “BUYING SMART” means “BUYING DEFENSIVELY”. It means capturing as much of the upside that real estate has to offer while minimizing its downside risks.
It means ensuring that your home helps you build the life you want -- not expose you to financial risk and stress in your life.
After studying housing markets for two decades, I can assure you that making better real estate decisions is not about luck, or timing, or wealth. It’s about asking ourselves the right questions before we even buy a house.
We created this course because we believe that every home buyer needs it -- and because we do not see anything else like it being offered to consumers. Most of the info you get through news media and the real estate industry is focussed on the process of buying a home -- figuring out what you want in a home, what your budget for a home is, what a mortgage pre-approval is, what a home inspection is and so on.
But while the process is important, there are far more important questions you should be asking yourself.
To help you learn how to buy defensively, I’ll walk you through why the home buying advice most buyers get today (online, in books, from real estate agents and banks) is actually leading them to make very bad decisions -- including deciding how much you should be spending on your housing costs in the first place.
Once we have a better understanding of why the advice you’re getting now leads to bad decisions, I’ll walk you through what you should be doing instead.
This is the course you should be taking before you come in to see a real estate agent, whether here at Realosophy or anywhere else.
I look forward to getting started --
John Pasalis
P.S. As this is the first-time I’m packaging this material into an online course, I’m keeping the cost low for the first 20 people a little while longer. The first 20 spots sold out the first day, but I would like to continue to keep the cost low for now because I’m looking for feedback from you on how I can make this course better.
