I’m proud to be hosting only the third ever Canadian real estate blog carnival. This carnival was started by Rachelle from Landlord Rescue and contains posts relating to real estate.
- Investing Thesis presents a guide to investing in REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) with Dennis Mitchell of the Sentry REIT fund. Some interesting reasons for investing in REITs, even if you own your own house.
- Landlord Rescue has some great suggestions to lower your property value. Just because your building has some problems, doesn’t mean you have to tell the world about it.
- Canadian Personal Finance Blog reports that the value of all the residential mortgages in Canada is now over $1 Trillion! I think the key stat is that mortgage arrears rate is only 0.42% which is lower than it was in the 1990’s.
- Money Smarts Blog commented on the recent CREA agreement to allow MLS listing for house sellers without a commissioned agent.
- Bigger Pockets has 5 steps to holding a mortgage inside your RRSP. Interesting post, but it seems to be missing some warnings about the high fees that are involved.
- SVB from Digerati Life bought a house in a short-sale. Can you guess which country this happened in? SVB has bought and sold several homes before, so she knew what to expect. Short-sale homes have their own difficulties however.
- Landlord Rescue wonders about VIP tenants.
3 replies on “Canadian Real Estate Blog Carnaval #3”
Thanks for including us, Mike.
Thanks for the shout out about my Bigger Pockets post.
Not sure what high fees you are referring to with regards to lending money from your RRSP as a mortgage. As a borrower of the funds we paid the fees on behalf of our lender(s). There are definitely quite a few fees involved as the borrower but as the lender there were very few fees if you negotiate with your borrower for them to pay those fees. For example, there was a mortgage set up and discharge fee and monthly account admin fees. They only add up to about $350 over about 2 years and typically the borrower will pay this. There are also legal fees to set up a mortgage, but again, the borrower will pay this. They should be less than $700 or so.
As a borrower, this wasn’t cheap money for us. As a lender it’s a SWEEEEETTTT deal in my opinion. They are getting an 11% return on their money secured by an asset with a ton of equity in it, plus we paid all the fees on their behalf. Since I wrote this article from the perspective of the lender I will leave it at that – because obviously the next question is why would a borrower do this?? But I will have to write about that some other day.
Hopefully that helps clarify things a bit for you!!
Thanks again for the shout out!
Julie
Hey Mike,
I forgot to link back ! Thanks for the links…