This story always amazes me for several reasons. 1. It happened to us (and we're realtors). 2. We should have known better (because we're realtors). 3. The home inspector that we used should have known better ('cause he's a freakin' home inspector and he was charging me $400 bucks). 4. You never know what you might find in an old house ('cause it's an old house damn it!).

When we purchased o ...

I thought I would just tell a super-quick story about reno-ing our own house.

After pulling apart the ceiling in the kitchen and finding an incredible amount of mouse droppings, we were trying to figure out how old they were because we knew the previous owner had 8 cats and lived there for 22 years. In my books, that means the mice were too damn scared to ever set foot in the actual house so ...

They should hand out an award for realtors who have to deal with certain nightmare tenants who are simply NOT worth any amount of commission whatsoever. Here's one (two actually) of them.

I was selling a home that had a two bed. basement suite. Nothing unusual about that, I thought to myself as I first opened the door to the suite. My nose recoiled and shrunk back into the base of my skull ...

Interesting, isn't it, when the market slows down a touch and everyone takes one step backward. With all the news exploding out of the US about the housing market, the folks here in Vancouver are certainly more leary of jumping on their latest real estate acquisition. On the one hand, who can blame them. On the other, the last few weeks have proven that the market often dips a bit and then ...

(note: I felt like writing something a little different on a recent trip to New York with my beautiful wife).

I'm cool. I'm definitely cool. Maybe not on a day to day basis like I'd love…but this morning I'm cool. I don't even know if the word 'cool' is cool anymore but if it is, I'm it. Max is cool too. Truthfully, Max is way cooler than I am. Maxi is, dare I say, 'uber-cool'. It ...

If people ever wondered what it must be like to run dozens of open houses and the literally thousands of people that a realtor meets in a year, this story should satisfy your curiosity.

A slight play on the movie title though the virgin in question was not 40 years old. This story was told to me through a realtor who didn't have time to write it down but desperately wanted me to post it (I ...

One of the great things about being able to follow the market daily is that we (realtors) can view general numbers like new listings, sold listings and price reductions and can successfully approximate the current market. As an example, today we had 55 new listings, 50 solds and 36 price reductions.

From this I can see that we are still having almost as many solds as new listings, which me ...

Well, it's happened twice today. I warned my clients that their offer was far too low for this market but they just don't listen. Too many courses by Carleton Sheets or something like that, I don't know, but I'm amazed how many people think that their lowball offers will be countered. Now, I'm not talking about ten or twenty thousand off of a price but much, much more. Only serious lowbal ...

Well, it's happened twice today. I warned my clients that their offer was far too low for this market but they just don't listen. Too many courses by Carleton Sheets or something like that, I don't know, but I'm amazed how many people think that their lowball offers will be countered. Now, I'm not talking about ten or twenty thousand off of a price but much, much more. Only serious lowbal ...