The Vince Files

We’ve been looking to move to a bigger home recently and finally we’ve taken the first step: listing our current property. Our property has many things going for it: close to amenities, close to public transit, has an attached garage instead of a parkade, has a relatively low monthly strata fee. I’m confident our place should sell fairly quickly.

Anna found us a realtor who is a friend of a friend. I’ll reveal her name when all transactions are complete. So far, this realtor has been nothing short of great. She’s communicating with us constantly via email especially if she finds a property that we may be interested in. She’s taken the time to arrange viewings of potential properties (some nice, some not so nice, some far, some really far) even into the evenings.

After having done a comparative market analysis, our realtor set a list price on our home that actually took us by surprise; it was higher than we were expecting. But after looking at recent listings and sales in our area for comparable units, it seems our place is priced just right to attract the right amount of attention.

Our realtor has uploaded our listing and pictures to all realtor computer systems (MLS, mlxchange, RealtyLink, etc). Our open house is scheduled for this Sunday.

In parallel to this first step of listing our place, I’m also in contact with a mortgage broker to pre-approve us for a mortgage for our new place. Our new place will most likely be more expensive than the place we have now so it’s in our best interest to know just how much the bank will approve us for so we can stick to houses we can actually afford. Once we receive notice from the broker, it’s off to some serious house hunting we go. Once our place sells, we can make offers without a “subject to sale of purchaser’s property”.