Intro
At the age of 43, I bought my first home here in Montreal. It’s a modest home, a lovely ground floor that was completely renovated , with two smaller bedrooms upstairs. I moved from Winnipeg to Montreal in 2015, and from 2015 to 2022, lived in 4 different rentals, 3 out of 4 were apartments , one was the upstairs of an older house. In May of 2022, I decided to buy my first house, here’s a blog post from that time. The house was purchased for $500k CDN in May 2022
I’ve really enjoyed home ownership, not having to deal with noise from adjacent neighbors to the left or right, or up and down, privacy and just the over-all experience of owning a house is definitely for me
However, when I bought the house, my lifestyle was different.
- I didn’t have a car, so, didn’t care that the house didn’t have a garage or car-port
- I was not into DIY at all, so didn’t care that the house did not have a work area / unfurnished basement for such activities or storage of DIY tools
- I was doing the bare minimum for exercise with my home gym gear, so was ok to have limited space across my 3 bedrooms for sad gear
Fast forward to 2025, things have changed
- I’ve got a lovely 2018 BMW X3 M40i that is protected in the winter by a tempo (temp winter car shelter)
- I love DIY, and tons of tools that are spread out across the house
- I started on TRT, so, my home gym equipment is expanding
As such, I’ve out-grown my first house in 3 years. So, I’m selling it, to move into a rental for a period of 1-2 years to save for a very similar house, but that includes a fully accessible basement and small(ish) garage for my car and tools
Rental hunting
As long as I can remember, I’ve been great at repetitive process, where others will do one test drive or view one rental, i’ll hit 10x that NO PROBLEM 😆
In 2021, I did 29 test drives for my first new (used) car in 10 years. In 2024, I briefly considered a move back to Winnipeg to buy a home there, so visited 31 homes posted for sale. My rental search was similar, and went like this
Monday Feb 24, 2025: [1 visit]: Terrabonne, Quebec (North Shore)
Wed Feb 26, 2025: [1 visit]: Boisbriand, Quebec (North shore)
Sat March 1, 2025: [1 visit]: L’Assomption, Quebec (off-island suburb of Montreal)
Sun March 2, 2025: [2 visits]: South shore, north shore
Sat March 8, 2025: [1 visits]: Saint-Constant, Quebec (South shore)
Sunday March 9, 2025: [3 visits]: South shore, Montreal island, Laval
April 2025: [3 visits]: Montreal north east, Deux-Montagnes, St-Catherine, Quebec
I did 12 visits total. I visited a mix of regular apartments, split level duplex units and one side-by-side townhouse
The side-by-side townhouse felt like the best fit coming from the fully detached house that I’m selling. That town-house was in Laval which is a city of about 400k , it’s north of Montreal.
The original pix from the FaceBook ad are shown below. What is not shown, the heated attached garage. I’ll have room for my car, as well as other items, which is very exciting. For whatever reason, functional garages in Montreal are very rare. There are 2 full sized bedrooms that are on the upper level, and one smaller one on the basement level where garage access is provided. As I’ve been work from home since 2013, i always need the second bedroom for my office / computer stuff, the third bedroom is for home workout gear. And so, this Laval rental is ideal for me
I had one buyer lined up for my house in Mid-march 2025, but the buyer backed out towards the end of the process. I advised the Laval renter, and advised them we would have to wait to sign lease for the July 1, 2025 rental start date
The house was re-listed at a higher price and I started doing visits with my realtor again, we did about 10 visits from March to April, until a small bidding war occurred towards the end of April. I was able to get $10k over-asking as a result of the bidding war. This isn’t the WILD times of home sales in Canada during the dreaded covid-era, where people were bidding 100k over-asking, but I’m happy with the profit 🙂
With the sale finalized, I went back to the Laval renter to advise them I was ready to sign 🙂
Lessons learned / take-aways
Profit: Buying and selling a home in a short-period of time can be result in a situation where end up with no profit , or even owning money once you factor in closing costs: the 5% realtor fee, moving costs, notary, or doing repairs prior to sale. I used a excel sheet to track this and guide me along the way. Here were my column headers (shown top to bottom for readability)
Closing price Realtor fee @ 5%
Taxes on realtor fee
Total realtor fees
Mortgage balance as of [date]
Notary fee
Months before closing (monthly equity contribution)
Final profit
You can add/remove/adjust as required
Don’t be obsessed with profit: Like it or not , the Canadian economy runs on buying / selling / building and upgrading of properties. This means there’s a lot of money to made potentially, even if you just hold on to your home for a few years.
However, there is an going debate on the quality of investment that home ownership is. The following video covers the finer points
There is growing evidence that the Canadian housing bubble has already started to deflate. My favorite CDN YT channel covers this topic in detail. TL;DR, it might be a smarter use of your money to buy a modest home and use the money saved to invest in crpyto/stocks/etc
Be patient: You’re at the mercy of the market and other than cleaning the house and making it presentable, you really just have to wait for the home to sell. I had about 30 home viewings from late Feb to April when I got the accepted offer. Good timing, I happened to make some changes to my sleep and exercise in late January 2025, so, I was in a good over-all mental state to deal with the anxiety of selling the house
Thanks for reading 🙂
Owen in Montreal
Owen Reynolds Personal blog 