2019: The Year of the First Time Home Buyer

This morning was the 2018 awards ceremony for outstanding achievement in 2018 and The Baker Group is very proud to have been awarded the emerald award and while this blog post is definitely about shameless self-promotion, it is decidedly not about that beautiful plaque.

During the ceremony, Royal LePage President, Phil Soper said something really important we had to share with you all.

He said we’re anticipating something really exciting in 2019 because of some basic economic conditions in Canada which should make this the year of the first time home buyer.

Right now we have record-low interest and unemployment numbers which, in a typical setting, would lead to a runaway housing market. Given that we’ve already gotten that out of our system in 2016-17, the market is instead rather stable and consumer confidence is returning. Basically, people have jobs, and borrowed money is cheap.

There’s another facet to this which will be of particular interest to my fellow millennials. Nearly 70% of millennials intend to buy a home in the next 5 years. Over 60% of them in the next year. And of those, 61% would consider relocating in order to make it happen. That’s how serious we are about home ownership - millennials are willing to leave behind jobs, social circles, and a good chunk of their lives, in order to be in a place where home ownership is a possibility for them.

If you count yourself among this cohort, (and based on the conversations we’ve had with many of you lately, I’d say that’s likely), We need to talk. I’ve been working with people buying in markets more affordable than Toronto, Peel, and Dufferin. I have seen the difficulties and helped people overcome them. There are a handful of basic dead-simple things you can be doing right now that will put you in a substantially better position when you’re ready to buy. It might be the difference between moving an hour away and moving 25 minutes away. There are ways to cut your monthly costs in half, there are grants, rebates, all kinds of programs designed to get young people into their own homes.

So I took the most important, most effective of these tips and put them into a short e-book. It’s a 15 minute read with lots of pictures for those of you whose attention span is as short as mine. You can find the e-book here or send us a message for your hard copy.