First and foremost: I recognize the irony or as some of you will suggest, the downright hypocrisy of me compiling a list of people from whom you shouldn’t solicit real estate advice, given that I provide real estate advice for a living!
But hopefully many of you will realize that today’s post is supposed to be fun.
If you’re a financial planner, or you’re currently pressuring your daughter-in-law to move to the boonies, then maybe you’ll have a tough time finding the humour.
But when all is said and done, I invite you to add or subtract from this list, however you see fit.
So without further adieu/adooo….
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10) Some random guy’s blog.
Wait….but I’m a random guy with a blog! Does that mean you shouldn’t listen to me?
On the whole, I would say “no,” you shouldn’t.
I’m proving a point here in starting today’s list of people “you shouldn’t listen to” that it’s probably unfair for me to suggest the following nine people or entities shouldn’t be trusted, but that I should.
There’s no shortage of real estate opinions out there and the internet holds many of them and hosts their respective authors.
Should you believe everything you read?
Should you trust the word of a random real estate broker whom you just found online?
No. Not on its own.
Most of my readers have been digesting TRB content for years and it takes time to build trust. At the same time, I’ve been told that some people “hate-read” what I write, which initially upset me until a younger person said, “No, you want that! A good hate-read draws just as much if not more passion than somebody who likes what you read!”
So if this happens to be your very first time reading TRB, then take everything with a grain of salt because everybody in this city has an opinion on real estate, and you need to understand who’s talking, what they’re saying, what their motivations are, and what level of experience (or what business…) they have providing advice.
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9) BlogTO
It took a while before I was ready to share my real opinions on BlogTO.
I try desperately not to slag individual newspaper or media outlets, and I try (perhaps unsuccessfully…) not to generalize.
But after a couple of years, I finally gave up and told my readers what I really think about BlogTO:
It’s a publication that caters to broke and angry Generation-Z members.
Every single real estate headline they publish is about how the sky is falling and only the world’s greatest fool would ever buy a property.
This culminated in a blog post I wrote on May 29th, 2023:
Monday Morning Quarterback: The “National Enquirer” Of Real Estate News
That’s right, I compared BlogTO to a publication that literally writes phony articles as a form of entertainment, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s what they do.
The outlet seems to have hired food critics and photographers to be their real estate “experts,” so what more is there to say?
Every headline looks like this:
Or like this:
Or like this:
That headline is a banger!
Like I said: catering to broke and angry Gen-Z’ers, and what’s more awful, appalling, unfair, and in need of change (or taxation?) than parents giving their own money to their own children! GASP!
If you’re looking for negativity, fear, and catastrophe at every turn, this is the place to go.
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8) Any real estate agent saying anything on Tik Tok.
You know the expression, “Hate the game, not the player?”
Well, in this case, I hate the medium of communication, and I’m going to say something unpopular here: real estate opinions provided on TikTok are less likely to be good.
Once upon a time, that was me. I had a blog. People would say the same thing.
“What the heck is a bloog?” they would ask. “Who is this kid saying all these things about real estate in an open forum like this?”
The long-time readers (and I mean loooooong…) might remember the flak I took in 2007 and 2008 for having the audacity to opine openly about real estate. It simply had never been done before, and the old guard of real estate did not like it.
So am I now a hypocrite for saying that you should be skeptical of real estate commentary found on a short-form video hosting service owned by a Chinese internet company, with over two billion downloads?
Yes.
But it doesn’t make it any less true…
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7) Your co-worker who lives outside the city and commutes.
People like what they like.
People like what they have.
People like what they have and they want you to like it too!
Toronto real estate has essentially become a sport in the past twenty years, and in sports, there are winners, losers, and people who get hurt. So it’s not unfair for me to say that there are some people out there who might act as though they dislike something they can’t have, or in this case, afford.
Your co-worker who lives outside the city is always telling you how amazing it is, how much she loves it, why she’s sooooo glad she lives there, and of course, why you should live there too.
But at the risk of being a jerk, or simply pointing out what many of you might already be thinking, do you think that if your co-worker had double the budget, she would have simply purchased a home in Toronto?
When I worked at Celestica during my infamous 2001-2002 internship, most of my department (Procurement Cost Engineering) lived in Durham Region. I would offer that half of them freely admitted, “I can’t afford to buy in Toronto,” but the other half consistently talked about how much better it was in Ajax, Whitby, Pickering, Oshawa, or in the case of one guy – Port Hope.
Perhaps coming as no surprise, the number-one topic of conversation in that department during my time there was traffic.
Our first office was on Wynford Drive and overlooked the Don Valley Parkway. I sat by the window and every day from 3pm onward, people would walk up to my desk and peer down at the DVP.
“Good flow today,” a colleague would observe while gazing upon the traffic below. Then he would look at his watch, grit his teeth, and consider how much more time until he left for the night.
Look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with living outside the city. In many cases, I’m insanely jealous of those who do!
But a lot of your colleagues are going to tell you to move out where they live, simply because they happen to live there…
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6) Your best friend who lives “the simple life.”
Do you ever get suckered into the clickbait articles about people that live in vans?
I certainly do.
I love to look at where anybody and everybody live, but it’s those bohemian folks who live in a van, cook canned beans with a lighter, “work” two hours per day on their laptop, and surf until the sun goes down that really have me wondering about just how real all this is.
Real is one thing.
But for how long a person can actually do that is another.
Not everybody plans their life in advance. Some people don’t look past tomorrow.
But you all have that one friend who lives the simplest life possible, doesn’t care about tomorrow, and most importantly, doesn’t care about all things that other people care about.
Rent? Savings? Down payment? Mortgage?
Psssh!
Your simple-life friend tells you to “Live for today” and not worry about where you’re going to live in ten years!
You want to own a three-bedroom house and you’re hoping for a powder room and a master ensuite bathroom?
Psssh!
Your simple-life friend tells you nobody “needs” more than one bathroom, and a “want” like that is gluttonous, greedy, and takes your focus away from the empire of your true self and all that you should strive to achieve in the universe.
You got promoted at work? You invested well? Your husband or wife comes from financial means? You’re buying a nice home?
Psssh!
Your simple-life friend tells you, “Remember where you came from,” as though to move up in the world means you’re going in the opposite direction.
Your friend who lives the simple life might have something in common with your co-worker who wants you to move to the boonies, in that both of them, sorry to say, could be a little bit envious.
Envy is a theme in all this. And envy is ever-present in Toronto…
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5) Your boss.
This is a classic!
I can’t tell you how many times a buyer client has told me something to the effect of, “My boss says that Leaside is nice, but Moore Park is better.”
Yeah?
And your boss knows that the average home in Moore Park is double what Leaside costs?
Clients tell me all the time, “I really like the Junction Triangle, but my boss lives steps to Roncesvalles.”
Okay.
But is your boss helping with the down payment?
I’m always amazed by the “bosses” who tell their employees or younger people who work under them where they should plant roots at, say, 32-years-old, when the “boss” is a man in his mid-fifties.
Does the boss remember where he bought his first home? And how much did it cost then?
I would like to think that the “boss” is simply wanting more for his or her underlings, but it always seems to me that the boss complicates the search by encouraging the buyer to look for something that doesn’t exist in their price point.
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4) Anybody who uses the term, “You know what you should do?”
My mother will love this one.
There’s a certain somebody in our extended family that loves to start sentences with, “You know what you should do?”
It almost never comes from a good place.
It seems as though the person saying it is either:
a) Wanting my mother to work against her own best interests.
b) Essentially saying what she would do if she were my mother.
Do you see what I mean?
There’s something to be said for those who make a habit of always telling others what they should do.
I’ve written on this blog many times over the years that “should” is one of my least favourite words, especially as it’s used in a political context, or in conjunction with entitlement.
“Should” is more often associated with fantasy than reality these days, and many people use “should” to live vicariously through others.
Your friend, family member, colleague, or sister’s boyfriend who “shoulds” you to death each and every time the topic of real estate arises is not the person you should be taking advice from.
Damn. I said “should”…
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3) Your in-laws.
Folks, there’s simply no more biased source of real estate opinions than your in-laws.
It’s not even close.
Your in-laws are going to push their own agenda, every step of the way, but you have to be careful because they’re not always overt about it.
They didn’t want you to buy that 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom house in Leslieville even though it was detached, had legal parking, and was steps from the dog park? Well no kidding! It’s because they want you to buy the poorly-located, less sexy, four-bedroom house because it’s far more conducive to having children!
Buying a 2-bedroom house will simply delay the arrival of those grandchildren, dummy! And that’s why they don’t like it.
If you ever start to wonder why your in-laws are sending you articles on the most-undervalued areas of the Golden Horseshoe, the highest rates of appreciation, the lowest rates of crime, and the highest percentage of students that graduate post-secondary school, and ALL of the articles point to Aurora, well, it’s because your in-laws live in Aurora, dummy!
Hey, did you hear about that person who got killed near that house you’re looking at?
No, you didn’t hear about it? Or no, it didn’t happen?
Doesn’t matter, because, um, also, uh, did you see that recent survey on the correlation between happiness and living in Keswick?
When your in-laws start to say things like, “There’s no room to put a bench near the front door, and we all know that people like to sit down to put their shoes on before they leave the house,” it’s simply an opening salvo in their pre-orchestrated attack against the property that you like.
Your in-laws are not promoting your best interests.
They’re promoting theirs.
Ah, but they’re also going to put their son or daughter’s interests ahead of yours, so be prepared to watch your husband forced to choose between his wife and his mother.
Isn’t buying a home fun?
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2) Your financial planner.
I know I’m going to take some heat for this one.
Those among you who are financial planners, I’m not talking about all of you. Just some of you, based on my experience.
In fairness, by the time I’m done writing this section, you can easily reply, “David, you’re on the opposite side of the coin here,” and that’s true. But hear me out first.
Over the years, I have run into a few financial planners who told their clients, inexplicably, not to buy real estate and I felt that it was because the clients would be removing cash from their investment portfolios.
I told one such story on my blog years ago, but for the life of me, I can’t find it.
Consider the financial planner who runs a $1,000,000 portfolio and derives revenue from making trades within that portfolio as well as for performance. Anybody in wealth management will tell you that there are many compensation models in the industry, but for those financial planners who basically day-trade stocks within a portfolio and make money on every hit, it goes without saying that withdrawing $700,000 from a $1,000,000 portfolio would reduce the income potential for that financial planner.
Note that I distinguish between “wealth manager” and “financial planner.”
The former is available to high net-worth individuals and, in my experience, the latter is often the ground-level, over-the-counter gal at the neighbourhood bank.
It’s that individual whose motivations I don’t trust.
Call me out, tell me I’m motivated to always tell my clients to buy and sell, and that’s fine. I see the comparison.
But how many times have I heard that the bank teller told my client not to buy real estate? Or that renting forever is the better play? Or “now isn’t a good time to take money out of the stock market?”
I’ve seen way too many questionable moves in this space to not be jaded.
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1) Your parents.
Man, I really hope my parents aren’t reading this.
To be fair though, my mother was highly supportive of my idea to purchase my first condo. In fact, the minute that I walked into the very first condo that I ever saw, she said, “I love it! This is perfect! You should buy it!”
That was a ground-floor unit at Balliol and Mount Pleasant, one block from my old office on Merton Street, and it would have been a terrible decision! Especially considering I moved to King Street East a year later and that shaped the next fifteen years of my life.
The problem with “advice from parents” is that often, both on a macro level and a micro level,” it can be shaped by a world that no longer exists.
Consider the buyer who wants to offer on a house where there’s an “offer date” because it’s under-priced by $300,000. Now, consider the father who says:
“When mum and I bought our house back in 1983, we offered them 80% of the list price and included all the furniture. Be aggressive, son! Lowball these folks and make ’em squirm!”
This isn’t creative writing here, folks. I’m speaking from experience!
Earlier in my career, I worked with a lot of buyers in their 20’s and this was what I was always up against.
Now I’m 44-years-old and I’m probably closer to being the “dad you shouldn’t listen to” than the “buyer who shouldn’t listen to his parents.”
Your in-laws, your financial planner, your co-worker who lives outside the city, your simple-life friend, that annoying person who always tells you what you “should” do are all exceptionally biased in terms of their real estate opinions, and so are your parents. But your parents take this one step further because:
They really want you to look up to them.
They want desperately to be right about something.
They want you to value their opinion, and the problem is, the contents of that opinion need not matter! So long as you agree with them, they’ll tell you A, B, C, or D. They just want you to say, “Wow, that’s awesome. You’re totally right, thanks Dad.”
Now, just imagine if you said, “I couldn’t have done this without you.” They would do or say anything to hear that.
Even when your parents are being annoying, it’s coming from a good place.
Remember when you saw that gorgeous 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom house in Beaconsfield Village, steps to the coffee shop?
What was it that your mom said?
“What kind of a house only has two bedrooms?”
And what did you say back?
“The kind of house I can afford, mom. And in Toronto, that’s $1,100,000.”
That should have been the end of it there, but your mom added, “A house with two bedrooms isn’t a house. It’s like a house-condo. Or a townhouse. But a real house has four bedrooms. That’s what you grew up in.”
Sure.
Then you added, “That may be true, mom, but to get a four bedroom house I would need another million dollars. Are you going to give me a million dollars?”
Fair question, and she walked right into it. Except she responded, “Oh, don’t be silly. If you’re going to be like that, Dad and I will just leave.”
But you didn’t even ask them to come in the first place! They heard from your brother that you were going to see the house and they just invited themselves!
Ugh, parents.
But believe it or not, they just want what’s best for you. We all realize that eventually, just at different points in our lives, and few of us realize it when they spend a half hour telling us stuff about the house, the real estate market, or the City of Toronto that:
a) We already know.
b) Is completely incorrect.
c) We told them to begin with.
4) Makes absolutely, positively, zero sense.
Ah, parents!
Alright, folks.
Add to the list. Subtract from the list. Rearrange the list.
Or better yet, tell the rest of us a story…
