Today was the day. May St,'s Victorian houses are coming down to make way for the new Champlain Bridge. Le Messager has photos and some details.
Monday, October 26, 2015
The Wrecking Ball Swings on May Street.
Today was the day. May St,'s Victorian houses are coming down to make way for the new Champlain Bridge. Le Messager has photos and some details.
Monday, October 5, 2015
The Mystery of Upstairs Neighbors Solved
Your upstairs neighbors are driving you mad? It might be time to move.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
A House for You Where Mile End and Plateau Merge. Explosions of Creativity and Wow Ensue!
Bye-bye condo fees. Hello your own sweet two-storey home in a very cool neighborhood. 5556-5558 Casgrain is a former duplex converted into a 2- or 3-bedroom with two full baths.It features a front living room with a passage to the dining room. A full bathroom with shower separates the two. There's a large open kitchen with concrete-topped counter and breakfast bar. The kitchen has windows on two sides for maximum light.
The dining room is an equally bright and inviting space and is steps away from the back door that leads to a spacious wooden deck with seating for at least eight, planters of flowers, vines and trees. Perfect for summer lounging and dining. There's protected bike storage and up a ladder, a wee playhouse for a kid or maybe the neighborhood raccoon.
Upstairs you will find a master bedroom at the front of the house. There are no bedroom closets, as is often the case with places built around about the turn of the 20th century. To compensate, the current occupants set up a dressing area in a corner at the top of the stairs. There's an oversized armoire and a chest of drawers. The armoire is staying for the next owner.
There's a second full bath with a deep tub. The guest room is a quirky space with a window onto the porch and another onto the bathroom. The office was once a closed third bedroom with a door to a small porch. It would be easy to put the wall back up, if a third bedroom is necessary.
Twenty years ago the area south of Mont-Royal Ave between Papineau and Drolet was the be-all and the end-all of Plateau living. That's where the fashionable people of the late 1980s dug in and that's where prices quickly climbed beyond the reach of ordinary buyers.
For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Young, creative types began to migrate north to the ungentrified industrial area just east of St-Laurent, between Maguire and the CP tracks. Ubisoft, the French video game maker, led the parade by setting up shop in the Peck building at the corner of St-Laurent and St-Viateur.
That influx of young creative types was just the encouragement the neighborhood needed. Soon enough, there was an explosion of cafés and boutiques. The old garment factories of de Gaspe Ave. and Casgrain St. became hives for start-ups making everything from jams to custom furniture.
Today, this as yet unnamed corner of Mile End, is where it is at creatively. Le Champ des Possibles, a community-created biodiversity park on former CP Rail land, perfectly exemplifies the area's spirit. It has given birth to Le Marché des Possibles, an outdoor summer market with artisanal goods, fresh produce and free cultural programming.(Just up the street from 5556 Casgrain). Pop Montreal, the annual indie music fest, hosts shows, symposia, screenings and art exhibits all over the area throughout the year. Let's not forget Montreal Roller Derby, headquartered in the St-Louis Arena! Let's not forget Bain St-Michel, once the area's community bathhouse/swimming pool and now an art and theatre space.
La Panthère Verte for the vegans, Magpie for the old-school 'zza, and Café District for the java. None of it is more than a two-minute walk from your front door. And if you don't mind crossing the Main, the best bagels in Montreal.
The asking price for 5556 Casgrain is $523,000. The owner has lived in the house for five years and has put good money into the bricks, the chimney, ventilation and the crawl space.The roof was redone in 2010.
All in all, a pretty sweet place, for a couple, family or a singleton looking for a house of their own.
You can see the complete listing here.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Suicide and Other Violent Deaths Must Be Declared
Patrick Lagacé, one of La Presse's liveliest columnists, recently had a piece about a West Island couple who were having trouble selling their family home. You can read it here.
In an unimaginable turn of events, their 25-year-old son had committed suicide in the home three years before. They had many visits, but potential buyers walked away when they learned of the unnatural death.
Quebec is the only jurisdiction in North America where vendors are obliged to disclose when a suicide has taken place in a property. It has been a standard question on the vendor's declaration since 2012.
In Lagacé's opinion this requirement is ridiculous. He hammers away at the fact that ghosts aren't real and don't haunt houses. He does not see why a grieving family should be doubly victimized, first by suicide and again by having their home stigmatized.
The courts disagree and have come down heavily on vendors and brokers who try to whitewash this information.
In 2013, a Superior Court judge cancelled the sale of a $275,000 home and ordered that the vendor pay the buyers $15,000 in moral damages and $23,000 in expenses after the vendor went out of his way to hide a double suicide in the the home he sold them.
The guilty vendor had picked the house up cheap from the estate of the double-suicide couple. He then tried two different listing brokers, both of whom told him the suicide had to be disclosed, before selling the property himself on Du Proprio. He told the buyers that with Du Proprio there was no such thing as a vendor's declaration. (An agent would have told them differently but hey, they thought they were saving money by cutting out the agent. Pffft!)
It did not take long for the buyers to hear about the double suicide from a neighbor. They were devastated. Instead of a first home in which to start their family, they were saddled with a place notorious among the neighbors and wreathed in sadness. They never even moved in.
Lagacé also pointed to the case of a South Shore real estate agent fined $2,000 after she "minimized" the importance of disclosing such information to a prospective buyer. The home in question might have been the scene of a violent death some 40 years before. It was the home where Quebec Justice Minister Pierre Laporte was held hostage during the October Crisis. Laporte was killed by his FLQ kidnappers but it has never been established whether he was killed in the house.
Peu importe, the disclosure form also covers violent death and asks whether the vendor is aware of any factors related to the property that might be likely to reduce its value, restrict its use, reduce the revenues it generates or increases the expenses associated with with operating it. (It isn't just about violent death. You would also have to disclose if the house had ever been a brothel, a motorcycle clubhouse, a gambling den...)
To the La Presse columnist the disclosure rule is ridiculous. He falls back on the very logical assertion that "There's no such thing as ghosts." Case closed.
If only we were Spock-like creatures ruled entirely by logic...
I've twice had to deal with properties touched by suicide. It is true that selling such a home can be a tricky thing requiring tact, empathy and forthrightness.
Columnist Lagacé can assert that ghosts don't exist all he wants. I'm here to tell you firsthand that some people care very much whether there has been a violent or unnatural death in a home.
I sold a home for the estate of a well-regarded professional a few years back. He had lived alone in a nice house in a good neighborhood.Nearly every single person who walked into that house could tell that there was something off about it. There were no outward signs of violence because his death had not been violent. There was a certain sadness that dusted the place.
Each time I disclosed the nature of the vendor's death, people gasped, even took a step back, as though trying to evade the information. I was amazed at how many times I ended up on the sofa, listening to complete strangers share the devastating details of suicides among their own family and friends.
A Vietnamese family, mother and father as well as their adult children, was ready to make an offer but backed out as soon as they heard about the suicide. Death is not necessarily a dealbreaker, the father told me.
"If an person lived a good life and then died in his own bed of old age, that would be an auspicious death," he explained. Suicide was never auspicious.
Ultimately, I sold the house to another immigrant family. The woman with whom I dealt absorbed the news. She did not care much about the suicide. Her cousin had commited suicide in her 20s, she mentioned. She asked whether I thought the kids of the neighborhood would single out her kindergarten-aged son because of it? Would they refuse to come over to play?
I told her that I couldn't imagine they would. Kids aren't like that. With time, the stigma of the house would fade. Instead of being the house where Mr. X killed himself, it would become the house where the Y family lived.
Still, when the Y family does decide to sell, they will have to disclose the suicide, too. I can't imagine that anyone will care in 25 years but what I think and what the law says are two different things.
In an unimaginable turn of events, their 25-year-old son had committed suicide in the home three years before. They had many visits, but potential buyers walked away when they learned of the unnatural death.
Quebec is the only jurisdiction in North America where vendors are obliged to disclose when a suicide has taken place in a property. It has been a standard question on the vendor's declaration since 2012.
In Lagacé's opinion this requirement is ridiculous. He hammers away at the fact that ghosts aren't real and don't haunt houses. He does not see why a grieving family should be doubly victimized, first by suicide and again by having their home stigmatized.
The courts disagree and have come down heavily on vendors and brokers who try to whitewash this information.
In 2013, a Superior Court judge cancelled the sale of a $275,000 home and ordered that the vendor pay the buyers $15,000 in moral damages and $23,000 in expenses after the vendor went out of his way to hide a double suicide in the the home he sold them.
The guilty vendor had picked the house up cheap from the estate of the double-suicide couple. He then tried two different listing brokers, both of whom told him the suicide had to be disclosed, before selling the property himself on Du Proprio. He told the buyers that with Du Proprio there was no such thing as a vendor's declaration. (An agent would have told them differently but hey, they thought they were saving money by cutting out the agent. Pffft!)
It did not take long for the buyers to hear about the double suicide from a neighbor. They were devastated. Instead of a first home in which to start their family, they were saddled with a place notorious among the neighbors and wreathed in sadness. They never even moved in.
Lagacé also pointed to the case of a South Shore real estate agent fined $2,000 after she "minimized" the importance of disclosing such information to a prospective buyer. The home in question might have been the scene of a violent death some 40 years before. It was the home where Quebec Justice Minister Pierre Laporte was held hostage during the October Crisis. Laporte was killed by his FLQ kidnappers but it has never been established whether he was killed in the house.
Peu importe, the disclosure form also covers violent death and asks whether the vendor is aware of any factors related to the property that might be likely to reduce its value, restrict its use, reduce the revenues it generates or increases the expenses associated with with operating it. (It isn't just about violent death. You would also have to disclose if the house had ever been a brothel, a motorcycle clubhouse, a gambling den...)
To the La Presse columnist the disclosure rule is ridiculous. He falls back on the very logical assertion that "There's no such thing as ghosts." Case closed.
If only we were Spock-like creatures ruled entirely by logic...
I've twice had to deal with properties touched by suicide. It is true that selling such a home can be a tricky thing requiring tact, empathy and forthrightness.
Columnist Lagacé can assert that ghosts don't exist all he wants. I'm here to tell you firsthand that some people care very much whether there has been a violent or unnatural death in a home.
I sold a home for the estate of a well-regarded professional a few years back. He had lived alone in a nice house in a good neighborhood.Nearly every single person who walked into that house could tell that there was something off about it. There were no outward signs of violence because his death had not been violent. There was a certain sadness that dusted the place.
Each time I disclosed the nature of the vendor's death, people gasped, even took a step back, as though trying to evade the information. I was amazed at how many times I ended up on the sofa, listening to complete strangers share the devastating details of suicides among their own family and friends.
A Vietnamese family, mother and father as well as their adult children, was ready to make an offer but backed out as soon as they heard about the suicide. Death is not necessarily a dealbreaker, the father told me.
"If an person lived a good life and then died in his own bed of old age, that would be an auspicious death," he explained. Suicide was never auspicious.
Ultimately, I sold the house to another immigrant family. The woman with whom I dealt absorbed the news. She did not care much about the suicide. Her cousin had commited suicide in her 20s, she mentioned. She asked whether I thought the kids of the neighborhood would single out her kindergarten-aged son because of it? Would they refuse to come over to play?
I told her that I couldn't imagine they would. Kids aren't like that. With time, the stigma of the house would fade. Instead of being the house where Mr. X killed himself, it would become the house where the Y family lived.
Still, when the Y family does decide to sell, they will have to disclose the suicide, too. I can't imagine that anyone will care in 25 years but what I think and what the law says are two different things.
IKEA Trolling
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Home + Rental Revenue + Office/Studio = A Mile-Ex Duplex for You
Amy Barratt and I have just listed a pretty special duplex in Mile-Ex (more about that name and neighborhood in a bit.)
7022-7024 Clark St. is a typical turn-of-the-century Montreal duplex. The upper unit, which will be available to the buyer, features three bedrooms, a large living room at the front and a big eat-in kitchen.
The bathroom is large, with a skylight, old-fashioned tub and has washer and dryer hook-ups.
All in all, this is a a big comfortable place with plenty of light and apleasing old soul.
Off the back balcony, the secret world of old Italian vegetable gardens, riotous flowers, trees and low-slung rooftops. A pocket of green in the heart of the city.
Off the back balcony, the secret world of old Italian vegetable gardens, riotous flowers, trees and low-slung rooftops. A pocket of green in the heart of the city.
The downstairs unit is currently rented at $1100 a month. The tenant shares the fenced backyard and has a vegetable garden.
What sets this property apart form others in the neighborhood is the detached two-storey building in the back yard. Probably once used as a shed, this concrete block on slab construction has been converted into a 225-square-foot completely insulated, fully wired and entirely finished studio space. With its original wood floors, new windows and skylights, the space is sunny and inviting. Accessible by a catwalk from the second floor or by an exterior winding staircase from the yard, this haven of creativity is something special.
The ground floor of the studio space is raw - concrete block walls with high ceilings and plenty of potential. It is currently used for storage but has been used as a carpentry shop, ceramic- and paint studios. The space is waiting for you and your projects.
The current owner purchased the place in 2001 and has spent good money on renovations. The main roof and the roof of the studio building were both redone. New skylights were installed. Windows were changed. Bricks have been repointed, plumbing and electrical brought into the 21st century.
The current owner purchased the place in 2001 and has spent good money on renovations. The main roof and the roof of the studio building were both redone. New skylights were installed. Windows were changed. Bricks have been repointed, plumbing and electrical brought into the 21st century.
The last time I wrote about Mile-Ex, a reader nearly took my head off. He insisted that Mile-Ex was a made-up name invented by invading hipsters. Maybe, if so blame La Presse which first publicized the name back in 2010. To some it is and will remain Little Italy, though that name doesn't quite capture the 'hood's adventurous new spirit.
To others, secteur Alexandra-Marconi sounds best. I even like WeLiTa, for West of Little Italy. Call it whatever you will, this is one lively neighborhood, a mix of old industrial buildings that increasingly house film and TV production houses, architects and designers, small manufcaturers and importers. There are early 20th century duplexes and triplexes and a number of new condo developments, either fresh built or sprung from the hulks of long gone factories.
Throw in Jean-Talon market, the nightlife and grocery shopping of the Upper Main and the many cool little restos in the area - I'm looking at you Depanneur Le Pick Up, Dinette Triple Crown, Manitoba, Café Guerrero and drinkeries like Alexanderplatz and the spanking new Brasserie Harricana and you've got the makings of a vibrant and engaging neighborhood.
Asking price $560,000.
Who wants in?
Saturday, January 24, 2015
What Were They Thinking, Sooooey! Edition
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
December Housing Sales Up vs 2012 & 2013
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A total of 2,203 homes were sold in the final month of '14, a 9-per-cent increase over the same month in 2013, which, if we're being honest, was a pretty crappy year for the local housing scene. (I am looking at you Pauline Marois and your trio of ill-behaved frat boys, Drainville, Peladeau and Lisée.)
It is no secret that the housing market took a dive during the Parti Québeois' 18-month chair-warming tenure as government. That took care of the final quarter of 2012, all of 2013 and the first bit of 2014. Happily, sales began to regain equilibrium in the second half of last year.
The North Shore and Laval led the charge, registering an eye-popping 26 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. Sales were up on the island by 8 per cent and 4 per cent on the South Shore.
Somewhat surprisingly, sales of both single-family homes and condominiums rose by 9 per cent and plex sales rose by 10 per cent. This despite an abundance of new and resale condos available. The median home prices remained unchanged at $284,000, while condo prices inched up by two per cent.
The number of active listings also rose December over December by 8 per cent. More choice for everyone!
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