In recent years we have heard of many instances of builders demanding extra money from the purchases of pre-construction residential properties, in many cases the options were to pay thousands of dollars or to terminate the contract. This may not be that easy going forward, in the case of Dhaliwal v Midland homes the judge recently ruled that the builder must honour the original purchase price and is not entitled to any additional funds. In summary Dhaliwal’s purchased a... [read more]

A buyer of a condominium was hit with a $34,000 special assessment shortly after purchasing a condominium and the judge ruled the buyer is exempt from paying his share because the possibly of the special assessment wasn’t properly disclosed in the status certificate.   The case of Adam Bruce v Waterloo North Condominium Corporation No. 26, they buyer Adam Bruce purchased a condominium in 2021. The buyer received the status certificate package including the status certificate... [read more]

GTA’s municipalities short-term rental rules and regulations. Short term rentals have been a hot topic for few years, highly debated on all levels of governments given our housing crisis, with the recent introduction of the federal government crackdown on illegal short term rentals starting January 1, 2024, we thought it would be a good idea to put together a list of rules and regulations by municipalities in the GTA region. The enforcement of the rules has always been very... [read more]

  Finding a rental property in today’s market of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) can be challenging. The rental market is very HOT! Vacancy rates are at all time low (around 1%) meaning that landlords (property owners) have their pick of who they want to rent to (and for what price). The housing market affects the rental rates. The more landlords pay for the property, the higher their mortgage, the higher the rent. And as it becomes harder to buy a home, with low market... [read more]

I have already written about condo project cancellations and there have been a number of them in the last few years. Every time a unit is purchased a deposit is made, are these funds safe? There are number of safeguards in place to protect the buyers and their deposits. Tarion offers condo deposit protection up to $20,000, but as we know most deposits would exceed this amount by a large margin. The developer of the new condominium project must be Tarion registered and must enter into... [read more]