A State of the Union

We listed our first of the year today – a sweet three-bedroom townhome on lower Charles St. You can read about it here (and that’s most definitely not it pictured above; the above is merely a mood piece, something that I hope sets the shaggy style and tone I’m after).

I’m happy to say that there will be quite a few more listings in the Inner Harbour neighbourhood in the coming weeks. I live on Charles St myself, and Cheri has a house on Patrick, and so these close-to-home listings feel particularly precious. And around month’s end we’ll have a semi-detached brick home out on Davis Drive too. We’re up and running again, in other words.

There will be plenty of other listings. Well maybe plenty isn’t exactly the right word. This year threatens low inventory levels again, which means more competition and rising prices. But there will be houses, good ones, I swear, and we’re pleased and grateful to be bringing them to you. 

The new year is a stressful time for everyone. Whatever your business, whatever your situation. In real estate it affects buyers, sellers, and realtors equally. Will it resemble last year is what I wonder for myself, a year when things didn’t really get going for us until the spring, but then were hectic right through December? Or will it be a more evenly spaced workload? There really is no way of telling. It’ll be a delight and a horror, that’s my prediction. An exercise in joy and fulfillment some days, and an MMA endurance bout on others. And we’re good with that. Lucky is what I always claim to feel because it’s true.

It’s not where I expected to end up, though, is it? Selling houses on the edge of a Great Lake? Predict that future to 15-year-old me back in Garsington, a village just outside Oxford in the late 1970s, up in his room listening to Queen and The Clash and Bowie, and I’d have told you to take a hike, albeit with a much thicker accent and a more vivid vocabulary. But I doubt many of us are where we expected to be, and even fewer of us would change much about our situation.

I’d change some things about real estate. I’m not a fan of some of the ways multiple offers are dealt with; some days it feels more like Westworld than Kingston out there. It’s a frustrating, opaque bidding process that seems to satisfy no one, save the odd lucky property owner who makes out like a bandit.

There are changes afoot in the neighbourhood too. The Catholic charity St Vincent de Paul Society bought the old Loblaws property at Bagot and Charles, and while I believe it’s a better location for the services they provide than the old place on Stephen St was, and it’s certainly better than them being out in some remote unwalkable industrial park, it does makes the future more complicated for this part of the Inner Harbour. Pretending otherwise isn’t helpful. The nearly orgasmic yelps of delight that erupted at the news came mostly from those who just happen to live a dozen blocks away, where the effects will be minimal.

There are new townhomes slated for the middle of Kingscourt, all with secondary suites (and some with tertiary suites too), and a few more down next to the lovely old broom factory building. Jay Patry will likely have his way with the old tannery grounds at some point, probably about the same time Homestead breaks ground down near the bottom of Queen St. You won’t recognize the joint a decade from now. And I don’t necessarily mean that as a criticism. It’s just that we’re at a new turning point, I think. There are gears being changed.

All of which makes this a vividly interesting time to be living where we live. Thoughts on gentrification are bandied about in the coffee shops more often than warm scones. It’s complicated out there right now - thrilling and sad, fascinating and disappointing in equal measures. Most of the changes are long-term, still set out on the horizon like a warm gathering fog. But there are those among us who have already made their decisions based on what they see, and those people are already plotting their way in and their way out. One or more of them call us most weeks

Generally speaking, looking at this point for bigger patterns in those migrations, real estate murmurations set against the blue sky over the Cataraqui River, is a mug’s game. We’re still standing too close to the screen. But perhaps in the coming months a sense of scale and perspective will evolve, and when that happens we’ll write again.