The Collingwood – Blue Mountain Real Estate Blog

For many reasons such as lifestyle, demographics and affordability, condominiums are increasingly becoming the home of choice for many buyers today.  I know that in the last year, I too have shown and sold more condos than any other type of property so I thought a quick review of the statistics would be interesting. In [...]

Are you allowed to rent out your home or cottage to visitors on a short term basis in a residentially zoned area?  The answer is no.  Should you be allowed to?  That appears to be a matter of opinion. The issue is making the news here in the Georgian Triangle over two particular cases: one [...]

When people look at potential homes to buy, they often stand for some time trying to envision how their furniture may fit into the space.  After making a home purchase, I find that almost everyone begins the process of dreaming what their new-to-them home could look like. Today, there are all kinds of sites online [...]

Guest post by Dave Larock If you are a new immigrant to Canada – welcome! As a former world traveller, I know how daunting it can be to get settled in a new country, and if purchasing a new home is high on your list of priorities, today’s post should help familiarize you with what’s [...]

Here is a summary of programs designed to help buyers achieve their goal of homeownership. ONTARIO’S LAND TRANSFER TAX REFUND FOR FIRST-TIME HOMEBUYERS Land Transfer Tax (LTT) is applicable to all transfers of land in Ontario.  First-time homebuyers may be eligible for a refund of all or part of that tax under this program. For [...]

First, Happy New Year.  Hopefully 2011 will kind and gentle to you.  My year has started off with some lucky luck.  It would appear that my predictions for 2010 were pretty well bang on.  Yay! Here we are with a whole new year ahead and the best way to make sense of it is to look back.  [...]

Strangely, I got a personalized and rather chatty email from Rachael at the Ontario Ministry of Revenue about a week ago.  She did provide some good information for consumers about HST and real estate including a link to fact sheet called  “Buying a home? Get the facts on HST.”  Perhaps her message is timely. Below is [...]

This is the final part of this 4-part series Intrawest and Blue Mountain know that in order for the resort to remain vibrant and solvent, they need to keep visitors coming to the resort.  Since Fortress purchased Intrawest, they focused on cutting capital expenditures and reducing operations which did not prove to work. The resort [...]

Part 3 of a 4 part series Arranging financing for the purchase of a condo hotel unit, such as those in the Village at Blue Mountain, is not always as straight forward as buyers might expect.  Since these are commercially zoned units that are principally used for the generation of revenue, many lenders treat them as [...]

Second in a four-part series In my own experience, people who buy condo units in the Village at Blue are looking for one or all of four things: 1.  They want to use and enjoy a unit themselves while using rental revenue to offset expenses and carrying costs 2. They want to be “where it is at’ [...]