The housing market doesn’t come to a standstill during the holidays. In fact, we’ve found that December is actually a great month to sell your home. Although, selling your home through the holiday season can come with a few additional things you should consider. In addition to all of the regular things you need to do to prepare your home to sell quickly, like cleaning, depersonalizing and decluttering, you will also need to consider whether or not to decorate for the holiday season.

We think that the holidays are a perfect time to showcase the warmth and character of your home to prospective buyers. We don't think that you need to avoid decorating altogether, but that you should follow some simple tips to ensure your house looks it’s best for prospective buyers.

Here are some tips for decorating for the holidays when you are preparing to sell:

Less is More

Follow the “less is more” theory when it comes to decorating this season. Too many decorations can be ...

Revisiting Fixed Vs. Variable Mortgages

It’s the classic rate decision many mortgage shoppers are faced with. And it’s only been made more complicated since the start of the pandemic. Towards the latter half of 2019, variable rates were flying off the shelves with rates as low as prime – 1%. A lot has changed since then.

In March, fears over the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown forced most banks and other mortgage lenders to cut their fixed rates from 3.95% to 2.45% within the span of just one month. At the same time, variable-rate discounts were scaled back to just prime – 0.15% to 0.25%. By the summer fixed rates were setting historic lows. That led to a dramatic shift in mortgage selection by borrowers.

Why the shift in mortgage preference?

First, the fixed rate mortgage is among the most competitive mortgage products on the market. And many believe variable rates have no more room to fall, given that the Bank of Canada’s overnight target rate...

With the cooler temperatures outside, you would normally expect to see the real estate market cool off...but that is not what we saw this past month.

In October we saw 430 home sales, which is a super high number for this time of year. This is actually the same number of sales we saw in September.

Historically at this time of year, things begin to wind down, social activities begin, and the market starts to cool off. For example, in October of 2019, we only saw 307 home sales. So that means for this October we are up 41.5% in homes sales compared to last year.

We commonly hear from clients that they think they should wait until spring to get their home on the market...but we want to show you why we think December is actually a great month to sell your home.

To prove our point, we wanted to collect some historical, end of the year data...and after digging around a bit, we found a trend that we had to share.

We went back a few years, and decided to look at sales to listings ratios. Sales to...