There is one common component to almost all successful real estate searches, whether they're for houses here in Kitchener or luxury condos in Toronto: research. By doing your research you familiarize yourself with the aspects of the real estate transaction and how to manipulate them to your advantage. But before you even get into the transaction phase you need to take a good long look at the city you plan to buy in and decide if it's right for you now and in the future. Having an understanding of the real estate market will help you do that.
Real estate markets are just like any other kind of market, whether they trade in fruit or stocks and bonds, in that they're always changing. Therefore you cannot rely on any research your friends did for their move a few years or even months ago, because the Kitchener market is now completely different. Each person has to do his or her own market research when they're buying their Milton, Ontario real estate in order to get the best understanding of the market.
To understand the market, you can either look directly at the statistics or talk to/read the work of someone (probably a real estate agent) whose job is to look at and interpret real estate statistics. If you're looking for statistics on your own, the most important ones are the average home price (so you can compare it to the price of houses for sale in Ajax and elsewhere) the average price per square foot (so you can guesstimate how much the house you have in mind will cost) and whether these prices have been going up or down in the past year.
It's also helpful to look at how many houses are getting sold in the market you're looking at. For instance, if there are a lot of houses being sold on the Oakville MLS, from this we can glean that the Oakville market is hot right now, which is good for sellers but not for buyers because it means they'll have to compete for homes (and end up paying more). If these numbers for past months are lower, the market is improving and likely to continue to do so. If they're dropping, than they are likely to continue to do so, so the longer you wait the less you pay for a home but the worse your prospects for reselling it.
Sometimes it's difficult to find statistics for smaller markets like Markham real estate or Kitchener real estate. In these cases you should focus your search on the blogs of local realtors. For your information at the present moment, the average price of a home in the Kitchener area is about $230,000.
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