Life

As mentioned in last week’s blog, the seller for the house I was looking at wanted to collect offers until Monday 7pm, and my realtor counselled that we wait until Sunday night to submit the offer so as to try not to trigger a bidding war. So that’s what we did. Monday afternoon rolled around and my realtor informed me that there were three offers on the house, and showed me a list of three realtors, including himself, representing the three buyers as proof. I even wrote a little letter to the seller introducing who I was and included that with my offer.

So Monday 7pm rolled around.. 8pm.. 9pm.. and then I got a text from my realtor, with a screenshot of an email from the seller’s realtor, which said (with typoes fixed):

This serves to inform you that the seller is not able to make a decision tonight as the 3 offers are very competitive. He instructs me to send you all the condo docs I have on hand (which are current till early April 2025).

You are all advised to review those documents and feel free to submit a new offer tomorrow before 6:30 pm. All offers will be presented to the seller at 7:00 pm sharp tomorrow. A final decision will be made around 8pm tomorrow.

What hot garbage was this? Sure, because this was a condo townhouse, condo document review was one of the three preconditions of the offer (the others being financing and inspection), but it hardly is ever the holdup that takes extra time, it’s generally inspection that is the issue. Plus, my realtor than emailed me 18 documents at 10 pm on the last night of a long weekend before work the following day, and I was supposed to review all that and make another offer by 6pm the next day? Without being able to get any lawyers to look it over? And how was that even supposed to affect the price or the competitive nature of the offers?

I interpreted this as the seller, whose name was Kairan, trying to play games and squeeze a higher price out of the purchase by implying that he needed something more to “tiebreak” between the offers. Allegedly. I wasn’t going to play any of those games, and I was angry because that meant that the stress of waiting around through Saturday, Sunday, and especially Monday was extended one more day into Tuesday.

I actually did review the documents, and I raised my offer on the house ever so slightly, from $279,500 (which was the exact asking price) to $280,000, and even dropped the condo document review precondition as maybe that was his holdup or something, but in the end Kairan went with someone else. So be it — I wasn’t given a chance to counteroffer even, but I wasn’t going to get dragged into a pointless and dishonourable bidding war when all condo prices have been flatlined for years in Edmonton and are not considered good investment properties anyway. This was already slightly higher than the other house that recently sold in the same complex and that I did not get a chance to bid on, and I believe about $50k higher than other houses in the same complex had sold for the previous year. And within the context of where those houses were in the complex, all of those ones were better placed than this one. So when I got the news back that Kairan had chosen to go with another bid, I shrugged — as far as I was concerned, it was the universe telling me not to get involved with this one and that the “right place” for me was elsewhere.

I also like my realtor, u/realtoryeg on Reddit, as a person, and I appreciated that unlike my old realtor, at no point in the process did I feel pressured into bidding higher or else. I was given the information and a suggestion, depending on how much I liked the place, but the decision ultimately was mine. But a couple flags did give me pause. Firstly, when I met him on Saturday morning, he said something to the extent of “I saw this listing pop up and figured that you would contact me about it”.

But wait a minute — isn’t this way too passive? Nomakk, who is also looking to buy a house in Ohio and has been talking a lot about his real estate journey on his streams online, has said several times that real estate agents are proactive and offer to bring them around to see houses. And one this week even offered to go out with him, sit down for some coffee, and he would show him a bunch of listings within his budget range and see if he could help Nomakk find his perfect house. And closer to home, even WingBenny, who is in the same province, said that yes, good realtors are usually active and actively help you look for houses, suggest matches etc.

Yet between both my previous realtor, and my current one (who has about 3-4 years experience I believe), neither one of them has ever sent me a text along the lines of “hey, do you want to go see houses” or “hey, what do you think of this house”? Both of them just helped me set up filtering rules on the Collaboration Center thing that apparently all the agents in the city use, and that’s it. Very passive. But I can do that sort of thing by just browsing realtor.ca or something myself, why do I need an agent for this? It’s so passive and unpersonal. I don’t know what the heck is out there in the city that meets my need, that’s why I’m confined to just four neighbourhoods or so that I’m looking in.

And even this one we looked at over the weekend actually did not trigger my alert at all because it was slightly over the price limit and had no garage, yet it was in a prime location and so I had been keeping an eye out for it. You could even say that the reason I lost the last one and didn’t get a chance to make an offer on it was because that one also barely missed the alert threshold and I wasn’t informed about it at that time (and had no idea that I could browse houses on the Collab site outside of my filters at the time — I only discovered that as a result of missing that first house).

The other flag that made me uneasy was when I asked him directly about this, whether he could alert me if something came up that seems like it would fit my need, since I know from Benny and others that real estate agents are supposed to.. help you find houses. His reply was that we were going into a busy season now and that he honestly wouldn’t have time to do so. Wow. So what, my budget is not big enough for you to care about me as a client now, u/realtoryeg?

But again, he was honest, and I do like him for that and maybe my interpretation was a bit too cynical. He was trying to say (and did immediately clarify) that the computer would alert me faster than he could in most cases. And that he looks out on pre-MLS listings and off market for his clients every morning too and would let me know if he finds anything (which has never happened). He also then adjusted the filters to be far more permissive, with a much higher condo fee cap and removing covered garages as a condition, which caused me to receive like 20 new matches the next morning and then several more over the next few days, which annoyed me. Though this can always be adjusted and fine-tuned, of course.

He’s completely missing the point though — the point isn’t the generated matches but that I don’t know what other neighbourhoods are suitable out there that I should be looking in. He knows what I am looking for in general but has not made an effort to suggest or sell me on other neighbourhoods, nor know my need intimately enough to know that I needed a heads up on that first house as well as this one (and not just a “hey, I knew you’d contact me about this!” when that wasn’t even on my filter). I don’t care about how quick the collab site notifications are, it’s the PERSONAL part of the BIGGEST PURCHASE IN MY LIFETIME that is lacking. Setting up website filters after 20 minutes of texting and checking in once every 2-4 weeks after “to see how things are going and if anything needs to be adjusted” is probably not enough groundwork. Sure it works well enough for some people sometimes, but I feel like it’s more a case of things succeeding “in spite of” the lack of realtor groundwork than anything else.

I think this is why my housing search seems to be limited into only eight or so small neighbourhoods around Southgate and Century Park, and has taken over a year now, because they’re the only regions I know well, and because neither agent has worked with me to identify other potential neighbourhoods that might be within my price range and still check off my need-to-haves and some of my nice-to-haves, and automatic website notifications do not tell you if a house condo fee is $1 over your maximum limit, or if a house is on sale for $1 over your maximum price, or if a listing happens to omit a certain feature that they actually have or that is easy to remedy.

I also had to sign a 6 month exclusive real estate representation contract for some reason before I could even make an offer on this house (although I think if I wanted to I could talk to him and end it), even though I never had to do that with Oscar, my previous realtor, as far as I remember, despite them both using online document signing websites. Whatever though. I don’t dislike him, as mentioned, in fact I think u/realtoryeg is great and he answers my texts and stuff fairly quickly and even on the weekends and holidays, which I appreciate. I feel like I’m being treated as a passive “one day this will cash out” cash cow outside of me being the one to reach out about specific houses though.

I don’t blame him for losing either house but I feel like I could have been alerted manually for the first one, if he had sat down with me and figured out a battle plan and what my perfect home would have looked like beforehand, so that I wouldn’t have missed the 1 day window to make an offer on that because it wasn’t strictly within my alerts, and for the second one above, I can’t help but feel like we got outmanouvered on the second round of offers. He was as confused as me as to what the realtor or seller was trying to do by giving us the condo docs and asking us to remake an offer, and in hindsight I think the right move here would have been him directly asking the seller realtor what specific conditions the seller values or was looking for. I was left completely in the dark and had to make my own decision on tweaking the offer here (I had advice to maybe bring forward the deadline for lifting conditions and maybe remove the condo document condition, both of which I did together with the slight bump in price) but in the end it was just not what they were looking for. And who knows why! Certainly not me, cause he wasn’t aggressive enough (or didn’t care) to find out! I don’t know for sure but I don’t think “What is the seller looking for/What does the seller value?” was asked between him and the other realtor.

Do I need a new realtor? Again? Eh.. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.

Some positives did come out of this whole experience though. For one, I now have all the condo documents for that complex for free, for any future bids that I might make on other units in that complex. I know their budget, upcoming projects, and such, I have a lot of personal details on their board fthat I maybe shouldn’t have since all the meeting notes from the past year were included, I know all the bylaws and I know that the condo fee covers all the fences, the outside of the house, and all the roofs but not the doors, and I know that the roofs are about 20 years away from replacement. All good info to have since they would all be relevant for any other house in there too.

I also know that although my RBC mortgage specialist said to give 10 days for mortgage approval, he can actually do 5 days or maybe less too with the right documents (the realtor needs to send the mortgage specialist the housing sheet listing price and fee, as well as a copy of the agreement). It kinda sounded again like my mortgage wasn’t fat enough for my RBC agent to care about processing it faster huh. Maybe I should go talk to Scotiabank too and find out what their timeline is like, since I have no idea what the baseline is (but have read that they can do 48 hour turnaround times. Maybe the rate isn’t as good though?) And also, even every failed attempt is a lot of personal experience as to how the house-buying process works.

I also finally did my $8,000 FHSA transfer for the year. I had not been able to figure out how to do it on the RBC website, but after walking through where the option should be with a phone agent on Tuesday morning, I finally figured out that a dropdown box where I could select a Transfer From bank account was not populating correctly in Firefox, but when I tried it in Microsoft Edge it worked. So it was a browser issue with the RBC website. I wasn’t sure if making my contribution transfer so close to the actual mortgage was going to mess it up in any way, but I had lots of leeway anyway since the mortgage would have been just $200k, as opposed to my preapproval of around $300k (last time I checked).

It still was annoying though, especially since this meant that my entire week was held hostage and I couldn’t go anywhere like I had planned to. Once the dust had settled, even though I was perfectly fine to lose the house for that price, I still couldn’t help but feel really blah about the whole thing. I spent a couple days looking at things like sunscreen and insect repellents, and even walked around to a bunch of nearby stores to compare prices, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I basically pushed my potential vacation out all the way to at least the end of this week to see if my mood improved. I still did need to prepare for it though, so again we have a shortened version of the blog because I have too much else to do anyway.

So. What happened in the rest of the week?

Firstly, The Bay’s closing sale continues. Apparently there are now signs saying that they’re in their last 10 days now, though I don’t know when that number started.

But that was on Wednesday, the 21st, whereas on Sunday, the 25th, they had 8 days left signs up.

Do they know how numbers work?

I also saw a car going by with a large triangular sale sign strapped to the top of it so it was visible from every angle. So weird! Who can scan for directions on a car going by?

Later on in the week, I went to Southgate‘s The Bay on Thursday as usual and took some pictures. The discount is now 60%-80%, but this is The Bay with its overpriced branded goods nonsense — I feel that for many items this only started to push them into approaching what the actual price of the item should be, and often times the prices are not even quite there yet. FOMO, the fear of missing out, is definitely a thing though and a lot of items have now sold too. As I am going on vacation next week, I will probably miss the actual last shutdown day of this Bay store, which is probably a good thing, so this was my likely farewell set of pictures for this store. Kind of like closing my eyes and turning away as the big beached whale dies.

Southgate also had its triannual (I think) Posh Market this weekend. It wasn’t very big as always, especially compared to other craft sales that can be found around the city now that we’re well into the spring season, but it is always nice to see.

A side effect of not having group anime/AMQ and streaming responsibilities during the evening is that I have the freedom to go down to Safeway at 8:30 pm on a Thursday to go get an onion because I was short an onion for some cooking. On the way back from that little jaunt, it started to rain, and I was drenched as I hurried home with the onion (and a few other assorted goods). This was a very nice feeling!

I saw some kids cavorting in the rain, continuing on with their soccer game that they had started before the torrential rains arrived. This reminded me of Singapore and her monsoons and sudden rains, where this sort of scene is rather common too.

And later that evening I took this picture, Thursday May 22 at 9:14 pm, as my only sky picture of the week.

I also replaced the sink drain strainer or sink guard or whatever you call it in the washroom sink this weekend. The old one was a metal monstrosity that was so gunked up (in the part that extends into the drain itself) that even draining plain water took forever, and there was also always a shallow pool of leftover water in the sink that never quite cleared right unless I removed the sink guard and replaced it after. Anyway it was very annoying and had been a minor pain point since I moved in, like the bath drain a few months ago, but it had gotten worse lately. I never had the mindfulness to realize it until last week though, so away it went this week.

I would also like to give a shout out to neal.fun’s Internet Roadtrip, a collaborative site that allows everyone on the site to travel around North America, albeit very slowly, via connected Google Street View panels, while chatting to each other using a shared Discord chat and listening to a radio station voted on by the people on the site. A nice community has more or less coalesced around it, and I’ve been on and off there watching people organize themselves and their small victories and failures along the way. And in a small way maybe it has inspired my trip as well. I need to go wander and look at mountains and night markets.

I also met and casually chatted with someone else who lives on my floor of this apartment block this week. He said that the previous owner of my apartment had a cat, and since my apartment is near the elevator, the cat would apparently go to the door and meow at people waiting for the elevator to arrive at our floor, and could be heard through the door (likely due to the lack of a door sweep under the door). We had a good chuckle over that.

Lastly before a couple day highlights, I broke out my trip preparation stuff into a separate travel blog page as always! I look forward to making another one of these little daily blog series for my upcoming trip!

Wednesday May 21

Next up, I went down to South Edmonton Common to buy some sunscreen and insect repellent on Wednesday afternoon. South Edmonton Common is a large, spacious area comprising of several city blocks that’s full of single-building malls and a few mall rows. It’s always really annoyed me because they’re spaced so far apart, and that’s such a terrible idea in Edmonton as our winters are so harsh — how do you get from store to store except by driving? And what do people without cars do? The area is very poorly served by buses too, I think only two or three of them really come by here from the nearest transit centre (though it depends on which end of the Commons one is heading to).

But it has its plus points too. The main one being that this sort of format allows for each box store to be really huge, since they have as much space as they want and aren’t constrained by what building is next to them for the most part. It was also actually a really nice walk in spring, and I suppose summer and autumn too. It did take a lot of legwork to cross across roads and between stores though. I took a number of random pictures here.

I was engrossed and weaved in and out to a number of stores, although I never bought anything other than at my target store, which was MEC. I just did a whole bunch of window shopping instead, spending so much time here that I ran into something that I hadn’t run into for ages. Lacking anime/AMQ at 4pm in the afternoon, and my streaming activities afterwards, I was able to stay here until a vaunted daily event called “closing time” happened at several of the stores at 6pm! It took me by surprise. How nostalgic.

I picked up a local Canadian insect repellent and sunscreen brand from MEC, which stands for Mountain Equipment Company, as well as some after-bite lotion, all in preparation for the possibility of going hiking later this weekend or early next week. I also actually tried to pick up bear spray:

But apparently an actual original piece of photo ID was needed to buy it, and I only had a picture of it with me since I don’t usually carry my card purse around and wasn’t planning to buy it at the onset of my trip. Oh well. Next time. I’m not really taking any hikes where I need this anyway, I think.