One of the biggest problems with house hunting is that you are bound to look at one or two, or more, homes which are beyond your budget. Standard practice for a London Ontario real estate agent or an agent anywhere else is to show buyers a range of homes. They won't be way out of your projected price range, but they will be about twenty thousand or so over. What the agent's motives are depend on your relationship with him or her; she could be trying to help, or she could be trying to upsell another client's home.
No matter what reason the agent has for showing you the home, though, you need to keep one thing in mind: you applied for a mortgage in Ontario with a very firm budget in mind. Or at least you should have. If you didn't, I urge you to go back right now and re-evaluate your whole house hunting process. The last thing you need is to find yourself committed to a house you can't afford, with both the mortgage and interest payments under consideration.
And that is what you need to be thinking about as you look at homes outside of your mortgage range as well. Those beautiful stand alone dwellings are going to look spectacular, most of the time, when compared to the standard Toronto townhouses which fit into the average person's budget in that expensive city. A beautiful yard, new fixtures and additions, a large kitchen. The other houses you have looked at suddenly start to look like hobbit holes, and you feel your thoughts returning to that dream home again and again.
This is a fairly common scenario among home buyers, whether it is the first or the fifth time that you are out shopping. It can be incredibly hard to pass up what looks like a dream home and go for what you see as a lesser dwelling, especially when it is only a matter of tens of thousands of dollars.
But wait just a second, and look at what you just said to yourself. Only tens of thousands of dollars? That amount is a lot on its own, and remember that any mortgage you take out will come with a lot of interest too. Every thousand dollars adds months to your pay off period, and that's if you can make those payments in the first place. There is a reason you were looking at a certain price range in the Toronto condo listings, and that's just it. You simply can't afford to pay more.
Hopefully, having that inner dialogue can bring you back to your senses as far as your home purchase is concerned. If you still think about that special home, there is no reason not to have a free Edmonton home evaluation done to see if it is really worth the asking price. But good luck finding one!
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