FAQs on real estate buy/sell in the GTA area

“I always felt very secure and very safe with real estate. Real estate always appreciates.” - Ivana Trump

Real estate in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) has seen significant growth in the past few years. There is a lot of questions in buyers and sellers mind whenever they want to take some action. In this blog post and the attached video, I am going to express my knowledge on 3 of the most important questions that first time home buyers are curious about.

1) What is the bank interest rate?

The bank interest rate for home loan varies from bank-to-bank. Normally, there are two types of loans: variable and fixed term. The interest rate for variable term is generally significantly less than the fixed term. The variable term is expressed as prime rate plus or minus some percentage amount but as prime rate is changeable, the variable term loan might increase. The prime rate is currently at 2.45% for the big five banks. Please refer to the attached video below to explore what the top 5 banks are offering right now.

2) How to compute your mortgage?

To compute the mortgage, the following information is needed: asking price, down payment, amortization period and mortgage rate. The down payment decides how much mortgage insurance has to be paid. The mortgage insurance is waived for down payment of 20% or more. The amortization period is directly proportional to monthly mortgage payments, i.e. the bigger the period, the lesser the monthly payments. The mortgage rate is the bank interest rate explained earlier.

3) How much could you qualify for based on your income?

Getting a mortgage pre-approval from mortgage lenders or mortgage brokers is a wise task. They look at assets, income and level of debt as a means of pre-approving/qualifying mortgage. It can be approximated using mortgage affordability calculator and providing the required inputs as shown in this attached video below.

Finally, there is a plethora of queries as well as speculations when it comes to real estate business. As this is the most important investment for an individual or family, things must be clearly understood by all associated parties. This blog post and the video just tried to explain 3 of the zillions of questions that people have regarding real estate. 

Thank you for your time!

Good Luck. 😀

References

1. https://www.mortgage4canadians.ca/index.php/blog/post/79/famous-real-estate-quotes-from-famous-people
2. https://www.pexels.com
3. https://www.ratehub.ca
4. https://www.savvynewcanadians.com/prime-rate-canada/

7 things to keep in mind for developing a real estate website

 “A business must have a website because office hours apply to a workplace, not to a website.” – Amit Kalantri

A real estate website is important for new real estate salespersons as well as experienced realtors. It is useful for new salespersons as they get online presence and clients could contact them via their website or vice versa. And, it is useful for experienced realtors as they could show their portfolio in detail and attract new clients.  

There are mainly the following four ways to create a website: 

1. Website builders like WIX.com
2. Content management systems like Wordpress
3. HTML, CSS and/or Bootstrap
4. Programming languages and frameworks

Whatever way one chooses to create a real estate website, it should be meaningful and fruitful to the business. So, following is the detailed description of the 7 things to consider for developing an effective real estate website:

(1) Responsiveness: A responsive website works for all sorts of devices from smartphones, tablets, laptops to bigger screens. If a website is not responsive, then the clients will have difficulty in fetching the information or using the services and thus lead to bad user experience. Furthermore, even Google would be less likely to rank the web page on search engine result pages (SERPs).

 

As mobile traffic is increasing at a very high pace, all sites are required to be mobile-first for the betterment of a business. The most popular way of producing a responsive mobile-first website is through the implementation of Bootstrap. Rather than reinventing the wheel, there are free as well as premium customizable templates available, which can be used.

(2) Simple navigation: A real estate website must be simple to navigate with the navigation items arranged in an easy way. It should have well-defined navigation items like About, Listings, Calculators, Guides, Contacts, etc so as to make it easy for site visitors. If a client finds it difficult to navigate the  information on your site, then they will simply look elsewhere.

(3) Social media integration: Social media is the most important channel for a realtor to get leads and clients. Twitter integration to show tweets on the site, Messenger integration to talk to prospective clients on the go, WhatsApp integration to call/receive instantly, Facebook/Twitter share for sharable content on the website, etc should be present in a real estate website. This makes the site more lively, encourages interactivity and gets more popularity. Normally, this can be implemented quite easily by embedding the required HTML code snippet into your site.

(4) Calculators: A real estate website needs a series of calculators like mortgage rate calculator, mortgage affordability calculator, mortgage payment calculator, CMHC insurance calculator, land transfer tax calculator, etc. These calculators are needed by buyers to better understand their own financial scenario and by the realtor to show the calculations. These calculators do not need to be re-invented again and can be integrated or embedded into any real estate website using the  required HTML snippet from ratehub.ca. 

(5) High resolution images and property videos: Photos and videos of the listings must be attractive and high quality as they are a key to attract potential buyers. Even if a listing is great value for money, it might not draw the attention of top buyers because of low quality images and videos. As people are preferring online as the first point of contact, relevant high resolution photography is a necessary and sufficient condition. 

The listing should include photos for all the rooms and amenities and the video should include a property walk-through. If a condo unit is in sale and it does not cover all the images, then clients are susceptible of the property. It would be great if neighbourhood videos are also included. This gives clients better idea of the overall look and feel of the property before booking a physical tour. Also, photos and videos must also fit in with the responsive design of the website so that overall quality is maintained. 

(6) Contact forms: Every real estate website needs to have a contact form at the bottom for initiating a call-to-action. It would be better if the contact form is associated with the actual displayed listings as well so as to associate a particular client to a target listing. The contact form must be implemented as an eye-catching form with very less typing from the visitors. 

(7) Safety-first COVID info: The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down and affected every business. As we are still fighting the pandemic, as a safety measure, it would be helpful if the website contains a COVID-19 safety section. It should contain the safety measures that are in place like the rules for masking, social distancing, sanitizing, no hand shaking, etc.

A dedicated web page regarding COVID safety and a navigation link in the home page would be suitable for implementing this. It will also help people who visit your site realize that client safety is your top priority. However, one must be aware of the federal, provincial and local regulations regarding this and have to be flexible about it.

CONCLUSION

There are a lot more things to consider before starting to build a real estate website. For example, this blog post did not cover about domain, hosting, maps, etc which are also important. This post just discussed about seven of the most important aspects of real estate website development and gave information on how to implement them.

This blog post is applicable to the development of other websites as well. After all, the objective is:

“The objective of a website is to bring a visitor who brings another visitor.” – Amit Kalantri  

Thank you for your time!

All the Best.😀

References

1. https://amitkalantri.com/2017/11/09/11-eye-opening-quotes-about-importance-of-having-a-website/
2. https://business.nextdoor.com/local/resources/10-must-have-features-for-a-strong-real-estate-website
3. https://getbootstrap.com
4. https://www.pexels.com
5. https://showcaseidx.com/7-features-of-a-great-real-estate-website/
6. https://unsplash.com
7. https://www.dreamhost.com/academy/ways-to-build-a-site/
8. https://www.ratehub.ca