From renting to buying: Haunted house-hunting in Toronto

ABOVE: What area has shown the highest increase in home prices? Cindy Pom reports. 

TORONTO – Andrew Heppner and Elisa Doyon-Vachon have been renting apartments together for six years and are now on the hunt for a house to accommodate their recently expanded family: rescue dog Morocco, a German Shepherd mix.

“We wanted more backyard space for our dog, and we wanted to start building equity in a house while getting into the market before it goes up any more,” said Heppner, 29.

The couple has lived near Broadview subway station for the past four years, and has cast broad location boundaries for their search: Anything south of Eglinton Avenue and north of King Street, west of Main Street and east of Jane Street. As long as the area is safe, within walking distance to a subway station, and an off-leash dog park, they’re happy.

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Since September they’ve looked at homes in East York, the Upper Beaches, Riverdale and Oakwood, aiming for houses in the $450,000-$500,000 range.

The most memorable? A $430,000 bungalow near Mortimer and Carlaw with a main floor that would need to be gutted to make it livable, and a basement Heppner described as “an American Horror Story starting ground.”

“We walked downstairs and the ground wasn’t even concrete. … It felt like you were walking on the earth. There was drywall, but it was so old – and there was this crazy graffiti,” he said.

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Even stranger was a small six by six foot concrete room at the back of the house, closed off by a steel door.

“There were pipes going across it, and little ropes hanging from the pipes, which looked like someone should have been tortured there and hung themselves or something,” Heppner said. “The thought of actually fixing it up would be a huge undertaking.”

Despite all this, when they checked back in a few weeks, the “haunted” house had sold.

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Heppner described other houses they’ve seen as small, with varying degrees of work needed. One in the Pape/Danforth area would have required a third of the wiring redone, a new oil tank or a change to gas or other heating, and at least $5,000 in kitchen renovations. It sold for $479,000.

The couple tried looking at lower prices, but felt that the difference in quality between homes listed at $400,000 and those at $500,000 was too large.

“Beyond that, there’s just nothing on the market for $400,000. If you want to buy a really small box in the middle of nowhere, you could maybe do it, but there’s no point,” Heppner said. “You’re pretty much forced to spend (in my opinion) close to $500,000 for a two-bedroom house that has a backyard.”

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The couple’s combined income rests around $100,000; Heppner is a project manager at a downtown software company and Doyon-Vachon is a project coordinator at Rogers. Heppner says they’ve been saving for the past five years, and have stored 30 per cent of their target purchase price for their down payment.

“I wouldn’t say we necessarily changed our saving habits in any way in order to buy a house,” he said. It helps that their rent, at $1,050, is relatively low, and they don’t eat out much. “We’re not necessarily big spenders.”

Their plan is to buy a starter home, taking five years to live in it, fix it up and “hopefully make enough to sell it again and step up to a nicer place.” The couple also hopes to find a house with an income property in the basement to supplement their income, and remove some of the financial stress.

Heppner says they feel no other investment is as safe or can bring the same types of returns in a relatively short time frame. But they’re in no rush to buy.

“We still look online and it just hasn’t been as many houses popping up recently,” he said. “Our current situation is such that we’re not paying a ton of money to live where we are and we’re happy … so it’s not a huge inconvenience to be staying here and still saving up money.”

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