We currently rent a home in the Upper Beaches near Woodbine & Danforth. It’s a nice family neighbourhood and our daughter goes to a home daycare near Donlands and & Danforth, so we basically drew a perimeter around this. The main criteria was that the house had to be no more than 15 minute drive from our daughter’s day care.
We were looking at any type of house in this area with at least 3 bedrooms plus a basement that we can use when we have family visiting us from overseas. Another must-have was a backyard or enough space to enjoy a BBQ during summer time :-). I’m not a handy man and I travel a lot for business, so I don’t have time to renovate, so we were looking mostly at renovated houses. Being close to a subway station was also part of the criteria.

The housing market is so hot in Toronto that we had to make concessions, looking a little bit further east and north, but still within 15 minutes of the daycare.
The neighbourhood where we bought is not as charming as our previous upper beaches neighbourhood with nice old trees, but houses are newer and this is still a residential and safe family neighbourhood.

Also, it’s a five minute walk to a bus station, then a five minute bus ride to be at Man Station. Door to door, it’s a 35 or 40 minute trip for Valentine to get to work on Church Street, but I work from home. :-). The house (semi-detached) has been completely renovated, so it is ready to move in, that was one of the main criteria.

At first we increased our budget, and made offers on houses really at our budget limit, but because people were making offers at 130% of asking, we failed to get the homes. After a few offers, we ended-up buying a house 100K below our budget limit. At the end of the day we are happy we made some concessions 🙂

The VP for the company I work for recommended Elli Davis at Royal Lepage  and that’s how I got connected with Shawn.  I would recommend Shawn to anybody who is looking to buy a house in Toronto. We are from France, and obviously did not know the housing market in Toronto or the buying process.  Shawn took the time to go over the process with us and make sure everything was crystal clear. He always did a lot of research on houses we were interested in and provided very valuable inputs on districts and locations. He has been available for us 7 days a week, 24hours/day. We have been on the phone with Shawn at 11PM at night… In our situation (newcomers to Canada), it was very helpful to work with Shawn. Because he has many many years of experience finding homes for his clients, this gave us a lot of confidence, we felt that we were in good hands. We exchanged so much with Shawn via phone, text, email over the past two months we feel like Shawn is part of the family now 🙂 Shawn also recommended a good Lawyer and Mortgage Broker. We have a strong  team who knows how to take care of us!