Guides & articles
Neighbourhood notes, buying explainers, cost breakdowns, market context and homeowner guidance.
Most Canadians selling the home they live in owe no capital gains tax on the gain — but the exemption has conditions, reporting the sale is required even at zero tax, and rentals, flips and non-resident sellers change the picture entirely.
The sale price is not what you walk away with. Commission and the HST on it, lawyer fees, mortgage discharge or a mortgage penalty, preparing your house for sale, moving and overlap all come off the top. Here is how to work out your net proceeds before you list — and which line regularly shocks sellers.
Hintonburg rewards the slow visit. Spend a Saturday and Sunday along Wellington Street West — coffee, the Parkdale Market, side-street art, a walk down to the river — and you'll understand why this former working-class pocket became one of Ottawa's most-loved main-street neighbourhoods. Things to do across two unhurried days, on foot.
Buying preconstruction is a different transaction from buying resale: the builder agreement is the builder's own paper, the home doesn't exist yet, and the timeline is measured in seasons. New vs resale, and the whole journey in the buyer's order.
Condo fees get treated like a penalty box on listing sheets, but they're really a bundled bill for things every homeowner pays somehow. Here's what the fee typically buys, what a reserve fund is for, and why a suspiciously low fee deserves more scrutiny, not less. What do condo fees cover, why maintenance fees and condo fees are the same thing under two names, and why the lowest fee is rarely the prize.
Average price, median, benchmark, days on market, sales-to-new-listings — the monthly market headlines all come from a handful of statistics that mean less, and more, than they appear to. Here's how to read them like someone who knows where they come from. Average sale price, benchmark and the HPI, days on market, months of inventory, and how to tell a buyer's market from a seller's one — so a headline number never stands in for your own home's value.
Ottawa's western suburbs get lumped together, but Kanata and Stittsville answer the where-should-we-live question differently — one built around a tech employment hub, the other around a small-town main street. Here's an honest side-by-side. A direct compare of Kanata and Stittsville on the things that actually differ.
Skip the sold data for an afternoon and go read the main street instead. Bank Street in the Glebe, Wellington West, Beechwood Avenue, Stittsville's Main Street — each one is a plain-language report on walkability, daily life, and where a neighbourhood is heading. A fast, honest read on neighbourhood character when you are choosing a neighbourhood and have an afternoon rather than a month.
Between signing and keys, your home passes through a fixed sequence of construction stages. Knowing the sequence turns the long wait into something you can follow — and tells you exactly what's worth looking at on the walk-throughs your builder allows. How a house is built, stage by stage, and what a realistic build timeline looks like between them.
