I really like Victoria and I hope the town does well out of this. I'm sad that I may not be able to afford to live in Vancouver anytime soon, though.
Oh .. and homes are getting multiple offers, buyers are getting into bidding wars regularly. We are searching for a decent place since we just had a child. It is causing a lot of misery in our life.
I seeing REIT's, and just about every wealthy person I kinda know buying up realeste, and renting it out at outrageous prices.
Some of the wealthy are buying the third house for the kid, and the kid is renting out rooms, at outragious prices.
Low interest rates, mortgages that are being thrown at the wealthy, all cash sales by wealthy foreigners/Americans--who only seem to care about ROA, young/middle class individuals who are just are being denied loans, young/middle class individuals who didn't want to be tied down and just rent, young/middle class individuals who will most likely always be just renters, a huge sector of the public who blame rent control on high rent, county and local building officials who are making it very difficult to build Anything.
If I had money, and believed their was absolutely nothing wrong with charging market rental rates; why wouldn't I buy every house I could afford, especially the under 1 million homes, that have at least 4 bedrooms, and room for four vechicles. Rent out the rooms, and make a profit?
Again, I hope your right.
Right now the poor, and middle class are being imprisioned, and I don't see much change on the horizon. (I was for Dodd-Frank--until banks just seemed to use it as an excuse to not loan, unless your Thrurston Howell the 3rd. And use the bill to raise bank fees on everything. Fees only the poor/middle class are paying.)
I've given up all hopes of buying real-estate.
I'm getting really tired of fees/fines. I'm tired of bank fees. I'm tired of being of overcharged by municipal revenue collectors(cops). I tied of new laws going up daily. I'm tired of being held hostage by the medical community for refills on drugs that should be over the counter. I tired of being charged close to a thousand dollars to get my 4 cylinder, 2300 cc engine to pass a CA smog test. A vechicle that in the bigger picture did nothing to the environment. Why, because I drove the same small car for the last 25 years. Even at it's worse, it doesn't pollute, or add to global warmimg like most newer vechicles--if you include the the carbon emitted when that new vechicle is manufactured in China.
I don't like this America.
It seems like some people don't realize they are being exploited?
Right know, Sausalito CA police are harassing Anchorouts.
They don't want the ugly boats there. I ate my lunch, and counted maybe 5 ugly boats form my vantage point. I counted 20 beautiful yachts, but they arn't the problem? See, there is no problem, but the powers at be just don't want the poor people out there. Ticket them until they are forced to abandon the boat, and it can be towed away--yea! "Rent a room for $700 week on land Sailor. Get your act together. Learn R, or ROR, I hear they are paying well in SF? Hay--put up a social network just for Sailors? I hear Adsence pays well? Oh, you can't code? There's landscaping, or I hear that burger place pays $12 per hr? Get off your old ass! I'm tired of looking at you. You arn't aesthetically pleasing, and no one get free rent in my world. Just think--instead of catching pneumonia on the frigid waters here, you can die on shore while being harrrased/ticketed in Dunphy park for falling asleep. Another yea!"
Yea, call it a narcisstic rant, but I'm just looking in, and hate what I see. It puts a knot in my stomach just writing about it.
GO trains are every 10 minutes during rush hours and every 30 minutes at all other times. Trains start at 4/5 am and go until 1am.
Markham does not have that level of connectivity. There are only a couple trains that run in the morning and then a couple in the evening. It is serviced by buses at other times.
Real estate prices wise, for what you pay for a town home in Markham, you can get a full detached home in Pickering...and it's only like 15 minutes away from Markham.
While you do have direct access to the said island, there's a limit to how much "nature" activities one can do. Diversity Nanaimo (another city) is utterly unremarkable. Tofino is very nice, but it's 4-hour drive away. Everything else is even farther and unremarkable. Getting to anywhere outside of the island is a major hassle. Victoria International Airport provides fine selection of international flights, though to Seattle only. Ferries are slow and expensive. Floating plane taxis tend to crash now and then, so that's not very good either. So, yes, in theory you can get off the island on a whim, in practice though it's so much hassle that more often than not you simply won't bother. Hence the "isolated" remark.
YMMV, but my experience was that outside of work things get very boring very quickly.
We have an office there and our team maintains a city-wide startup listing + job board:
I had visited Victoria several years ago, and it was a beautiful place.
In BC, 'competitive salary' ranges from 40-160K for the same role :)
Having interviewed with them a couple of years ago, I can attest that their team is incredibly nice, and the product is interesting also.