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Property information

Keaton, who is well known for restoring architecturally significant homes in the L.A. area, paid $9.1 million (€6.2 million) last year for the six-bedroom house built for Oscar-winning composer Alfred Newman in 1948.
The house sits on 2.6 acres (1.05 hectares) overlooking Sunset Boulevard and includes a barn, riding stables and one of Wright’s trademark hexagonal pools.
Want to know more about great homes and market trands? Call Toronto real estate agent Alex Malkhassiants: (416) 723-9383.

Ontario property owners will see a double-digit increase on their assessments because of the hot housing market and because the province’s property assessment freeze has lifted, a real estate industry expert warns. Maureen O’Neill, president of the Toronto Real Estate Board, says the median price of a detached home in the GTA has increased about 20 per cent since the last assessments were done in 2005.Three years ago, the median price of a detached home in the GTA was $335,000. Today, it’s $403,000, O’Neill said. “Condominium and apartment owners will also see a whopping 27 per cent increase in their property assessments”

“In 2005, the median price of a condo or apartment was $192,000. Today, it’s $245,000″, O’Neill said. “They’ve seen appreciation and therefore they’re going be taxed accordingly. Property owners are going to experience quite a dramatic shock.”

Homes in east Toronto will be particularly hard hit, as assessments will rise about 31 per cent.

The province’s three-year freeze on assessments lifted on January 1. The Ontario government, however, has introduced a plan to spread out any assessment increases over the next four years.

NDP Leader Howard Hampton, however, said the government’s strategy, including the freeze, has made the housing assessment ordeal worse. “There’s a big problem here. The property tax is not based upon someone’s income, it’s not based on my ability to pay,” Hampton said.

The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation came under fire years ago for conducting inaccurate assessments. The agency performed 500,000 on-site inspections last year in its bid to boost accuracy.

Property owners will be receiving their new assessments in August and September.

Want to know more? Call Toronto real estate agent Alex Malkhassiants: (416) 723-9383.

The McGuinty government is giving all first-time homebuyers a break on land transfer tax by proposing to expand the Land Transfer Tax Refund Program to include purchases of resale homes, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan announced today.“Expanding this Land Transfer Tax refund is an important part of our government’s commitment to helping Ontarians buying their first home,” Duncan said.

Effective midnight tonight, first-time buyers of resale homes, as well as newly constructed homes, would be eligible for a refund from the provincial government of up to $2,000 of the Land Transfer Tax paid.

The expanded Land Transfer Tax Refund Program for First-time Homebuyers is part of a package of new tax initiatives announced in the 2007 Fall Economic Outlook and Fiscal Review that would provide $1.4 billion in provincial tax relief for business and people over three years.  The government is making strategic investments in people, communities and infrastructure to strengthen Ontario’s economic advantage and help manufacturers and other sectors challenged by current economic conditions.

Toronto has solidified its spot as North America’s largest condominium market, according to a report that says 259 projects are in the works in the city’s census area.

Urbanation, one of the country’s major condominium market research firms, says condo sales skyrocketed over the first nine months of 2007. There were 16,790, sales - more than all of 2005, which was a record year. Sales will likely reach 21,000 by the end of the year. By comparison, New York City usually records about 10,000 condo sales a year.

“This is the highest number we’ve ever tracked since we started in 1981,” said Jane Renwick, executive vice-president of Urbanation. “If you look at our [research], sales just keep going up, up, up.”

Urbanation, which tracks just about every condo in the city, says its quarterly research report has grown into a 360-page mini-encyclopedia from modest beginnings when it looked more like a small pamphlet on the condo sector.

The city’s red-hot condo sector came under scrutiny last week when sales at a tower planned for Yonge and Bloor streets resulted in lineups and prices skyrocketing overnight.

The proposed 80-storey One Bloor St. is said to have started with prices of $650 per square foot for VIPs and has escalated since. The site is located near the most expensive hub of the 52 submarkets in the census metropolitan area, which stops at Ajax in the east, and Burlington to the west.

Bloor-Yorkville gets the nod as the most expensive submarket in the city with an average price of $839 per square foot, which would get you a small one-bedroom apartment for $1-million. The market is home to Toronto’s most expensive condo tower, the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences.

Sale prices in the Four Seasons’ east building have averaged about $1,250 per square foot, while prices in the west tower go for $1,450 per square foot. Prices have since climbed, and the west tower is now asking about $1,600 a square foot, making it Toronto’s most posh address.

The 53-storey Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Residences has the largest condominium under construction in the city, with a 10,820 square foot mansion in the sky planned, according to Urbanation.

While the so-called trophy buildings are getting all the attention in the city, Ms. Renwick said, they are hiding the fact that the condo market is growing at a steady pace across Toronto. The 416 area code accounts for 79% of transactions and 905 accounts for 21%.

The average sale price across the Toronto census area is $371 per square foot, up 10.1% from a year ago. Sale prices have jumped from about $180 per square foot in 1996.

It has eaten into affordability. To carry a 700-square-foot apartment — the average size of a unit in the city — a consumer would need about $70,000 in household income, based on a standard mortgage with 25% down.

Affordability has eroded quickly after remaining relatively stable for most of the decade. From 2001 to 2005, a buyer needed about $54,000 to $57,000 to carry that same 700-square-foot apartment in Toronto. It climbed to $63,000 by last year, rising another $7,000 this year.

Despite the cut in affordability, some of which has been driven by rising interest rates, Ms. Renwick said speculation is hardly rampant.

Urbanation said of the 259 projects in the works, it estimates 30% of units were bought by investors. The other 70% of the condos to go up in the next five years will be owner occupied. That 70% is made up of 30% first-time buyers, 20% move-up buyers and 20% people downsizing.

You want to buy a condo in Toronto? Ask Alex how to do it. Call Alexandre (Alex) Malkhassiants at (416) 723-9383

National Post

Open house in prestigious Markham Cornell neigbourhood!

Address: 769 CORNELL ROUGE BLVD - 16th Ave/9th Line

Visit our Open House on Saturday and Sunday - November 17 and November 18 from 12 to 4.

BRAND NEW TOWNHOUSE, NEVER LIVED IN!
Only $329,900 for a Forest Hill beauty - 3-storey town facing park.
4 Bedrooms or 3 Bdr + second floor Family room (easy to convert to 4th Br)
Feels like semi - 1,725 SqFt! Quality construction, good spacious layout.
Modern country kitchen with an island. Parquet floors. Neutral decor.
New Stainless Steel Appliances!
Eight foot high ceiling on main & second floors. Sprayed, strippled ceilings.
Covered porch, detached garage.
Beautiful views from huge living and family room windows.
Lots of storage space. Sliding glass thermopane patio door.
Oval tub & shower with light, breakfast bar.
Easy access laundry room on second floor, all rough-ins throughout.
High efficiency natural gas furnace.
Cold storage room in a big unfinished basement. Quality ceramics in wet areas.
Quality low maintenance white casement windows.
Asphalt roof shingles under 20 year warranty. 7 years new home warranty.
Two steps to school & park. Enjoy the convenience of the Cornell community!
Very motivated vendor.

For details call listing agent Alexandre (Alex) Malkhassiants at (416) 723-9383
or go here - http://www.torontogreathomes.com/Markham/Ontario/Homes/N11_-_UnionvilleMarkham/Cornell/Agent/Listing_980357.html

Real estate buyers and sellers looking to hold onto their last dollar may be rushing to buy or sell their home before the new land transfer tax comes into effect at the end of this year.

The controversial tax, passed in a 26-19 vote by city council on Monday night, will be collected on purchases that are signed after Dec. 31.

The tax affects 0.5 per cent on the first $55,000 of residential property values, one per cent on the next $345,000 and two per cent on more than $400,000. First-time buyers do not pay on the first $400,000.

Buyers trying to avoid paying for the new levy would need to sign on the dotted line before the new year and sellers hoping to make their asking price more attractive for potential investors, may be placing their homes on the block sooner rather than later.

“Anytime there’s a market destabilizing force like the implementation of a new tax, you do tend to see correlative changes in consumer behaviour,” said Kevin Gaudet of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “People thinking to buy a house next year because they wanted to save a few extra bucks (for a larger down payment) may facilitate the decision in moving forward (sooner) … these types of taxes have an impact.”

Von Palmer of the Toronto Real Estate Board said the tax will have an economic impact of up to $33,000 per purchase to other industries such as furniture, which thrive on home sales. He also added that buyers will be forced to place smaller down payments or carry larger mortgage payments over time.

He said it still remains to be seen whether or not the impending tax will result in an upward or downward spike in housing sales.

Want to know more? Call Alexandre Malkhassiants at (416) 723-9383 or go here -

http://www.torontogreathomes.com/

24 HOURS

Do not pay until 2047. The Canadian real estate industry has come up with the perfect product — the 40-year amortization.

Instead of planning to pay off their mortgage in 25 years, Canadians are now turning to products that give them at least an extra decade to pay their debt — subject to massive interest payments over the course of a loan.

Benjamin Tal, a senior economist with CIBC World Markets, says the change in the way Canadians pay off their mortgage is the most significant innovation to hit the industry in almost three decades.

In addition to lengthening the amortization period, the Canadian market has also been recently introduced to interest-only loans and zero-equity mortgages. Consumers can effectively borrow 103% of the value of their home because borrowers tack the cost of mortgage insurance on to the total loan value.

Mr. Tal, who is the process of compiling a report on how the new products have changed the market, says interest-only and zero-equity loans are probably less than 1% of new business. It’s the long-term amortization that has caught everybody’s fancy.

What he finds amazing about the shift towards paying off your mortgage way ahead in the future is that it has occurred almost overnight, even though this is not the first time banks have tried to attract consumers with longer amortization periods.

“They were available in the early ’80s and nobody was interested. The attitude toward debt is totally different now,” says Mr. Tal, who adds his study will show a “significant” amount of new money is geared toward that 2047 mortgage-burning party.

Those extra 15 years of mortgage debt will cost Canadians. The Canadian Real Estate Association says the average sale price of a home was $311,495 in July. If you bought that house with 0% down and a 25-year amortization, the total interest would end up being $277,993 over 25 years, based on monthly payments and an interest rate of 5.85%, a typical discounted rate today. Extend the amortization period 40 years under the same terms and you end up paying $488,116 in interest –more than the price of the house.

Paying that much interest is just throwing money away, says Ron Cirotto, who runs the Web site www.amortization.com. He has spent years trying to convince Canadians to pay down their mortgages and can’t wrap his mind around the new amortizations.

He laughs at the suggestion the 40-year amortization is giving Canadians more flexibility when it comes to making lower monthly payments. “I’m not sure you can call it an advantage to pay interest for another 15 years,” says Mr. Cirotto. “To me it’s bullshit. The best way to save money is not to have any mortgage.”

Have your own opinion on 40-year amortization mortgage? Call Alex Malkhassiants at (416) 723-9383 or go here - http://www.torontogreathomes.com/

canada.com

In the battle for one-upmanship in Toronto’s luxury real estate market, Alex Shnaider has revealed a convincing hand.

The enigmatic Toronto billionaire says in an exclusive interview he has decided to keep what has been billed as Canada’s most expensive condominium, valued at up to $20 million, at the Trump International Hotel & Tower for himself.

A work in progress, his mansion in the sky could be as large as 14,000 square feet, and will have, in some areas, soaring 9-metre ceilings.

“You can put an observatory up there. It’s a great place to get away from the wife if we ever have a fight,” joked Shnaider.

While New York billionaire Donald Trump is the brand, Shnaider, at 39 Canada’s youngest billionaire, is the financial muscle behind the ultra-luxury project in the city’s financial district.

The most expensive condo sold in the city so far is thought to be former Bank of Montreal CEO Tony Comper’s One St. Thomas penthouse at $15 million.

Shnaider – whom Forbes says is the 557th richest man in the world with a net worth of $1.8 billion (U.S.) – will presumably give himself a respectable friends-and-family discount, but his is an expensive pied-à-terre. He is already building a magnificent new home in Toronto, less than half an hour away.

And it’s not as if he’s living in squalor now. His current 15,000-square-foot residence is a traditional stone mansion put together in 2000 by celebrity designer Katherine Newman. The property was listed for $10.9 million (Cdn.) two years ago when he was thinking of relocating to Russia, but it was taken off the market after he decided to keep his headquarters in Toronto.

The home is stunning, decorated in a traditional English manor style, but the security-conscious billionaire allowed the Star a rare glimpse of his residence only if its location not be revealed. In the garage is a gleaming silver $450,000 (U.S.) Mercedes SLR McLaren, barely 2,000 kilometres on the odometer.

A car nut, he most famously bought a Formula One team in 2005 for $50 million and sold it last year for $106.6 million.

Other toys include a 170-foot Benetti yacht, the Midlandia, (which sleeps 12 and rents for a mere $270,000 a week when he’s not using it) and a private jet.

How did Shnaider get this rich?

His private company Midland Group, which he runs with London-based partner Eduard Shifrin (number 538 on the Forbes list at $1.9 billion) has diverse holdings, including steel mills in the Ukraine, the national power grid of Armenia, real estate, retail malls, and manufacturing in Russia and Siberia. The company has 34 offices and more than 50,000 employees and earnings in excess of $2 billion annually.

And Shnaider, it seems, is putting some of that money where his mouth is – at least with his $500 million (Cdn.) Toronto venture.

Rumours have persisted at the Trump site on Bay and Adelaide Sts. that sales were poor and the project was destined for failure.

Shnaider was taking a three-week break with his family on the Midlandia – he may have been in the waters of Turkey at the time, or it could have been Greece – when the call came that news had broken in the Toronto Star that his 70-storey Trump International Hotel & Tower was going to be downsized and eleven residential floors, including two hotel floors, lopped off.

“The hotel part of the sales was always doing well. Residential sales were a problem,” says Shnaider.

“A lot of buyers were buying for themselves, usually people working on Bay St. and, because of the skepticism, when they didn’t know a date they are quite reluctant. This is especially true for the larger, more expensive units because you have talk on the street that it won’t be built.”

But Shnaider said he expects construction to start in September. He also says 75 per cent of the building is sold. Over the past two and a half years, the developer says, approximately $275 million worth of property has been sold.

The original plans called for only four residential units per floor, but that had to be changed, he says.

“We needed to stimulate sales because the units were very big and expensive and they weren’t selling as fast as we would have liked,” he says candidly. “We ended up making this six units per floor to make it more affordable.”

The higher density meant that something had to go, says Shnaider.

But even with 13 fewer storeys, the high ceiling heights in the building will still make it the tallest residential tower in the city, he says.

“We ended up with more units than we were allowed to have for engineering purposes. To provide the amount of service necessary, we couldn’t do it with the higher density, we really had to make the building smaller,” he says.

When the building was shortened, there was skepticism from some in the real estate community that the rationale was pure spin to explain falling sales.

In an earlier Star story, one of Shnaider’s executives said one reason for the height reduction was “the more residents we had, the more elevators were going to be used, and that wasn’t what we wanted in an exclusive building like Trump.” (Four elevators are designated for residents for the 57 habitable floors, although the building may be two stories higher to allow for mechanical systems.)

What is known is that sales for the tower started in September 2004, three years before the proposed start of construction. In comparison, it took competitor Ritz Carlton 14 months to break ground.

But the buck stops with Shnaider, who is remarkably frank during the interview. He says he isn’t sure why the $500 million project didn’t sell as well as expected initially, although sales have been better since the smaller suites were introduced.

“We were certainly asking very high prices at the time. But we may have been too early for the market,” he says, noting that the Four Seasons and the Shangri-La hotel brands now have condominiums selling in Toronto.

“We started at $700 a square foot, which was unheard of back then and now we’re over a thousand a square foot. But I think the market has caught up.”

His purchase of the penthouse, meanwhile, may prompt skepticism that Shnaider couldn’t find a buyer for the pricey property. But he insists that he’s buying because “it’s a good investment.”

One gets the sense that Shnaider would break ground if only as a point of pride – whether it made money or not. But the business person in him seems resolute: “If this were a loss-making venture, I wouldn’t go ahead,” he says.

Shnaider has shown he knows when to cut and run: He sold the Formula 1 Team in short order because he couldn’t find a Russian sponsor. “We underestimated the interest of Russian companies, thinking they would embrace it more than they did,” he says.

And, despite the prominence of the Trump project, it is only one small part of his diverse holdings.

Over the past two months, for example, he has rolled out a new convenience store chain in the Ukraine, tapping the need for modern community-based retail. He plans to open 1,500 stores in the next several years.

But the Trump project is the most visible part of his empire, especially since it’s in his backyard.

“I wanted to build something important in the city, something I could be proud of,” he says.

By the time Shnaider bought the site, the Trump Tower was already steeped in controversy. “I knew from the beginning this wouldn’t be an easy project,” he says.

The site was initially supposed to have been a Ritz Carlton hotel and condominium, with Donald Trump as a partner, when it was first announced in 2001.

That soon fizzled after the Star revealed one of the original partners had been convicted of bankruptcy fraud and embezzlement in the United States and had fled to Canada. The Ritz Carlton backed out, eventually finding a new site years later at Simcoe and Wellington Sts.

Meanwhile, the original location was sold to Shnaider and his development company. Trump remained as a partner and his brand was put on the hotel – the flamboyant developer’s first venture at the time outside the United States.

It seemed like an ideal match: Two billionaires who exemplified the high life would be creating one of the world’s tallest and most luxurious residencies in Toronto.

In many ways the building symbolized the loftiness of Shnaider’s ambition. To say his rise was meteoric seems almost like an understatement, since he formed the holding company Midland Resources only in 1994 at the age of 26.

Born in St. Petersburg, Shnaider moved to North York when he was 13. His parents, an engineer and a dentist, ended up buying a deli.

Shnaider went to William Lyon Mackenzie C.I. while helping his parents in the deli. He later studied economics at York University.

With help from his politically connected future father-in-law, Shnaider ended up in the steel business, eventually setting up his own steel trading shop in Russia. One of his big customers was the Zaporizhstal plant in eastern Ukraine, one of the country’s largest steel producers. With privatization in the ’90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Shnaider and his partner Shifrin, an academic with a PhD in metallurgical engineering, formed Midland. They eventually bought the Zaporizhstal plant.

From there, they built a substantial collection of assets throughout Eastern Europe.

The steel plant acquisition was perfect timing, as prices for the material started to jump with the economic rise of India and China. Now the industry is in major consolidation, with steel mills fetching hefty premiums. Asked whether he would sell, Shnaider says with a smile, “Everything is for sale. … But we are concentrating on other areas such as retail and real estate.”

It continues to be a sore point with the self-made billionaire, however, that a negative stigma seems to surround successful Russians.

He wrote a letter to Forbes after a mostly laudatory profile of him in 2005 that referred to the “murky” world of Russian business.

“There is this stereotype that was especially strong during the ’90s that every Russian who is successful or made money must have done so through connections with the mafia, or arms dealing or prostitution, which I find really offensive,” he says. “But Russians are incredibly educated people who are fast learners and willing to work hard. That is the stereotype you don’t hear about as much.”

Time is precious for Shnaider, who travels constantly, including an appointment in New York this day. He glances at his oversized watch, a $150,000 Audemars Piguet Royal Oak tourbillion. After saying goodbye to his guests, he slips into a jacket by Neapolitan tailor Attolini.

Then it’s into the sports car and a brisk drive to his waiting jet.

Thestar

Hats off to the Bank of Montreal for starting a practice that all financial institutions should have in place, and could even improve upon.

BMO has announced that prospective homebuyers who take out a five-year fixed-rate mortgage and existing homeowners who renew for a five-year fixed rate, by Oct. 31 of this year, will not have to pay basic banking service charges during that five-year period.

The bank says having its Performance Service Plan with unlimited transactions free of charge during the term will save a person more than $800, which could be worth an extra mortgage payment.

Service charges have always been a bone of contention. The simple question people ask is why should they have to pay to take out their own money, and the simple answer they receive is that there are expenses in paying staff and building the buildings to handle transactions.

It’s been the picayune service fees that have been particularly irksome for people, like being billed for each cheque written or each withdrawal.

Particularly when a person takes out a mortgage and pays interest — a meagre $100,000 mortgage at six per cent costs $91,900 in interest over 25 years or $127,400 over 35 years — it seems galling for that person to be charged $10.50 a month for a full-service package on a bank account.

The Bank of Montreal’s announcement to waive service charges for five-year mortgage owners also brings another issue into play, that of fixed-rate mortgages.

Most Canadian mortgages offer rates close to the prime interest rate, but U.S. lenders also offer teaser rates — one or two per cent for the first couple of years — and subprime rates.

In addition, while only 22 per cent of subprime borrowers in Canada have variable mortgage rates, according to CIBC World Markets economist Benjamin Tal, the figure is double in the U.S.

In fact, it is now estimated that 40 per cent of Americans who had adjustable rate mortgages as they are called in the U.S., in recent years will have their homes foreclosed upon.

Thus the new Bank of Montreal deal works for it on a number of fronts. It offers some appeasement to clients and politicians on service charges, it stabilizes the length of mortgage loans and, therefore, bank revenue projections, and it may protect some homebuyers from losing their homes due to shocking increases in variable-mortgage payments due to rising rates.

Basic service charges could be waived for anyone holding a mortgage with the bank, and even more charges could be waived for people renewing, which would reduce the amount of shopping around for mortgages that goes on.

Perhaps in the spirit of negotiation, you could barter which fees get excused. The $30 charge for ordering another 200 cheques comes to mind.

Canada.com