Everyone would love a cottage, wouldn’t they? A little getaway in the woods or the mountaintops where you can spend winter nights crouched around a fireplace, or weeks in the summer spent up at the lake? It might seem like just about every Canadian’s fantasy and in fact, thousands of cottages are sold every year across the country. However cottage sales, just like all other real estate sales, slow down drastically in the winter. And are sometimes slower to start back up in spring than other types of residential real estate. This year though, thanks to a mild winter in Ontario and only a few regions of the province seeing any real snow fall or coverage on the ground at all, cottage-hunting season has come early this year, and sales are up like never before.
This, according to Huntsville real estate agent Susan Brown, who says that this is the time of year when her clients are headed south and are more interested in their tropical vacations than they are their spring ones. But this year is quite the exception. Ms. Brown has handled four Toronto mortgages in the past two months that have been home loans on cottages, and it even astounds her. “I’ve been busier now than I have been in 22 years in the winter. Usually it’s very quiet” she said on CTV News Saturday.
So why the major shift?
The change in cottage real estate this year can be attributed to snow or rather, a lack of it. While cottages are usually in back country and require access to back roads and pathways, many of these areas are simply impassible during the winter months because of the amount of snow covering or blocking them. But cottage country has also seen far less snowfall this year than it’s used to, leaving this roads and access-ways wide open for cottage hunters and real estate agents to get into the property.
Ms. Brown also says, “I was showing a young couple a few weeks ago, and normally we would have to have snowshoes on; we would have been up to our hips in snow without them, and this year we just walked in.”
And it’s not just the buyers who are starting to activate the market earlier than usual, but sellers too. While cottage owners usually wait until April or May to list their cottage, they too are getting in on the action and starting to list early. This could be because they are able to do outdoors repairs due to the nice weather, or simply because they are able to get up to their cottage to make repairs and make it “show-worthy;” whereas they might not be able to do that under typical Ontario winter conditions.
Are you going to get in on the frenzy? If you’ve always dreamed of being part of cottage country and think this is your year, speak to a Toronto mortgage broker and get in on the market while it’s hot!
