Participating is your city and neighbourhood has an impact on how your city invests in infrastructure to make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians. I think safer streets translates directly to Real Estate value.
Creating Bike Friendly Cities
The Need for Mandatory Energy Assesments
Voluntary energy labelling of houses offers untapped potential for individual Realtors, brokerages and franchises to create value for home buyers and sellers. Think about the energy labels on appliances and cars and food. The market is used to seeing product and energy information and labels. So what does a voluntary building label look like in the real estate marketplace?
Promoting Canada’s liveability rankings
The Economist’s World’s Most Liveable Cities issue ranks cities according to 39 data sets including safety, education, hygiene, health care, culture, environment, recreation, political-economic stability and public transportation. Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary sit in the top five on the The Economist’s list. These key Canadian real estate markets share the top five positions with Vienna, Austria and Melbourne, Australia. New York is used as baseline. Interestingly, some of the world’s most buoyant real estate markets are also on the list of top 100 cities.
The implication to Canada’s real estate marketplace is not directly correlative. I have many conversations with colleagues and clients who speculate about where our marketplace is getting its tenacity. Generational wealth transfer is definitely one source of Canadian real estate stability and growth. I believe the attraction of global foreign investment in a time of social, economic and environmental instability has a major impact on our market, and I think liveability taps the psyche of wealthy people the world over.
Read the rest of the article at REMOnline.com
Chris Chopik is a sustainability communication and policy consultant, Realtor and real estate instructor in Toronto.
Eco Home News: Real Estate and Rising Gas Prices
Originally Published in Tonic Magazine 2007.
The suburban lifestyle is built on the baseline principal of cheap gasoline. Since 2003 we have seen gas prices more than double. Today we are seeing the impacts to quality of life for residents of Toronto’s suburban communities. This expensive transportation inflation is influencing behaviour and is fuelling a revaluation of where people choose to live and work, and how they choose to get around. As the cost of car commuting increases, suburban lifestyles will continue to evolve, and urban lifestyles will become the preferred alternative...