Real estate seminar in Oakville

Last week we held the first of what we hope will be several seminars on real estate at the St. Joseph Ukraine Catholic Church and Heritage Centre in Oakville. Lesya Babiy, UCU's branch manager at our Mississauga location hosted the event. The main speaker was George Dlugosh of Prudential Town Centre Realty Inc.

George Dlugosh talks about the particularities of the Oakville real estate market

If you want to live in Oakville, be prepared to pay a premium the closer you live to a good school. During the seminar George displayed a set of maps that showed a very close correlation between school rankings and house prices. Clearly a lot of younger families are moving into the area. If you don't have children, you can get a bit of a bargain if you look for areas that are not close to good schools. However, most schools in Oakville have a pretty high ranking!

Ukrainian Credit Union Limited has now held real estate seminars with a half-dozen different real estate agents, each targeting a slightly different audience. Some were focused on first-time buyers, some on new immigrants, some on selling rather than buying a house. What strikes us is that every agent that runs a successful business has an angle that provides value. We always learn something new at each seminar.

One of George's differentiators is that he does a lot of research on "why" a house sold for a particular price, so he can advise his clients on whether the asking prices are reflective of the market in the area. He also tracks the average inventory of houses in a particular price range very carefully to see how much leeway his clients have when it comes to making a bid. While many agents do this as well, what struck us as different is that George gets much more granular in the price ranges and rather than tracking low, medium and high prices ranges, he has a good eight or ten price bands.

On a separate note, we should mention that the Terrce Cafe at St. Joseph's Church has very delicious food on sale every Thursday.

More pictures of the event can be found on our Facebook page.