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The Group at Re/Max First We help buyers and sellers in the Calgary real estate market.

An appraiser is not deciding what your home is worth. They are answering a much narrower question, and understanding whi...
10/13/2026

An appraiser is not deciding what your home is worth. They are answering a much narrower question, and understanding which question changes how you read the number.

The question is not “what could this sell for?” It is “does this specific property support this specific loan amount, based on what comparable homes have already sold for?” Already sold. Past tense. In a market that has moved, an appraisal is looking backward by design.

That matters more in a slower market than a fast one. When prices were climbing, appraisals chased and mostly caught up. When the market flattens, the gap between an accepted offer and an appraised value opens up, and somebody has to cover it.

The useful move, if you are selling in Calgary this fall, is to make the appraiser’s job easy. They are working with far less information about your home than you have. A new roof looks like a roof. A rebuilt drainage system looks like a yard. If you do not hand them the list of what you have done, with years and rough costs attached, none of it counts.

And if it comes in low, that is not a verdict. It is one opinion built on old data. You can cover the gap, renegotiate, or order a second opinion where the comparables were genuinely wrong.

DM me the word APPRAISAL if you want the prep list before yours is scheduled.

The table is smaller than you planned and the house is louder than you wanted. That is the good part.Nobody’s Thanksgivi...
10/12/2026

The table is smaller than you planned and the house is louder than you wanted. That is the good part.

Nobody’s Thanksgiving looks like the version in the magazine. Somebody is late. The oven timing does not work out. There is a folding chair at the end that everybody pretends is a real chair. And every year the people who were here are the thing you remember, not the room they were in.

I get to see a lot of houses. The ones people love are almost never the ones that photographed best. They are the ones where something happened.

Happy Thanksgiving from my house to yours. Enjoy the loud part.

You do not have to sell your current home to buy the next one, and a lot of people never run the numbers on keeping it b...
10/11/2026

You do not have to sell your current home to buy the next one, and a lot of people never run the numbers on keeping it because they assume the answer is no.

Sometimes the answer is no. A property that does not cover its costs while tying up your equity and your borrowing capacity is not an investment, it is a second job with a mortgage attached. But the reflex to sell automatically costs some people a property they could not buy again today at any price.

This is a math question with about six inputs, and most people run two of them and stop. What the rent actually is, not what you hope it is. What it costs to hold, including the months it sits empty and the furnace that will fail eventually. What keeping it does to your ability to qualify for the next place, which is the input people forget entirely.

Swipe through for the full calculation, in the order that matters.

Save this before you list the house you are leaving.

Everybody has one room they go to when the day was too much.It is almost never the nicest room in the house. It is the k...
10/10/2026

Everybody has one room they go to when the day was too much.

It is almost never the nicest room in the house. It is the kitchen at 10pm with one light on. The chair by the window that gets the afternoon sun. The porch, in October, with a blanket and something warm, watching nothing in particular happen on the street.

Today is World Mental Health Day, and I am not going to pretend a house fixes anything. It does not. But a home does hold some of it. There is a real difference between a place you live and a place that gives you somewhere to land, and I think about that more than I think about square footage.

If you are house hunting right now, that is worth adding to the list. Not just how many bedrooms. Where in this house would I go on the worst day?

Tell me your room.

Every renovation that goes badly over budget in Calgary goes over for the same handful of reasons, and none of them are ...
10/09/2026

Every renovation that goes badly over budget in Calgary goes over for the same handful of reasons, and none of them are the ones people plan for. Nobody’s budget dies because they picked the more expensive tile. It dies because of what was found behind the wall on day four.

October is when a lot of people start planning spring work, which makes right now the useful time to talk about this rather than in March when the quotes are already signed.

The honest version is that you cannot eliminate the unknown. You can price it, sequence the work so the unknown surfaces early, and hold back money for it on purpose instead of discovering you needed it.

Swipe through for the four that actually blow budgets, and how much to hold back.
Save this before you call a contractor.

Your parents are going to bring up selling the house at some point this fall, or they are going to carefully not bring i...
10/08/2026

Your parents are going to bring up selling the house at some point this fall, or they are going to carefully not bring it up, which is its own kind of conversation.

Downsizing gets written about as a financial decision and it almost never is. It is a decision about stairs, about a garden that got bigger every year without changing size, about whether the guest room still needs to exist, and about leaving a place where a lot happened.

The families who handle this well are not the ones who decide fastest. They are the ones who start the conversation a year before anyone has to, so nobody is making a housing decision inside a crisis.

If you are the adult child in this, your job is not to have the answer. It is to make it a subject that can be discussed without it meaning something has been decided.

Swipe through for how the timeline actually works, and the question that opens the conversation without ending it.

DM me the word DOWNSIZE if you want to talk through the timing for your family. No pressure and no listing conversation attached to it.

Get the insurance quote before you remove your conditions, not after. This is the step buyers skip most often and the on...
10/07/2026

Get the insurance quote before you remove your conditions, not after. This is the step buyers skip most often and the one that has quietly killed the most deals I have watched.

Here is what happens. The inspection comes back fine. Financing is in place. Everybody relaxes. Then the insurance application goes in and the answer is either a decline, a surcharge that changes the monthly cost, or a requirement to replace something within thirty days of taking possession.

Insurers are asking harder questions than they were even three years ago. The roof and its age. What kind of electrical panel is in there. Whether there is a wood stove and whether it was installed to code with paperwork to prove it. The age of the plumbing. The claims history attached to the address, which follows the property and not the owner, and which you cannot see.

None of this is exotic and none of it is expensive to check. It is just that it sits outside the standard checklist, so it gets discovered at the one moment when you have no leverage left.

Call an insurance broker the same week you book the inspection. One phone call, and it either confirms what you already believe about the house or it tells you something worth knowing while you can still act on it.

If you are buying in Calgary this fall, put it on the list.

10/07/2026

A lot of buyers begin their home search with the wrong number.

A pre-approval answers one question: what is the most this lender is willing to risk on you? It is a ceiling. It is not a recommendation, and it is not built around your life. It does not know about the daycare, the car that is nearly done, the fact that you would like to take a trip once a year, or the emergency that has not happened yet.

So people get approved for a number, go shopping at that number, and end up in a house that works on paper and squeezes every month.

Here is what I would actually do. Take the payment you have been comfortable with, add whatever you can genuinely add without resenting it, and treat that as the real number. Then work backwards to a price. That number is almost always lower than the ceiling, and the gap between the two is the difference between owning a home and being owned by one.

Getting approved for more is not a compliment. It is a credit limit.

Buy the house you can live in, not the one you qualify for.

Every house has a running clock on it, and most owners find out where they are on that clock in the worst possible week....
10/05/2026

Every house has a running clock on it, and most owners find out where they are on that clock in the worst possible week.

This is not a scare list. Most of these are ordinary, all of them are predictable, and knowing roughly where yours sits turns a surprise into a plan. That matters whether you are staying put for ten more years or listing in the spring, because a buyer prices an unknown at worst case and prices a known number at actual.

Ranked by what the failure actually costs you, not by how alarming it looks.

Swipe through, then go find out how old three of these are in your own home. It takes about fifteen minutes and a flashlight.

Save this and check it off on a Sunday.

Someone in your family offered to help with the down payment, but the conversation stalled because neither of you knew w...
10/02/2026

Someone in your family offered to help with the down payment, but the conversation stalled because neither of you knew what needed to happen next.

This is one of the most common ways people buy a first home in Calgary, and it goes wrong for boring paperwork reasons far more often than for family reasons.

Lenders are not suspicious of family help. They are required to document where money came from, and money that appears in your account three weeks before closing with no trail attached will hold up your financing. A gift that is properly papered from the start causes zero problems. The same gift handled casually can cost you the house.

There is also a conversation nobody enjoys but everyone should have, which is whether this is a gift or a loan, and what happens to it if things change. Getting that clear now protects the relationship far more than avoiding it does.

Swipe through for how it actually works, including the one form that does most of the heavy lifting.

Send this to the family member who offered. It is easier than explaining it twice.

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115-8820 Blackfoot Trail SE
Calgary, AB
T2W4B4

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