Posts filed under 'Real Estate Matters'
The owner of this easycare lot is fighting a Developer in Chongqing City, China. The developer wants to build a shopping mall but the owner is holding out for his price — 20 million yuan, or about $2,600,000. “The owner refuses to move so the Developer has dug all around him to force him to,” says a saleswoman at Weilan Real Estate Co. “He wants his price or he’ll stay until the end of the world.”
I’ve had Sellers like that. But I wonder how this one gets his groceries?
July 20th, 2007
Benjamin Franklin said there was nothing certain in this world but death and taxes.
That in mind, it has always surprised me how few seniors are aware of their ability to defer property taxes in B.C. Since its inception in 1974, only a relative handful of homeowners have taken advantage of the Tax Deferment Program which allows seniors to set property taxes aside until death or selling the property.
The details are roughly as follows: it has to be your principal residence (vs. a rental or vacation property), you have to have 25% equity in it, be a B.C. resident, and prepared to pay a one-time application fee of $60. The debt is registered as a charge on title at the Land Titles Office and you settle it from the proceeds of sale if and when you sell — or your heirs attend to it after you’re gone.
The province pays the municipality for the deferred amount so nobody goes without, and with property values increasing by leaps and bounds there seems no good reason not to do it. Let the bouyant market carry the burden the rest of the way.
It has estate planning implications, so you might want to involve your heirs and financial planner in the decision.
Perhaps Ben Franklin was only partially right.
July 19th, 2007
Divorces are - presumably - always painful, but as with most of life’s experiences, some moreso than others.
A man undergoing a divorce in Sonneberg, Germany, was determined to split things right down the middle. Accordingly, he took a chainsaw and carved their house in two and took his half away on a forklift truck.
Reports aren’t clear as to how his wife reacted, but she was heard to say something about ‘…less to clean and paint.’
And if she took him to court, could he plead that he comes from a broken home?
July 18th, 2007
You may have seen the item in the local paper recently having to do with a home owner and her house which is, in her words “…a plain little box in disrepair ”.
Trouble is, City Hall sees it as an ‘Edwardian Classical bungalow’ with heritage value, and has conferred heritage status on it. That means it’s subject to quite strict guidelines governing changes able to be made to it, particularly so with respect to the exterior — and all changes must be approved by Council.
The City was concerned about rapid change in that particular municipality, and peremptorily put it on the heritage list. The owner was never consulted and learned about it some ten years after she bought it. She now wants to conduct needed repairs, and claims to have neither the resources nor the energy to turn it into the architectural gem its unbidden status now demands.
Being on the Heritage Registry is a double edged sword. Examples of architecturally or culturally valuable properties deserve preservation, but owners need to be aware of all the ramifications of that designation before taking that irrevocable step. An owner cannot demolish, add on, or substantially alter its appearance without Council consent, and that has resale implications among other things. True, grants are in place to assist owners in conducting approved alterations, and more details are at www.victoriaheritagefoundation.ca, but you need to look before you leap.
No doubt this owner wishes she had been given that option.
July 17th, 2007
I took down a series of birdhouses last fall and left them in the atrium of our house over the winter. I overlooked one as I erected them this past May, a ‘down market’ straw coconut-like thing that no previous birds had ever bothered with. Over the winter it had fallen from wherever I had left it the previous autumn and wedged itself behind a set of stacking lawn chairs, and that’s where it was this spring when a family of Berwick wrens, renowned for their unorthodox nesting sites, found it and set up housekeeping inside.
They soon had a nest underway and from inside my wife and I watched them come and go…and it wasn’t long before it was apparent that young chicks had hatched.
Early one morning soon thereafter I looked out only to see a half-fledged baby on the atrium floor. It had either fallen out or, perhaps, pushed in some Darwinian application that sets in when food is scarce and needs competing for. One for the cat. It lay there all morning, its heart beating almost imperceptably, obviously not long for this world. The ‘tough love’ parents came and went with assorted insects for the siblings destined to survive, but paid this one no heed.
“Leave it be”, my wife counseled. “It’s obviously not meant to live. Even the parents have given up on it.”
I took a spade and prepared a small hole in the garden for the inevitable.
So imagine my surprise and amazement later that day when I noticed it had somehow not expired; instead, it was making an attempt at movement. And life. It reminded me in a small way of Jon Krakauer’s account of survival in his riveting book ‘Into Thin Air’ wherein he describes the disastrous climb up Mt. Everest and both the death and heroics that ensued. Its half-fledged wings attempted first flight but its legs, now caught in the gaps thoughtfully provided by the floorboards, ruled out any real mobility — and certainly precluded any return to the nest.
The parents remained indifferent to its struggle and continued to service the nest with no offer of sustenance to their fallen offspring.
“Should we pick it up and put it back in the nest?” my wife asked.
“Leave it be” I rejoined. “It’s obviously not meant to live. Even the parents have given up on it.”
But live it did, and I couldn’t but intervene. With the help of a Popsicle stick and rubber gloves so as not to impart human scent, I picked the wretch up off the floor and gently slipped it back into the company of its siblings. Whether they were pleased to see him I can’t say (see ’competition for food’ above), but when I took the nest down a week or so later it was, to my happy surprise, empty. No maggoty carcass bearing testimony to its demise as I had expected to find.
It’s Darwinian. As with the marketplace, the strong survive.
It’s just that some of us need a boost now and again.
July 5th, 2007
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