Leaside renters look north to invest
Matt Roth doesn’t mind condo living.
“I love a view. I’ll take a view over an extra 500 square feet any day,” he said.
But there’s nothing like a baby to focus your priorities, said Roth, 35, a director with a downtown communications company, who, until a year ago, was living in a Leaside semi.
“From a life-stage perspective, my wife and I married two years ago, we got pregnant very quickly and our daughter was born last year. There are obviously tons of considerations that come with that,” he said. Although home ownership was a priority, and he and his wife, Crystal, loved their rental, “it was a neighbourhood where we were never going to be able to buy our first home, which was hugely disappointing,” said Roth.
Rather than settling for long daily commutes from the suburbs or mortgaging themselves for a fixer-upper, they acted on a discussion they had been having for years during frequent visits with friends and family.
They moved to Collingwood, where Roth said, “We paid less than we would be paying for a studio condo in Toronto — under $500,000 for a three-plusone bedroom, two bath.”
The home and yard is on a quiet circle where Roth envisions Darby riding her bike with the other neighbourhood kids in a few years.
In the meantime, the house is a home, not a DIY project.
“There’s a couple of windows I want to replace. There’s some carpet I want to redo. . . But I don’t need to come in and feel like I need to tear the kitchen out, which is where we were probably looking if we decided to buy in town or even in some of the towns that are closer to the GTA,” said Roth.
Their jobs — Crystal does training for a financial institution — allow the couple to work from home about 75 per cent of the time.
Roth concedes that when he goes to the city for meetings, about once a week, it’s a long day. He hits the road by 5 a.m. to avoid the worst of the traffic and stays past the evening rush, sometimes arriving home after 10 p.m. But it’s easier to make that time up since he won’t have to do it again the next day.
Sidestepping the aggressive competition in Toronto was also a consideration. “We didn’t want to go through 18 bidding wars to find a place,” he said.
“We gave it some thought — if we wanted to do a condo or we wanted to continue renting in Toronto and maybe buy a cottage. But, ultimately, there were a lot of benefits to going this way that we just weren’t going to be able to provide (Darby) by staying in the city.”