A plan B for prospective homeowners
Some choose to rent in Toronto while owning outside the city
When it comes to young, first-time buyers looking to stake their claim in Toronto’s hot real estate market, the popular narrative is often one of these: scrimp to buy a small, downtown condo unit, or say goodbye to life in the city and set up somewhere cheaper.
But these aren’t the only paths to home ownership. Dayna Winter, a Toronto resident of 17 years, has found an alternate route: keep your rental in Toronto and buy elsewhere.
The 38-year-old, a content marketer at Shopify, recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the closing of her house in Picton, Prince Edward County.
“In the last few years, I’ve gotten my financial s--t together and felt like I still couldn’t afford to live in the city,” Winter says. She was “fantasy shopping” on realtor.ca when she spotted the two-bedroom home in Picton, around the corner from shopping and restaurants.
“I thought ‘This is a great compromise.’ I’ve always wanted to retire in the country and thought, why would I wait? I have this job that’s pretty flexible, I can work from anywhere.
“I’ll just jump and buy this house and figure it out later, which I did.”
Amanda Flude, 37, and Tim Butters, 33, found themselves in a similar situation as Winter last year. The recently engaged couple was ready to buy a home, but was priced out of the city.
“We work in the city and really love our neighbourhood, (around) Gerrard St. and Coxwell Ave., so that was our original aim, but the market in our area was cost-prohibitive, with homes around us going for well over a million dollars,” Flude says.
“We started looking at different models of ownership and began to consider the notion of buying outside the city, where our money could go further.”
Coincidentally, they also ended up in Prince Edward County, having fallen in love with the area years before, when Butters’ parents owned a home in the region.
“Our conversations turned from ‘What if . . .?’ to ‘Why not?!’ ” Flude says.
After many weekends spent touring properties, the couple settled on their dream home: a three-bedroom, threebathroom house on a treed, waterfront site along a quiet road.
“As soon as we saw it, we knew it was meant for us. Given our criteria, we wouldn’t have been able to come close to something comparable in the city,” Flude says.
While maintaining a rented home base in Toronto and investing your dollars in real estate elsewhere can offer the best of both worlds, it doesn’t come without challenges.
There’s the issue of maintaining your property when you’re not there and, of course, floating both a monthly rent and a mortgage. For Winter, the solution was to list her Picton home on Airbnb.
“(I realized) the only way that I could afford this on top of rent is if the house, for a while, pays for itself,” she says.
“I crunched the numbers and realized . . . I could do this. Even if I have a vacancy rate of 50 per cent, I can still make all my money back.”
To stand out from the pack — a search on Airbnb reveals more than 300 properties for rent in the region — Winter transformed the house into a whimsical, Wes Anderson-themed wonderland that has since been rented some 26 times. She usually makes the trip to the county about once a week, staying for a day or two and prepping the house for the next guests.
Flude and Butters aim to spend at least two weekends per month at their Bay of Quinte retreat, and more so during vacations. But maintenance is a challenge. “As people with cottages would tell you, maintaining two homes can be challenging,” Flude says.
It’s a worthwhile inconvenience. “For us, it allowed us to achieve our objective of home ownership and have a place that we can make our own . . . while still working in Toronto and enjoying the amenities that the city has to offer,” she explains. “From a financial standpoint, it makes sense to us as there’s an opportunity to grow our investment.”
After a year as a dual renter and homeowner, Winter is getting ready to make a change. Come May, she’s giving up her Toronto apartment and will move to Picton full-time, returning to the city once or twice a month. She says she has no regrets about her path to ownership.
“I can see people doing this for 10 years and building up the equity and then being able to afford in Toronto. I think it’s a really good interim thing for young people,” she says. “I paid $215,000 for my house. You’d get a dumpster in Toronto for that.”