The 10 Most Valued Work Skills in 2020

There’s no doubt about it: in the future, automation for many jobs through digital systems and smart machines will be the norm. This will change the face of the workplace. The skill set that will be in high demand will also change, as a natural consequence.

With the current flow of things, value creation is highly affected by social technologies. That’s why social intelligence, new media proficiency, and tech based skills will rule the workplace of the future.

The data visualization presented here by top ten online colleges gives a thorough overview of the skills that will be most valued by 2020 - Source Life Hack

Reason 5 You Should List Your House Today

Greater Toronto Area is a changing market. Homes and commercial real estate in Toronto are going through a dynamic transition right now. What you ask? Well, for one the definition of a 'spacious' house has changed to the 'efficient' house. The intensification process seems to have dug in and now widely accepted, even in sub-urban areas such as Markham, Richmond Hill, Vaughan and so far out as the Durham region. Regardless of any of these trends, home ownership is now in demand more than ever. Buyers have realized that if they don't buy now, it is only going to get harder. 

For the home owners, here are you reasons why you should sell today. 

1.  High demand for your property

Sale of homes is at a record high since 2007. In the most recent study home sales have increased by 9.2% over the previous year. There is an influx of serious buyers waiting for the right home.

2.  More buyers in GTA Market

The supply of homes for sale is at lowest point since 2005. There is a drop of 21.6% compared to his time last year. Selling your properly now when there is more buyers than homes for sale my get you the best price.

3.  New Competition

Over the last several years, most homeowners selling their home did not have to complete wit

h a new construction project around the block. As the market is recovering, more and more builders are jumping back in. these “shiny” new homes will again become competition as they are an attractive alternative to many purchasers.

4.  Interest Rate Climbing the Ladder

Whether you’re upsizing or downsizing, your housing expense will increase more a year from now as mortgage interest rates will increase approximately one full point this year.

5.  Timeline Rather Seems To Be Promising

There is less transaction during this time of year, so the time spent waiting for appraisals and inspections are shorter, therefore during the next 90 days is the best time to do these transactions.  Buying a home at this time will be a friendlier experience.

One thing is for sure. If you own a home, its foundations just as well be made of cold hard cash. Now is the time to get your hands on it. 

Formally educated as an Architect, Jagdeep Singh is Toronto REALTOR™ consulting on both resale real estate and new developments. Powerful Local Focus on Real Estate with a Global Perspective™. This post is for information purposes only. Though effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents, the reader is advised to verify the information independently. This post may contain contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. The reader is not allowed to reproduce it in any medium without the author’s prior written permission. Jagdeep Singh is a broker with Century 21 Heritage Group Ltd., brokerage (416) 798-7133 which is independently owned and operated. This message is not intended to solicit parties currently under contract.

4 Tips to Make Strong Property Investments

It's 2014! You may be thinking of investing in real estate this year, but how difficult is it?

Use these 4 tips to make strong property investments without being overwhelmed:

1) Learn Selectively

Learning how to buy that first investment house or property can be overwhelming. If you search Google for “real estate investing” you are given 217,000,000 results!

Pick one niche and one strategy, and learn a little about those. That’s it.

For example, you might be interested in buying small multifamily properties, like duplexes or triplexes, and hanging on to them until retirement. Searching Google for “how to buy a small multifamily property” will bring you far more targeted responses.

2) Start Small

Yes, you may want to acquire millions of dollars in real estate to stock your retirement fund, but that million dollar portfolio starts with a single purchase.

Perhaps it’s your goal to buy ten single family houses over the next five years. You do not need to buy all ten this year, or next. Perhaps you can buy just one this year, while learning how the process works. The year after you might buy two. Each year, you become more and more familiar with the process and can buy more and more properties.

3) Buy Only the Best Deals

Remember these three simple words: Quality over quantity. 

Having hundreds of properties does you no good if you aren’t making any money from them. When you are a multinational corporation or large hedge-fund buying up property, you can wager your bets and buy thousands of properties. However, if you are a regular person looking to stock your retirement fund, you can’t afford to buy bad deals.

Buying the best deals will allow you to spend less time managing properties, give you less stress while owning them, and help you build wealth even faster.

4) When you find the right opportunity, take action.

Waiting for the right opportunity is good. Waiting for the fear of taking action is bad. 

If you are going to wait for the right opportunity to buy, then have a checklist prepared to decide when the right opportunity presents itself. If it meets your criteria, then take action and put in an offer. Especially when consulting with a REALTOR, the last thing you want to do is not take action. After all you putting your energy in order to buy, not to endlessly wait. Understand that there will always be unknowns, however if you have a checklist of what meets your criteria, then moving forward and signing on the dotted line will become a no brainer. 

Happy investing. 

Formally educated as an Architect, Jagdeep Singh is Toronto REALTOR™ consulting on both resale real estate and new developments. Powerful Local Focus on Real Estate with a Global Perspective™.  This post is for information purposes only. Though effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents, the reader is advised to verify the information independently. This post may contain contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. The reader is not allowed to reproduce it in any medium without the author’s prior written permission. Jagdeep Singh is a broker with Century 21 Heritage Group Ltd., brokerage (416) 798-7133 which is independently owned and operated. This message is not intended to solicit parties currently under contract.

6 Questions You should Ask when Choosing a Lawyer for Your Real Estate Closing

It is typical to use a lawyer for real estate closings and all the related work that is involved. While the amount of fee charged is one criterion to determine which lawyer to work with, what should you do when you get relatively the same fee or similar fee quoted to you by multiple lawyers? An informed consumer will often ask the following questions:

1. What sort of experience does the lawyer have? Make sure that the lawyer has been dealing in real estate closings and that is his or her primary business. 
2. Whether the lawyer offers “the personal touch.” Will you as the Buyer or Seller, actually meet the lawyer in person or will you be left to deal with assistants? 
3. Is the office staff experienced and competent? Sometimes lawyers will hire law students and expect them to know the intricacies of real estate transactions. Obviously, you don't want to have someone practice on the sale and purchase of your single biggest asset. 
4. What sort of accommodations can the lawyer's office offer? Let's say you have someone with limited mobility on title. Will the lawyer be able to assign a representative who can visit your house as opposed to you struggling to bring your family member to his or her office?
5. Will the transaction be processed within the office or will the work be outsourced to a third party? 
6. Does the lawyer have litigation experience or have someone that he or she can consult if there is a problem with a transaction? The lawyer’s ability to stick-handle the players if the transaction starts to go sideways is very important. 

Whatever the fee, it’s always a good idea to make sure that the lawyer will be accessible throughout the process and especially on closing. Make sure you check for all of these and

more. And if a lawyer gets uneasy answering these questions or makes it seem that you are taking up their precious time, then that in itself tells you something, doesn't it?

If you find yourself stuck in an unpleasant situation with a lawyer, then you have the option to reach out to The Law Society of Upper Canada. The Law Society’s authority to license and regulate lawyers and paralegals in the public interest is granted by the Ontario government through the Law Society Act and regulations made under the act. Here you can find the rules and legislations governing the lawyers.

Filing a Complaint against a lawyer: If you wish to file a complaint against a lawyer, then The Law Society of Upper Canada provides Complaint Services. There are various methods to reach the complaints department or you can simply download the complaint form to file a formal complaint. 

Formally educated as an Architect, Jagdeep Singh is Toronto REALTOR™ consulting on both resale real estate and new developments. Powerful Local Focus on Real Estate with a Global Perspective™.  This post is for information purposes only. Though effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents, the reader is advised to verify the information independently. This post may contain contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. The reader is not allowed to reproduce it in any medium without the author’s prior written permission. Jagdeep Singh is a broker with Century 21 Heritage Group Ltd., brokerage (416) 798-7133 which is independently owned and operated. This post is not intended to solicit parties currently under contract.

Expert Opinion on Real Estate

There's been too much talk about a bubble in Toronto. We have all seen the doom and gloom headlines from self proclaimed experts and we all know how much merit these have. Without making this post too long, here is what was recently in news. You make the decision.

Robert Shiller, the U.S. economist who foresaw the tech bubble of 2000 and the American housing collapse said, "Toronto prices keep going up. They have increased almost as much as New York prices ever did,” the Nobel-prize winner told a crowd of chartered financial analysts in Montreal two weeks ago. He went on to compare prices in Canada and the United States with graphs that support his view. Yet, when asked point blank, the Yale professor stopped short of calling it a bubble.

Formally educated as an Architect, Jagdeep Singh is Toronto REALTOR™ consulting on both resale real estate and new developments. Powerful Local Focus on Real Estate with a Global Perspective™.  This post is for information purposes only. Though effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents, the reader is advised to verify the information independently. This post may contain contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. The reader is not allowed to reproduce it in any medium without the author’s prior written permission. Jagdeep Singh is a broker with Century 21 Heritage Group Ltd., brokerage (416) 798-7133 which is independently owned and operated. This message is not intended to solicit parties currently under contract.

Obsessed with Real Estate?

Is hockey our favourite past time or is it weather that we discuss the most as Canadians? A recent poll found that in Toronto, people talk about real estate just as much as NHL playoffs. 47% people in Toronto were talking about housing.

I am not surprised by that number. Not because I am a real estate broker, living and working in the Greater Toronto Area, but because housing, a.k.a. shelter, is one of our basic needs, right up there with food and clothing. It is something that we require on a daily basis, so it is no surprise that we are constantly thinking about it.

Point to Ponder: How often do we act upon what we think? How often should we act upon what we think?

84% of survey respondents said that they think about real estate on a "regular basis". "There are at least two main reasons homes are so important to people," Richard Ivey School of Business professor Dr. June Cotte said. "One is that they are often seen as an extension of our identity, and represent who we are. A second reason is that owning a home in a desirable location is also seen as an advantage in terms of resources, such as schools, as well as status."

Only 28% of those surveyed said that they went to an open house as a method to preview a property 85% simply previewed homes online.



Formally educated as an Architect, Jagdeep Singh is Toronto REALTOR™ consulting on both resale real estate and new developments. Powerful Local Focus on Real Estate with a Global Perspective™.  This post is for information purposes only. Though effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents, the reader is advised to verify the information independently. This post may contain contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. The reader is not allowed to reproduce it in any medium without the author’s prior written permission. Jagdeep Singh is a broker with Century 21 Heritage Group Ltd., brokerage (416) 798-7133 which is independently owned and operated. This message is not intended to solicit parties currently under contract.

Really? Is it that simple?

Percentage Change: The Commission Game, by Tara Perkins, a real estate reporter with Globe and Mail, was interesting to read, mainly because it had a good mix of fact and fantasy. Published on 25 May 2013 as a cover story in the printed business section, it discusses real estate commissions. (http://bit.ly/Z7ib7j) 

According to Perkins, “technology has failed to snap consumers out of their complacency”. Perhaps what seems complacency is actually a real, need driven service that the consumers are seeking out. Real estate transactions are increasingly complex than ever before. Take it from me, an industry insider and a Real Estate Broker. A simple measure of this complexity are the real estate forms. They used to be much simpler and involved a lot less legalese. The standard form alone now is 5 pages long. Add a few pages of clauses to that and you are dealing with a pretty hefty document. I haven’t even discussed all the legal papers required before even getting to the offer stage. 

But let’s just say that a real estate sale was as easy as adopting the technology. The Internet part merely gets the buyers and sellers the information on the real estate out there. One still has to safely navigate the procedures set out for selling and buying houses, which by the way are not dictated by REALTORs but are dictated by the laws of the country.  Between spousal consents and terrorist financing, real estate sale is not as easy as browsing the Internet. 

Yes there has been a lot of talk about the Competition Bureau, at the expense of taxpayers’ money, trying to accomplish whatever they were trying to accomplish. I wrote the previous line like that because I really fail to see, what is so anti-competitive about real estate commissions from a consumer’s perspective. The choices available to the average home seller or home buyer are endless. You don’t have to believe me. Just get a real estate license and then try and go out and get a listing. You will very quickly realize how much competition is out there, within the real estate community itself. There are REALTORs providing options from low commissions, to buyer discounts, to added incentives in addition to charging less commission. Here as well, just like anything else, the age old wisdom of ‘You Get What You Pay For’ applies. 

There are a lot of flat fee, ‘mere posting’ services out there. This would be where the seller pays few hundred dollars to post their property on Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and then fields the calls for appointments, open houses, offers etc. These programs work or not will depend upon who you ask. Several companies started out on similar fee structure and have since closed down. Realistically, if these kinds of programs worked, then don’t you think that companies like Century 21, Royal LePage, ReMax etc. would have them? 

I am not a national level REALTOR. No individual is, as there is no such thing. I provide powerful local focus with a global perspective, within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). So when discussing market, I stick with GTA and what is happening here. 

Every newspaper and media outlet seems to be having a field day with the housing prices and how they have risen, supposedly at an astonishing speed. Does anyone stop to wonder why that is happening? Perhaps GTA’s population should be an indicator. According to one source, Canadian baby boomers added a little more than 400,000 people to the Canadian population. We have seen the same growth in population of Southern Ontario in little over 3 years that the baby boomers gave us in almost 19 years over the entire country. Look at the current vacancy rates in Toronto and you will see how people are flocking to rent while there are virtually no vacant condos out there. All these tenants are potential buyers and they will buy as soon as they can qualify for a mortgage. Where do you think the prices will go then, up or down? 

So it seems baseless for Perkins’ article to speculate that the market is going to stay flat, that the sellers are not going to make as much money and somehow that is going to cause a downward push on the real estate commissions. May be real estate commission are, what they are, because the real costs to being a REALTOR are way higher than what meets the eye. 

CREA’s consumer education campaign has the right premise, “Why do we think if we can look it up (on the internet, then) we can do it? When it comes to your home, get help, get a REALTOR.”

Formally educated as an Architect, Jagdeep Singh is Toronto REALTOR™ consulting on both resale real estate and new developments. Powerful Local Focus on Real Estate with a Global Perspective™

This post is for information purposes only. Though effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents, the reader is advised to verify the information independently. This post may contain contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. The reader is not allowed to reproduce it in any medium without the author’s prior written permission. Jagdeep Singh is a broker with Century 21 Heritage Group Ltd., brokerage (416) 798-7133 which is independently owned and operated. This message is not intended to solicit parties currently under contract.