Corner Houses

Buying a house?

No, you are buying land.  Banks know it.  We don't.  They urge us to ditch renting and buy homes.  Its pretty convincing most of the time because of the pretty ads with mom and dad, two kids, boy and girl, a dog and cars in the driveway.

However, your home can be a good investment if you are on the same page with banks.  They know that like most people, you can never finish paying off the loan/mortgage they gave you, not in this unpredictable economic quicksand that closed Sears Canada, the department store, in January 2018.

You can be on the same page with banks if you merge the two intentions, to have a place of your own and to make money when you decide to sell it.  That is where buying a house at a street corner comes in.  When you sell it after say 15 years, I can buy it, demolish it to the last brick and sell it to a gas station that needs the land badly.

A good example is the photo in this blog.  It used to be a one storey blue house, now it is being renovated into six condos and there is a big ad about how to buy off-plan (while they are still building).

I’m not an architect but I still cannot imagine that six homes will come from that blue house, corner property or not.  One thing for sure, buyers will get used to the idea of hearing the neighbour using the toilet and flushing, something common even in older Canadian apartment buildings.

Corner houses have a lot of potential down the road, but they are seldom high on buyers’ lists.  They usually gush over the high ceiling, kitchen, basement, back yard etc. 

If they think like banks, they will scout for corner properties, but they are hard to come by.  How many are in your street?  But if you do find one grab it, because it is more valuable than a house that is like salami between two slices of bread.

By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.