Been here six months.

I have recently moved to Calgary from Winnipeg. We have a down payment that matches our income threshold for a mortgage and we are pre-approved for a mortgage. The style of homes in Calgary are so much different from those in Winnipeg. There is quite a bit of urban sprawl which vastly affects housing prices. The negotiations are a bit different here as well.

We first came to Calgary after I accepted a job offer from my current employer. We sold the home we owned in Winnipeg and were able to sock away a net proceeds check, and also we will be able to recoup some of the costs of the sale of the house as we moved across Canada for work. The first Calgary winter I experienced only had 1 day where I didn't want to go outside because it was too cold. Quite the contrast from Winnipeg winters. We were very lucky to find a nice home to rent temporarily. 1300 sqft semi-attached built in '91 with a garage for $1200/month. Most basement suites here are $800 and higher.

We inquired as to what kind of mortgage we'd qualify for on one income with the down payment that we had available. It was a healthy amount by Winnipeg standards, and seemed to be healthy for the Calgary market as well. When we arrived in November and started looking for homes we quickly found that the only homes on the market were on the market because they didn't sell in the fall. As a result we'd been entering homes that needed some major renovations and we gave up on the house hunt for a few months. Rates held true and we got re-pre-approved in spring.

In Winnipeg you'd find a home that is built with living space in mind, less focus on the bedrooms. In Calgary everything is a lot newer than in Winnipeg. The living space is cramped to fit on narrow lots and the bedrooms upstairs are little more than closets with doors on them often times. Anything built in the boom years feels like a small labyrinth of poor design decisions, so much so that they have no potential. There are barely any wartime houses here in areas with affordable pricing. The bungalows are often nice layouts but they are in major need of updating, and again the basements have often been slapped together without much forethought to how the spaces will be used. They just throw up a wall and start playing "Settlers of Cattan - Calgary" with the drywall to suit their expanding families. The end result being a death trap dungeon in the basement. Some builders build on odd sized lots and just use the same architectural plan, resulting in a home that should have a walk out basement but instead has a deadly looking 25 riser staircase from a deck off the back of the house to the garage.

The home that we sold for $165,000 in Winnipeg would cost at least $600,000 here, only because if it were built in 1914 it would likely be in the core of the city with high land value. In Winnipeg houses in the core, although huge, are usually valued lower because of the social issues that the city has in it's core areas. Winnipeg's sprawl isn't a residential sprawl necessarily but an industrial one. Calgary seems to have a central commercial district and then three or four industrial corridors. A new construction home costs half as much as an old home in the core, but it's got a lot less character and usually comes with a much longer commute. My work place is not very accessible by transit despite being off a major route, so using the C-Train is not feasible. There are plenty of bike paths but the distance would mean having a shower on arrival. This amenity does not exist in the office either.

We found a home that was a huge compromise in that it was finished nicely, but only had one bathroom and no garage. The yard was spectacular however. We offered a price on a home, 12,000 under asking, the seller countered at 2,000 under asking and asked us to increase our deposit by $5,000. We countered with their deposit request but at 7,000 under asking. They countered again asking for 1,500 more. We declined at this point. The seller accepted another offer a week later, and the financing fell through (happens often I out here that financing falls through). The seller contacted us back and asked if we were still interested. Since other homes were coming on the market we politely declined. The sellers put the house back on the market while giving the original buyers an extension on financing! The house sold for our original offer price! Jerks.