74 Calaveras Ave., Nepean, Ont.
Listing price: $365,000
Selling price: $384,500
Previous selling prices: $247,000 (2006); $208,800 (2003); $168,529 (2001)
Days on market: Five
Taxes: $3,380 (2018)
Listing agent: Steve Walsh, Walker Real Estate Group at Re/Max Absolute Realty
The action
The kitchen has a breakfast bar and granite countertops.
An early-fall listing in Nepean usually doesn’t drive this much demand, but listing agent Steve Walsh said the sellers came to the conclusion that there was enough interest to call for offers five days after listing the home.
Ten offers came in, with the sellers accepting one that was $19,500 over their asking price.
“We got everybody through so nobody rushed and put in offers within 10 or 20 minutes,” Mr. Walsh said. “The strategy paid off.”
The sellers had an open house on the Sunday, which had a lot of second visits from showings on the Friday and Saturday. By 12 p.m. on the Tuesday, they had the 10 offers.
There was mostly millennial interest, Mr. Walsh said, but a handful of investors were keen on the property as well.
“If your home is priced properly and shows really well, it’s going to get a lot of showings. But that doesn’t mean there will be pen to paper,” Mr. Walsh said. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if we got five offers, but I was surprised at 10. That meant 10 people were ready to buy.”
What they got
The basement was finished within the last 10 years.
The three-bedroom, four-bathroom home is located in Barrhaven, a growing suburb about 25 minutes from Ottawa’s downtown.
The roof was redone last year, along with most of the pieces in the kitchen. Within the past decade, the basement was finished, the powder room was upgraded and the backyard (with a deck) was redone.
“There was a pride of ownership,” Mr. Walsh said.
A gas fireplace in the living room gives way to an open kitchen that has granite counter tops and a breakfast bar.
All the bedrooms are located upstairs. The master includes a four-piece ensuite with a soaker tub and glass shower.
The agent’s take
The master suite includes a bathroom with a soaker tub.
With Ottawa’s home inventory so low, this 17-year-old townhouse in an Ottawa suburb – which looked more like a semi-detached, since it was connected to just one other house – was an attractive property, according to Mr. Walsh.
Added to that, there has been a recent upswing in the market, Mr. Walsh said. “People are trying to avoid the potential for [mortgage] rates going up. And there is some foreign money, too.”
For any listing comparable to this – a semi-detached, relatively new build in an Ottawa suburb – Mr. Walsh said the typical days-on-market average was between 30 and 40 days.
But the recent average has been just 17 days.
Mr. Walsh said to the sellers they should try to maximize what they’ve got right now.
“There’s a low inventory and a lot of buyers, rather than waiting for the unknown in the spring, and they said, ‘Okay,'” Mr. Walsh said.
They decided to list and they came up with a price that was on the higher end of what Mr. Walsh suggested.
“But with a limited inventory … I don’t want to say you could do whatever, but you could test it at that price,” he said.