Close enough. :-) $429,900.

Also the listing includes this hilarious line:

Your turn! :-)

If it's my turn you guys are going to have to wait until tonight, I'm off to somewhere for the day (and running late already: damn you, SSP).

Let's have MonctonRad bring up a Moncton listing, or Acajack an Ottawa-Gatineau one. :)

:previous:

Sorry, I'm at work. Can't do anything until this evening.

Jeez. I know it's not Toronto or Vancouver but that still seems really low for such a beatiful house in the centre of an otherwise prosperous, desirable city. Is this a particularly good deal or is that about the going rate for a place like this in Quebec?

All right, I'll try a Halifax one. I'm curious about guesses, since people from other cities I've lived in think the city is outrageously cheap, and people in Halifax tend to think it's brutally expensive.

Halifax rowhouse, built in 1918. 1,200 sq. ft., three bedrooms, modern appliances and décor, but retains historical architectural touches. Upgraded electrical and plumbing. 1.5 baths.


http://i.imgur.com/cMgSymd.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/wHw102h.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/V94GODU.jpg


Neighbourhood: The Hydrostone, a near-downtown area so named because the houses and the commercial main street were built with "hydrostone" blocks, after the Halifax Explosion blew the neighbourhood’s previous wooden houses to smithereens. Until recently the area was largely retirees, but it’s becoming a real hotspot for young families nowadays.

Pluses: About a 30-minute walk to downtown, and there are lots of pedestrian-accessible amenities nearby. The neighbourhood has a block-long commercial main street, and a short walk beyond that are several more commercial strips boasting all the usual stuff: butchers, bakers, barbers, cafes, bars, etc. Good transit connections, for Halifax, anyway. Lots of parks and stuff. Old house in good condition, in a historical neighbourhood with a great backstory.

Cons: It’s attached on both sides, which is unusual in Halifax (mostly a city of semi-attached or detached houses, even centrally) and it doesn’t have much outdoor space (backyards are non-existent in this area, just parking pads backing into service lanes). To the west side is a very ugly district of warehouses and strip malls and big-box retail. And though it’s definitely central, it’s at the edge of the inner-ring urban neighbourhoods. That's probably not such a handicap though, since the neighbourhood itself is self-sufficient with amenities, and as I said, it's still close to downtown in absolute terms.

Inside it is so drab. Just totally lost on me that it is 1918. I have no idea about Halifax real estate either, so I'll say it's pricey for the size and go with $339,000.

All I know about HFX real estate is that the average price is slightly cheaper than here but I assume that includes your whole HRM with rural properties you can't give away.

So I'm going to assume it's actually a little more expensive than the same would be here and guess $390,000.

These houses aren't ornate, but there are lots of smaller touches: original decorative wooden bannisters, original oak doors (this house has them, but they're painted white), old hardwood floors. A lot of the houses around here also have exposed stone or brick, but this one is all drywalled over, apparently.

I'm going to go with $289,000.

I see I jumped the rules on posting (always read the rules!) so I'll reveal the price now, so we can get back to the pre-established posting succession: $324,500.

Similar houses in the 'hood go for under 300k, often closer to 200k, but the bigger and detached ones get up to around 500k.

Interesting that the highest guess was SHH.

I've lived in rowhouses, detached houses, and concrete and wood frame buildings and the rowhouse seems like a nice compromise. Noise-wise, at least in the ones I've been in, they are much closer to a detached house than to a typical wood frame apartment building. You also get direct access to the outside.

It's common for people to say that Halifax doesn't have many rowhouses but I don't think this is true (the fact that there are a dozen or so blocks of Hydrostone is part of this). Originally it was a city with lots of rowhouses downtown, lots in the North End, and a mix in the south. Overtime I think what happened is that downtown shifted south into the higher-end neighbourhoods that were biased more toward detached housing, and a lot of the really central housing was redeveloped, so detached houses seem more common to people who spend time around areas like Spring Garden. In the pre-WWI part of the city, I would guess that the most common types of housing are apartments/condos, rowhouse or semi-setached, and then detached homes.

Masonry construction is kind of similar. It is really not that rare in Halifax. There are more wooden houses but there's lots of brick and stone too. Generally speaking, older stucco type buildings are made of brick. A lot of vinyl-sided buildings and some shingled buildings are brick underneath (this one is brick for example). Hopefully over time more and more of these buildings will be restored to their original appearance.

This style is masonry construction: https://www.google.com/maps/@44.6516...7i13312!8i6656

THAT's brick? Damn. I hope someone buys that building with an eye to restoration, not demolition. I've always thought that's an area likely to get a lot livelier in coming years, and that building would make a nice corner landmark if restored. Always assumed it was a wood frame and siding though.

The Quebec City example shows how much of a disparity there is in building upkeep between different cities. It's a great looking building but it's not ultra expensive. Clearly it is possible to maintain such a building with a limited budget.

In depressed areas it may not be possible for building owners to fully maintain their properties, and in these places it might make sense to preserve buildings selectively or just try to slow the decline by throwing up vinyl siding and hoping that things will be better in 20 years. There aren't many places like this in Canada. Most of the losses are due to bad regulations that create misaligned incentives.

What happens in Halifax is that there are very valuable properties that are neglected only because the land is even more valuable as a development site. The public value of these properties as heritage does not enter into the equation. A large percentage of the heritage stock in Halifax, like the one pictured above, is basically being run temporarily slumlord-style as the owners wait to redevelop or sell. If they were well-maintained, it would be possible for a lot of these properties to look like the Quebec City example.

I wonder what the regulations are like in Quebec City. In Halifax it's just a free for all. As a property owner you can de-register whatever heritage building you want, tear down whatever you want (or mysteriously watch it burn down in a well-timed fire), and build anew on any property. This has been good for encouraging new construction but bad for developing good neighbourhoods. Cities need both room to develop and regulation to preserve and grow character neighbourhoods. And for the most part, cities have the power to control both of these factors. People in Halifax often have a fatalist attitude around this (property owners just do what they do, or we never had anything good to begin with) that is completely wrong.

This decent-looking sixplex on Quebec City's Parliament Hill, currently fully rented according to the MLS listing, 6 out of 6, all "to professionals", some of which are keeping these apts as their a pied-à-terre in the Parliament area -- there's a ton of govt stuff around there. (I have no doubt the tenants are high-quality.)

Listing (in the original language) says the units are "high class". They're also rented fully furnished, so there are six entire sets of appliances included in the price.

The building is from 1868, which is merely moderately old (or even new-ish) for the area.

The listing is surprisingly minimal -- no pics of the units! -- but it's a three-story building, so I expect six small 1br units, which of course won't be all identical in layout at all (there probably are no two identical units in the bunch). The building is a bit longer in terms of depths than its immediate neighbors, so in the back there are at least windows on three sides for part of each floorplan. There's only one parking, you can see the Toyota Yaris in the pic. But having no parking is normal in that area, basically everyone either parks on the street or has no car. I'm actually impressed it has off-street parking at all.

Where it is (the walled city is just to the east, Parliament just to the southeast) :

https://www.google.com/maps/place/85...35eff10aa23145



The building:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y15...psl46pewkd.jpg

I admit that before answering this I went and look at the listing. My initial guess was $800k (and I'm not going to change it now that I've cheated!)

Guys -- no cheating!!! :P

$600,000?

It's really hard for me to guess stone properties. They're so rare here that they're really at a premium.

I'll guess $990,000 again.

Darn, I wanted to guess. I would have guessed $250,000, so I see I would have been way off.

I shouldn't have been such a a hard-nose about the "rules." Lio mentioned upthread that he was busy during the day, so it was fine of you to jump in with a new one to guess at.

And cheers for putting up a Halifax one, I might add. This thread could so easily be dominated by "I can't believe how expensive this Vancouver/Toronto shack is!", so it's nice to have some geographic variety. We need some prairie posters to either win at guesses or be bequeathed an opportunity to post their chosen houses by other winners.

$800,000. I'll bet ma vie on it.