Almost every difficult first purchase we have seen went wrong in the same place: the buyer worked out what they could afford from the advertised price instead of from the monthly figure. The price is the smaller half of the decision. Start with the other one.
Work out the real monthly cost first
Add the amortisation, the association dues, the property tax spread over twelve months, insurance, and a realistic allowance for maintenance. For a condominium the dues alone can add a fifth to what the loan calculator told you. If that total is above roughly a third of take-home pay, the unit is not affordable no matter how comfortably the down payment fits.
Get the loan pre-assessed before you fall in love
A bank pre-assessment costs nothing and changes how you shop. It tells you the ceiling, and it surfaces problems — a thin credit history, an income that is hard to document, an employer the bank has not seen before — while you still have months to fix them rather than days. Buyers who reserve a unit first and apply afterwards are the ones who end up forfeiting a reservation fee.
The paperwork is the property. Everything else is a photograph of it.
MyVan client-services desk
Read the title, not the brochure
Ask for a certified true copy of the title from the Registry of Deeds and read the annotations on the back. That page tells you about mortgages, liens, adverse claims and rights of way — the things a brochure will never mention. For a pre-selling unit, ask for the licence to sell and the development permit as well, and check that the name on them matches the name on the contract you are being handed.
- Certified true copy of the title, annotations included
- Licence to sell and development permit for anything pre-selling
- Tax declaration and proof that real property tax is current
- A receipt that names the specific unit, in the developer's name, for every payment
That last point is worth repeating. Never pay a reservation fee in cash to an individual, and never accept a receipt that does not identify the unit. A reservation you cannot prove is a reservation you do not have.
Getting the loan pre-assessed first saved us. The bank flagged that my income documents needed a different form of certification, and sorting that out took six weeks. If we had reserved a unit first we would have lost the fee.