Everything people ask me
before they start.

There is no universal answer, and anyone who gives you one before looking at your numbers is guessing.

Selling first means you know exactly what you have to spend and you are never carrying two properties. The risk is having to be out before the right home has appeared. Buying first means you never move twice and you can take your time — but you are committing to a purchase before you know what your sale actually brings in.

Which risk you can live with depends on your equity, your mortgage, how flexible your timing is, and what the market is currently doing to homes like yours. That is the first real conversation we have, and it happens long before anything is listed.

Ideally neither happens. Aligning both closing dates onto a single day is one of the specific things I coordinate — we work backwards from whichever date is less flexible and negotiate the other to match it.

When they genuinely cannot be aligned, there are normal ways to bridge the gap: short-term bridge financing, a rent-back arrangement with your buyer, or storage and a few weeks elsewhere. Your mortgage broker and your lawyer confirm which is available to you and what it costs. My job is to make sure that question gets asked in the first week rather than three days before closing.

Yes. A condition on the sale of the buyer's existing property is a standard term. It protects you completely — if your home does not sell within the agreed window, you are not obliged to complete the purchase.

The trade-off is that it makes your offer weaker, because the seller is being asked to wait on something outside their control. In a slower market it is very workable. Against several competing offers it rarely wins. Knowing which of those two situations you are in is the point of doing the groundwork first.

What your home sells for, minus what is left on your mortgage, minus commission, legal fees, any penalty for discharging the mortgage early, and the closing adjustments. Your lawyer produces the exact figure.

Before that, I will give you a realistic range built from what comparable homes near you have actually sold for — not what they were listed at. The gap between those two numbers is where most people's planning goes wrong.

No. That is the ideal time, and it is when most of the families I work with first get in touch.

Everything that makes a move go smoothly takes longer than people expect — decluttering, the repairs you have been putting off, understanding what your home is genuinely worth, working out which neighbourhoods survive contact with your commute. Started a year out, that is a series of easy weekends. Started six weeks out, it is the reason people describe moving as the worst thing they have ever done.

A real mortgage pre-approval from a lender or broker, with your documents actually reviewed — not an online pre-qualification, which is a calculator with a friendly name.

And the criteria list: layout, storage, commute, schools, taxes and utilities, and the monthly payment that leaves you room to breathe rather than the maximum a lender will approve. Settling those first is what makes the search short.

Fewer than you are expecting, if the groundwork is done. Buyers who tour twenty houses are usually using the showings to work out what they want, which is an expensive and exhausting way to find out.

When the list is defined in advance, every home you walk into is a genuine candidate rather than a process of elimination.

On the standard Ontario agreement the deposit is payable within 24 hours of your offer being accepted, unless the agreement specifically says otherwise. That means the money needs to be liquid and ready before you make an offer — not sitting in a locked-in investment.

The amount varies with the price of the home and how competitive the situation is. It is not an extra cost: it is credited toward your down payment on closing.

Not on a resale home. Once an offer is accepted and any conditions have been satisfied or waived, you have a binding contract. This surprises people, and it is the single most important reason to understand your conditions before you sign rather than after.

There is one exception, and it is narrow: a newly built condominium purchased from the builder carries a ten-day statutory rescission period under Ontario's Condominium Act. It does not apply to resale homes of any kind.

A condition — most commonly financing, a home inspection, or review of the status certificate on a condo — gives you a defined window to confirm something, and lets you walk away if it does not check out. If the window closes without the condition being satisfied, the agreement ends.

Waiving one removes that protection completely. You would be committing to buy regardless of what an inspection would have found, or whether the financing actually comes through. It sometimes wins a competitive offer, and it is a genuinely serious decision — which is why we talk it through in advance, not during the twenty minutes you have on offer night.

Ontario land transfer tax, legal fees and disbursements, title insurance, a home inspection, adjustments for property tax and utilities the seller has prepaid, and moving.

One local detail worth knowing: Toronto charges a second, municipal land transfer tax on top of the provincial one. Peel and Halton — so Mississauga, Milton and Oakville — do not. Your lawyer gives you the exact total before closing, but we budget for it long before then.