housing, chapter 1: the search

(The MacDonald Bridge, which heads to Dartmouth, from North Street)

~

One of the things about Halifax that we were excited for was the reasonable real estate market. (Disclaimer: I don't even know if it's really reasonable out here. All I know is that I spent the last three years in Calgary, where real estate is unreasonably expensive, especially for what you get.)

~

When we first arrived in June, we moved into a furnished sublet until we figured out where we wanted to live. As soon as we got the internet, we were searching on mls.ca to check out what was available within our criteria; we wanted two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a balcony, and insuite laundry.

~

We went on a tour with our realtor of a few places, and it didn't take long to realize a couple of things. First, Halifax is a geographically constrained city. You can either live on the peninsula, which is more expensive, but convenient and more urban. Or, you can live off of the peninsula, which is cheaper, but more suburban and separated from downtown and the hospitals by either a bridge or a roundabout (hello traffic chokepoints!). Second, Halifax is a very old city. There's three types of housing: new, renovated, and old.

~

When we combined those two things with our price range, an interesting thing happened: we had to re-evaluate our priorities! We wanted to live within a fairly small area around downtown and the hospitals. We didn't want to buy a 100 year old house. We could only spend so much money. So then we narrowed it down to wanting a balcony, and at least one bathroom and bedroom.

~

We looked at some pretty 'ehhh' places. Some were vintage 70s (with $600 condo fees!), some had windows falling out of the cases, some were just very boring and relatively expensive. It didn't look good. But don't worry - there's a happy ending to this story!

(Our housing search area)