The Real Estate Podcast

Is Ontario Still a Place to Grow? | EP296

Shocking Stats: 4 Out of 10 Are Leaving Ontario! Ariel Kormendy and Adrian Trott dive deep into the alarming trend of residents leaving Ontario. With nearly 40% of Ontarians packing up and moving out, we explore the reasons behind this mass exodus. From the rising cost of living and housing affordability crisis to job opportunities and lifestyle changes, we uncover the factors driving people to seek greener pastures outside the province. ************************ 0:14 - Intro 1:41 - Health and fitness routines 6:00 - Topic introduction: Why 4 Out of 10 Are Leaving Ontario 9:00 – Ontario has the highest income tax out of all the provinces 11:50 - Impact of taxes and expenses 13:41 - Immigrant influx and how it affects the housing market 15:11 - Personal thoughts on leaving Ontario 18:18 – Outro ************************ Want more real estate podcast discussions? Watch it here: youtu.be/uLhNb8fdHt4 Listen to it here: http://www.soundcloud.com/ktrealty Catch clips and highlights of the show here: http://www.instagram.com/kormendytrott ************************ Our Social: Instagram: www.instagram.com/kormendytrott  YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/kormendytrott  Facebook: www.facebook.com/kormendytrott  Twitter: www.twitter.com/KormendyTrott Soundcloud:http://www.soundcloud.com/ktrealty  LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ktrealty  Pinterest: www.pinterest.ca/KormendyTrott  TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@kormendytrott?lang=en ************************ In 2011, Ariel Kormendy and Adrian Trott formed The Kormendy Trott Team, now often referred to as KT (thanks to our logo!). The foundation of KT is built on providing unmatched value and attention to detail in everything we do. From our ever-expanding, comprehensive list of exclusive services to our expertly trained team, you will receive the highest level of care throughout your entire real estate journey. Originally a team of two in Milton, Ontario, the KT Team has grown into a large team of exceptional REALTORS®, a client-care department, and now includes KT media, KT Commercial and KT Property Management to provide our clients with a complete lineup of genuine, professional, and proven services across Halton Region, Peel Region and the surrounding Regions within the Greater Toronto Area. We’d appreciate it if you’d subscribe and follow us for behind-the-scenes footage, real estate tips, industry secrets, exclusive listings, KT Confidential - the real estate podcast, and more!

Duration:: 18m
Broadcast on:: 15 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Everyone's leaving Ontario. What's going on? We chat about that in this episode. Well, four out of 10 before out of 10. Howdy partner. How's it going? I'm feeling actually really good today. Yeah. Do you notice that Robbie changed the way that we are speaking into the microphones? Did he? Yeah. Maybe because your audio over a couple of podcasts was a little bit while you keep looking here. Did I spit on myself? No, I'm not looking at your microphone. Oh, it's a little bit more down than mine. I have the baritone voice. Do you? All right. Let's get on with this. So, I'm great. Thanks. How are you? Oh, that's super. How's your week going? Oh, that's good. I'm happy it's summer. I'm looking forward to spending some time on this episode. I had a coffee on the couch in the backyard today. Oh, I love that. I love that. The outdoors coffee morning coffee. East exposure. So, we get sunlight through the trees. Oh, yeah. Front porch. No, the back porch. Oh, right. Front is west. Yeah. Front would be sunset. Right. Yeah. So, that was nice. Yeah. Yeah. What time was that? Uh, seven, 15, something like that. So, past sunrise. Yeah. Well, we don't wouldn't have the sun until about that time. Right. Because of the houses. I don't have acreage. Do you have any shade in your backyard? Yeah. Like an umbrella or something. Oh, no, no. I mean, we have shade. You talked about buying an umbrella for years. Yeah. Never did. No, never did. Never did. How's your fitness and health and eating routines going these days? It's good. I'm doing it just to try to get a lot of each other lately because we've been so busy and, and so this is, this is a good time to catch up and let everybody know. Yeah. So, yeah. My whole health, uh, routines now eating better, exercising regularly. It was primarily, uh, initiated because I was trying to get my cholesterol down because, um, I feel I'm at higher risk because my whole family's had heart attacks. My grandfather's brother, to my understanding, died in his 50s from a heart attack. My grandfather had a couple of heart attacks. He had triple bypass surgery. My dad at 60 had a quadruple bypass surgery and he had it twice. Thank God for technology. He woke up in the morning and he was bleeding out so the surgeon had to redo it. Um, and then my mom has had heart issues. I think my grandma said heart issues. So on both the female and male side, who? So my numbers are, uh, to people that maybe don't have that history, maybe it would be, uh, not super concerning. Yeah. But for me, my numbers bother me and they're similar to what my dads were when he had a heart attack. Well, now that you're in your 40s, you know, things are, your body is slowing down on some capacity. So you gotta step up your game. Yeah. So I kind of almost all meet first. I'm going with three months. I've had some chicken, a little bit of chicken, not much. And I've had fish, a fair bit of fish, but no red meat, no pork, no dark meat, chicken, that is, um, and that help. Like I don't have high cholesterol, so I don't follow. Yeah. Does that like eliminating red meats or dark meat? Well, I hope so. You will have a lot of controversial feedback on that right from my research. There's a lot of people that believe in the carnivore diet and they say, oh, you should eat just meat and that will lower your number. You need protein. So where are you getting your protein from? You do tofu or tofu or like what? All of the above. No food chickpeas, black beans, different beans and occasionally, and we'll fish and occasionally chicken. So what happens with the rest of your family? Because when one person is on a specific diet, yeah, they've all been really good. Yeah. Um, it's actually been kind of fun because I like to do the cooking in the house. Well, Alicia does most of the cooking in the house, but I'm the one who enjoys it more, I think. And my whole, uh, history of cooking has always involved meat. So I've not done much without meat. Right. So it's been nice to explore meals that don't involve meat. So I've kind of expanded my knowledge on cooking. Yeah. And then in the colder, colder. You're right. Awkward pause. Have a glass of water, sip of water. Excuse me, Robbie. Um, in the colder months, you can shift to like stews and soups and stuff like that that are hardy, but, um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Good. Yeah. You're lucky not to have high cholesterol. Yeah. Um, who knows that can change at any moment. I have high blood pressure. I've been working on and similar to you, not on my mom's side of the family or my mom, but my dad and my dad's side of the family all had high blood pressure. There were heart attack. Oh, actually, my maternal grandfather also had high blood pressure, quadruple bypass. Yeah. So it's all things that as you get older, you got to keep. Well, my brothers and either of them have even looked into it. So I'm like, I think it's important that people, especially as you near, you know, 40, in your 40s, for sure, you should be going to get checked regularly. I think manner more guilty of not looking into their, you know, doing regular physicals and that sort of stuff. So, which leads very well as an excellent segue into our topic today. Is it? Yeah. Of, uh, why 4 out of 10 Ontarians are considering leaving the province. So yeah, that's that came out. There's a few articles we've heard from a lot of our clients and we've had clients actually do this is they're leaving Ontario and going somewhere else in the country. Yeah. And even some that are going out of country, like going to the States, lots of going to Costa Rica, going to Panama, going to wherever. Well, I had I've heard even people like moving now to Europe. We've had a couple of those clients. One move to Poland. The other one moved to Portugal, I think. Well, a lot of that happened over COVID. Yeah. Like one of the guys that we use quite often for flooring. He has a company that over the course of COVID, he lost, I think, all of his employees who were mostly Polish. Right. And they all went back home. Yeah. They came here for a few years, saved some money. And now living good back in the homeland. Yeah. Well, and for me, I've had actually the most of my close friends have left one. He left at a young age. What does that say about you? Well, we keep in touch regularly, though. One guy has kind of traveled all over, but he settled in Victoria. Another is on the verge of moving to North Carolina. And another one moved to Alabama, but he was deported. He didn't choose to leave. That's a whole other story. I'm trying to think if there's anybody else. But we have had tons of clients who have, I have some that have gone to Halifax, some who have gone, oh, my best friend lives in Edmonton, but he left many years ago. Really the underlying topic within the topic is that they are leaving because of expense, because of cost. Yes. Affordability. Affordability. And that's only, not only just real estate. Yeah. Not only the real estate factor, even though, like to own a home in this province, you've got high purchase price, high property taxes, high utility costs, high insurance costs. And then you couple that with cost of food, cost of transportation, overall public transportation. You've got so many variable and fixed expenses that are much higher in this province. So, can you look at comparables in a lot of people moving out to Alberta, a lot of people moving out east, whether it's PEI or New Zealand. Well, Ontario, I think has one of the highest income tax brackets in the country, in the continent, probably. A lot of people will argue, and I don't know a whole lot of it. I definitely would not get into an official debate on this because I don't dollar for dollar with each expense. I don't know where we stand, but from discussions with people in all these different areas and doing some research, it does seem like living in Ontario is significantly more expensive for the average person. Well, and the incomes in this province as a whole, they might be higher in certain areas, like if you're working downtown Toronto, it might be a job that you can't find anywhere else, and it's a good salary or whatever. But your take home money, your true take home money, like think about your tax on your income, your tax on your property, your tax on everything, and then you're going to buy things that are then taxed, like your tax upon tax upon tax. So, what's left in your pocket? No wonder people are struggling to buy homes. And then, if you have an average purchase price in the greater Toronto area of almost a million bucks, dollar for dollar, I would say you could purchase a, like right now in the GTA, I don't know what the average exactly would be, but I'll call it, let's say 1.2 to 1.4 million dollars for a 2,000 to 2,500 square foot double car garage home, right? An ideal family home, family of four wants that kind of house in an ideal world. Here, you're paying 1.2 to 1.4 million dollars for sure. 1.2 million dollars in somewhere like Halifax is buying you twice the size of home. Well, in the States too. So, you know, can you buy something with a double car garage, 2,500 square feet, four bedroom for 600 grand somewhere else in the country? Absolutely. What are you looking at? It's like a fuel cost here. And I had a text message recently. I don't know if it costs per liter. Yeah, yeah. While this was in the US gallons, but sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I thought you were just going to continue talking. So, it is happening. People are leaving Ontario to go to other areas. A lot of them are staying within the country, which is good. I think one of the big fears for people that are here and one of the common discussion that might scare them from the idea of moving away is healthcare, being that they don't have to pay for it here. You know, they do in a roundabout way between all the various taxes. But from my discussion with people in the States, when you look at everything as a whole and take into account insurance costs, like I was chatting with someone who's paying $900 a month in insurance for a family of four for very good insurance coverage, they're better off paying that when you take into account their lower sales tax, lower income tax for lowering everything. That's if you're moving to the States. I don't know. The US is going to probably be in a little bit of turmoil for a while. There's lots of talk about market crashing. And then you watch like the debate with Biden and Trump and you go, oh geez, do I want to move to a country like that? Well, we're already there. Nobody wants to come here. Trudeau is not any better. But you look at Costa Rica as an example. You know, I'm a big fan of that country. Some of the best healthcare that you'll find. And it's cheap. You need a root canal in Costa Rica. You can probably get same day service for 50 bucks. Well, my sister-in-law had some dental work done there. I don't remember what she had done. But she, I don't remember the dollars and cents, but I remember it being very low. Very low. Apparently, the dentist actually flew to her, did whatever needed to be done and then left for a fraction of what it would have costed here. And my brother had something- Costed? Costed? Cost. And my brother had something done too, and he paid it, you know, whatever the number was, it's at least like a third of what it would have cost here. Right. But these are all unknowns. So if 4 out of 10 Ontarians are thinking of moving away from Ontario, how does that affect Ontario real estate? Well, first of all, there's a lot of new immigrants coming to Ontario. So that potentially frees up now places to live for all these people, because we are still short supplied in terms of bodies per roof. Yeah, but then these people afford to buy a house. Well, that's it. So what's going to happen? You're just going to hold out until the market comes down. Although I had this chat with a client the other day, people are coming from other countries with significant amount of money. Yes, some. And they're being gifted money from their families, generational money. Doesn't mean they can get approved for mortgage. Wow. That's a whole other. Even if they had 1% of it. I think that might change as the rates come down a bit and the floodgates might open. We'll see. I'm curious how many listeners have contemplated leaving, and what was their ultimate decision? Yeah, I would say 50% of people listening have thought about it. Well, at least four out of 10. Yeah. And what was your final decision? And why did you settle on that decision? Like if you didn't leave? And where would you go? And where would you go? Yeah, that would be interesting to me. Where? So have you thought about it? Leaving the province, leaving the country. Just leaving Ontario. No. No. Not enough to say yes, if that makes sense. I have no idea. I mean, you know, in a moment of, you know, having a glass of wine, thinking about, oh, it'd be nice to be on the beach right now. That maybe you're thinking something like that, but it doesn't really interest me. I'd like to think that we can just, things will get better here, but we'll see. It really interests me, but from a realistic perspective, when you have businesses, family, friends, kids in school. You say that, but I feel like, you know, there are a lot of people who say, oh, yeah, I don't leave family, but then family leave. Family leave families far away anyway. Right. How often do you see that family? Would you see them more if you had a destination for them to go that they wanted to visit? Maybe. I mean, how many of you, how many of you, we don't see that often? Right. How many times your family in Huntsville say, well, let's go to Milton for a, yeah, I'm trying to think that how many times will we see each other a year? Once or twice a year? No, no. We would see each other probably. Oh, because you go up there. For more interest. I'd say a half a dozen times a year. Between holidays, cottage visits, birthdays, like we do, we do spend a fair amount of time together, but I think the time would just change instead of spending one or two days at a time. If you had a beach front villa in Hawaii, I guarantee you they would be visiting. For sure. For a week at a time. So it might be a better, more quality time. You know, from my perspective, because in my younger years when I lived in Las Vegas with my family, I went through knowing what it's like to have good weather all year round. And I miss that terribly because I hate winter. Yeah, but you said recently that you, you found it much more enjoyable or maybe that you could put up with it because you started wearing warmer jackets or something. I don't know something like that. I didn't realize proper outerwear made a difference. Well, I've learned that and maybe because growing up as a kid, as a teenager, as a young adult, you go outside in the freezing cold in just a thin jacket and it's like it's never seem to get cold or whatever, right? Or even if you are cold, you're not thinking about wearing layers and you got to look good, you're going to the club, you're not wearing a thermal undershirt. I was always the thermal undershirt guy. Were you? I was never at the club. That explains why you were single for so many years. Anyways, we'll end it there. Yeah, no, there was something else I wanted to say though. I can't remember. Anyways, that's a good way to end the podcast right there. I can't remember. Works for me. Maybe you should eat more meat. You're losing your memory. Well, it does affect for sure to think of your body if you go through a big change. Yeah. All right. See you next week. Ciao. Bye. Let us know in the comments if you've thought about leaving your province. We'd love to know why and where you would go if you did. Good. (beep) (beep)