What can You Afford in Calgary

As a team of trusted realtors, we always receive emails from families wanting to make a move within or to Calgary from other cities.

Clients usually give us information about their current seasons in life and what they look forward to having in their next home.

Helping a Family Find a Home in Calgary

In this blog, we want to show you an example of how we help and walk our clients through finding the next best house for them.

For this example, we will use an email we received from a family living out of town and wanting to move to Calgary in the next coming months. They have an annual household income of $160,000 to $175,000. They can afford up to a $65,000 down payment and have no outstanding debt.

This family would love to be in a community with access to great schools for their children in third and sixth grade. They also want a place where they can easily walk to the stores and parks nearby.

Shopping Budget

Whether you are like this family from another city or have lived in Calgary for a while, finding a new place to live starts with setting a shopping budget.

Our team works with Hugh Bullen, a mortgage professional in Dominion Lending Centre. Hugh helped us compute all the numbers for this example and develop the best shopping budget for our email sender.

As of writing, the maximum debt allowed for a family with an annual household income of $160,000 to $170,000 is $675 per month. This means they can choose homes ranging from $680,000 to $720,000 with a minimum down payment of $45,000.

Dominion Lending Centre has an app that helps you plan out your mortgage. Download My Mortgage Toolbox and key in all the necessary numbers like interest rates, amortization, etc., then go to the Find a Rate section. This will give you the most current interest rates and calculate the types of mortgages suitable for you.

The Right Neighbourhood

The next thing you need to do is find the best neighbourhood that works for you and your family. You can check out our website to see all the homes for sale in each community in Calgary.

We also have a market statistics page that we update every month to give you a glimpse of what the market looks like in each neighbourhood. It is an interactive page that shows the map of Calgary with the average prices, days on the market, and months of inventory in different areas.

To see what different neighbourhoods look like, you can check out our YouTube Channel, which features the best communities in Calgary. This is of massive help if you are trying to get a feel of different types of neighbourhoods and what they are like.

Finding the Right Schools

If you have little kids like the family in our example, it is imperative to check out different schools in the area. You can visit the Calgary Public Board of Education, Calgary Catholic School District and several private schools to explore your options.

Once you know the neighbourhoods, you can already start looking for the communities. Sometimes, you can live in one community and send your kids to a school in another community if that is what you find most fitting. There are a lot of schools you can choose from for your kids, especially in the private school sector.

Right Locations

Once you have found the kind of area and homes that you are interested in, go to Google Maps, zoom in and check what is around the house. Doing this will give you a sense of what is there.

This step can be hard to do on your own. If you don't know what you are looking for, you will never find what you are looking for! It is best to have an experienced real estate advisor who can guide you and tell you how and where to look. Just because you can zoom in on a map doesn't mean you know where the best thing is or what indeed is around there.

When you go to the Calgary real estate market trend guide page, you can hover over the map and see the average sold price in each area to help you search within your budget. In our example, the email sender can afford a $680,000 to $720,000 home. Based on their criteria, they want to live in a more established area with more trees, good schools and excellent amenities nearby.

The south of downtown can be an excellent option for them. They can look at Glengarry, Glendale, Killarney, and Richmond. South Calgary is a good prospect, too, with Altadore, Currie, The Barracks, Strathcona Park, Christie Park, and Discovery Ridge.

If they go down south, they can check out Willow Park, Lake Bonavista, Maple Ridge, Fish Creek Park, and Parkland. Southcentre Mall is right around this area, just walking distance from the communities.

For a family of four, they might want to find a residential house with at least three bedrooms, no less than a thousand square feet. We did a quick search in MLS with all the said criteria and found a 1,300-square-foot house in Willow Park listed at $718,000. There is also another one in Winterbourne Crescent for $718,000.

We also found higher-end properties in Lake Bonavista that they could consider. The seller is asking for $789,000 for a 1,350 square foot home with an updated kitchen, basement workshop, one bedroom with an en suite and three bedrooms upstairs. Outside, it features a nice, manicured yard and a single garage.

If you also need help finding your next home, you can book a call with us; we will be happy to guide you throughout the process as we did for this family!