Prince George Real Estate

This post may be a little bit inflammatory to some people, so please bear in mind that it is merely the opinion of one man, and may or may not be shared by others in the industry, or in town.  The issue at hand is the development that is taking place along Tyner Boulevard – the newest and closest homes to UNBC, the crown jewel of the city.  First, as somebody who has spent seven years at university living the Kraft Dinner and beer life of an undergraduate – twice, I understand the need for affordable housing in the immediate vicinity of the institution.  The argument has been made that there is no problem with students living all over town because we have a well (more…)

Two years in business terms is nothing, barely a toddler by any standard, but last week we were given a great vote of confidence by the business community – we were offered the chance to speak in front of a crowd of young entrepreneurs regarding the challenges of starting up a business.  Along with ourselves were three other guest speakers; Shawna Harper of Live Work PG, Tom Simpson of Benchmark Automotive, and Chris Hunter of Reid’s Prescriptions.  It was great to finally be able to talk a little bit about some of the rewards and challenges of starting a business without feeling like I was boring my victim to death.  Perhaps the best part about the entire event, (more…)

PG Listings is evolving.  Actually, we haven’t stopped evolving since our inception two years ago and I think that’s a good thing.  A static business will one day be a stagnant business in today’s world, and this blog entry is all about what we’ve been up to the past little while.   (more…)

This time of year, agents and marketers are looking around for fresh new ideas and innovative products/services that they would like to implement over the coming year.  In regards to real estate, this could mean reassessing an advertising budget and reallocating it to something new, investing in new equipment or software for your website, purchasing upgraded marketing materials, or contracting out part of your day to day to streamline your workflow.  More and more often in my daily internet wanderings, I am finding high quality video presentations of homes for sale. I get a lot of my information from the PFRE Blog, and today I’d like to sound off on a recent topic presented on it. (more…)

Prince George is a little bit isolated from the raging real estate markets of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary, but buyers and sellers can learn a lot from these markets, as they often guide policies for the rest of the country. Recently, an article came out from the Canadian Real Estate Magazine (REM) with regards to square footage; how does one measure it? Should agents include it? What measures should be taken to ensure due diligence?  I am only really interested in the first part – should measurements be a mandatory part of any MLS listing? This question has real estate forums ablaze with varied opinions, so I thought I would present some of the arguments to my readers. (more…)

This post is in response to some questions that I have received from both friends and random people browsing my site regarding the Canadian Real Estate Association and the recent ruling of the competition bureau.  There appears to be a little bit of confusion about what has changed with respect to content allowed on the MLS here in Canada. (more…)

This post offers up a bit of a technical explanation of why a common cellphone will not work as well as a digital SLR camera when photographing homes for sale.  For the most part it comes down to the sensor possessed by the camera.  For a cellphone to fit inside the palm of your hand, everything inside of it needs to be very small, including the camera and sensor.  This means that the 5 megapixel sensor inside of your cellphone is miniscule, with a huge amount of pixels jammed into it. The modern full frame SLR has a very large sensor, and although it often has much more megapixels to fit into it (12-30) the increased size of the sensor still leaves more than enough room for the additional pixel count.  Here is a nice diagram illustrating various sensor sizes: (more…)

Today I am super excited to try something that I have wanted to test out for a while – a concrete survey of viewers and their assessments of a few interior photographs.  What I would like you to do is have a look at images from two separate listings and then guess the asking prices of the two homes.  Pretty straightforward right?  To enter the contest, simply write a comment at the bottom of the page with the price for house one and house two.  Be sure to leave your email address and at the (more…)

This post is all about introducing the world’s mecca of real estate advertising – Gold Coast, Australia.  I would wager the first location to come to mind was probably Hollywood or Los Angeles, or maybe New York or London, but believe it or not, the most progressive marketing techniques have come from down under.  I would like to introduce you to the work of PlatimunHD.tv and the mastermind behind it, Brett Clements.  Think of them as a professional movie production crew working on marketing a single property, using everything from cranes to planes.  Here is what the result looks like: (more…)

Welcome to part six of our twenty two part miniseries on real estate photography and the role that it plays in marketing a home.  Today we are going to look at a master bedroom from a local listing, taken with a point and shoot camera, and then critique it and compare it to a shot from my site, PG Listings.ca

I’m feeling rather saucy tonight, so I think I’ll turn things up to eleven and choose a higher end master bedroom, something that you might walk around in wearing a silk kimono, puffing away on your ivory tusk hand carved pipe while doing morning pilates….So with the goal of evoking that kind of imagery, lets have a look.

(more…)