Buying a new home brings out the designer in you!

Posted by admin | July 12th, 2010
Buying a new home, buying a new home ottawa, buying new homes, choosing finishes, Custom Home Interiors, interior decorating, interior decorator, interior decorators Ottawa, interior design, interior designers Ottawa, New Home Alert | 1 Comment »

Hi - Seb here (CEO of New Home Alert).  One of the most exciting things about buying a new home is being able to personalize the core design elements of your home: the exterior finishes, the kitchen cabinets, the floors, the bathroom tiles, and so on. With all of the TV shows and magazines dedicated to interior design, most of us are inspired to become amateur interior designers, right?

My business partner Gen is building a custom home in Ottawa, and she’s in the process of choosing the finishes with her home builder. Yesterday at our business meeting, we spent the first hour exchanging ideas on the design of her new kitchen. We probably could have spent another 3 hours on the topic, going through the dozens of magazines she had on kitchen design ideas, but duty called!

Every future home buyer will have to go through this process of choosing finishes, and we know the list of finishes and options can be quite daunting. Because of this, New Home Alert is very excited to introduce a web video series dedicated to educating future home buyers with tips and advice for choosing the finishes of your new home. Our interior design series will feature a young and dynamic Ottawa company - Custom Home Interiors (CHI), who has in fact become a resource of choice for Gen in her new home buying process.

Custom Home Interiors is the ideal resource to help us create these web episodes, since they already work with Ottawa home builders and understand the new home buying process. You can look for episodes to start airing soon on www.newhomealert.ca, or follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook Fan page, where our episodes will be posted as we release them.

I look forward to presenting to all of you the great team at Custom Home Interiors and to get your feedback and suggestions on topics you’d like us to explore.

Oh, and one last thing. I hope this blog posting inspires Gen to start blogging about her own home building experience… What are you waiting for Gen?

How REALTORS® Help?

Posted by admin | May 18th, 2010
buying new homes, Gatineau, How Realtors Help, New Home Alert, New Home Ottawa, online home research, Ottawa Home Builders | No Comments »

Many of you have probably seen the ads running on television promoting the website http://www.howrealtorshelp.ca/. I (Seb Lessard- CEO of New Home Alert) visited the website and found it to be very insightful and easy to navigate. I recommend to everyone entertaining the idea of buying or selling a home to take a look at the website to learn more about the important role of a REALTOR® during the purchasing and selling process. Visitors to the website can find very practical tools (forms and checklists) they can download and use before and during their house hunting experience.

The one thing missing on the http://www.howrealtorshelp.ca/ website is information about buying a new home (pre-construction) and the role of a REALTOR® if one chooses a new construction rather than a resale home.

With 9 out of 10 future home buyers using the web to start their research for their next home, many of them are now finding the choice in new homes available by local homebuilders. In Ottawa and Gatineau, the www.newhomealert.ca website presents more than 1,500 new home listings in over 100 residential communities. Can a REALTOR® help their home buyer clients uncover the choice available? Would it be beneficial for home buyers to have a REALTOR® assist them with buying a new home? You bet!

With “MLS like” search engines catering to the residential construction industry (such as www.newhomealert.ca) and the ‘for sale by owner’ industry (such as www.grapevine.ca), it may be time for REALTORS® to start learning about the role they can play to assist home buyers looking to buy a home not represented by a real estate agent.
There’s no doubt about it, REALTORS® really do have a wealth of knowledge to share with their clients, and their participation in a transaction alleviates many of the hardships involved. With easy to access information via web and mobile technologies, REALTORS® can rise to the top of their very competitive field by simply being able to help in all aspects of their local housing market.

The real estate game will drastically change for real estate agents with the imminent changes to the MLS service and the REALTORS® loss of its exclusive use. Add to this, emerging services where home buyers can find more web resources they can use and in no time, we could see the role of a REALTOR® diminish in importance…unless they become more multi-faceted in the expert knowledge they can share with their clients. Maybe that’s how the role of a REALTOR® will be defined in the future.  Just a thought!