Keeping safe from Coronavirus is difficult for the over 1.9 million Canadians living in condos. One condo building in Calgary has seen the worst of this, as they reported 32 cases of Coronavirus in June. In this article, we provide tips on how to minimize your chances of contracting COVID-19 if you live in a condo building. We explain what condominiums are doing, or should be doing, to prevent a full-building infection and review what you can do as a tenant to avoid being infected.

What Condominiums Are or Should Be Doing

Your condominium building has a responsibility to prevent the building from a COVID-19 outbreak. Most condo corporations have done their part through additional cleanings, closing off certain areas, and communicating reminders and information to tenants.

Additional Cleaning and Sanitation

Like restaurants, malls, busses, and more, condo buildings must sanitize regularly used areas more often to prevent a Coronavirus outbreak. This is especially true for objects such as door handles, stairwell railings, elevator buttons, and more. Additionally, the cleaning supplies that your building uses should no longer depend on scent and cost, but its ability to kill bacteria.

It’s also essential that your building provides its residents with easy access to sanitation, such as hand sanitizer. We may lose track of what we touch and end up with germs on our hands. But if your building has hand sanitizer stations at key areas, it’s a reminder to sanitize our hands.

Closing Off and Restricting Common Areas

Condo residents spend a lot on their condo fees. These fees usually go to amenities such as the pool, gym, and concierge. Although there’s a particular entitlement to these amenities because of condo fees, your condo should stop access to pools, gyms, and other non-essential facilities. These areas are prime for COVID-19 spread. As infection rates slow down, your building may reopen these amenities, but they should do so carefully. One common trend with gyms reopening is for members to book time slots so that the space is not overcrowded. Each time slot should also have space in between for sanitation. Condo buildings should look to do the same with building amenities.

Although the management office was once a place to socialize with your building’s staff or ask questions and file complaints, your condo should restrict access to these areas. You and other tenants can still ask questions or file complaints via phone or email, where the risk of Coronavirus transmission is nil.

Communication with Tenants

Your condo building should communicate with its tenants on multiple fronts. First, although we’ve been told again and again to wash our hands, social distance, and wear masks, it won’t hurt for signs in your condo building to do it again. Everyone forgets, and a reminder is better than a case of COVID-19. If your building isn’t already doing this, it’s an easy suggestion for your condo management.

Your building should also inform everyone about the initiatives they’re taking to prevent the spread of Coronavirus and if there are any possible cases in the building. This information should be available through emails, if your building has your email, or through signs in the elevators or main areas. It’s imperative to know if someone in your building may have COVID-19 so that you can self-isolate.

Personal Safety Precautions

You’re ultimately responsible for yourself in avoiding COVID-19. While going through your building, whether it’s to leave or to come home, it’s important to sanitize your hand and wear a mask. Elevator etiquette has changed in the COVID-19 era, and it’s important to understand what new etiquette entails. 

Personal Sanitation and Wearing a Mask

Standard COVID-19 measures should apply in your condo building, even if it’s your “home”. This means you should avoid touching anything and everything. To open a door or press a button, carry a napkin so you don’t have to touch the object. Your shirt sleeve or elbow will work too – as long as you’re using something that doesn’t make contact with your face. Furthermore, though, ideally, your condo building has hand sanitizer stations around key areas, it’s always better to carry your own bottle.

When you’re in the lobby or a common area of the condo building, make sure to wear a mask. Some cities are even taking steps to mandate mask-wearing in condo buildings. Your mask shouldn’t come off until you’re in the comfort of your condo unit.

Elevator Etiquette

Elevators have been a key concern in the COVID-19 era. Elevators don’t allow for social distancing due to being confined in a small box with multiple people. Others may have also contaminated the area by touching buttons or holding onto railings.

Again, it’s important to avoid touching buttons with your hands. Your hands may touch your face or rub your eyes, which can allow the virus into your body. If you see a crowded elevator that won’t allow for social distancing, it’s better to take the next one or the stairs

Although you’re used to your whole condo building being your home, be cautious during this time. Learn about your condo building’s initiatives to protect its residents by emailing or calling management. For yourself, assume that everything outside of your condo unit is infected with Coronavirus so that you’ll take the necessary precautions.

The post How to Protect Yourself from COVID-19 if You Live in a Condominium first appeared on RankMyAgent - Trusted resource about Buying, Selling and Renting.

Although it’s a tough time, it’s important to remain hopeful. The federal and provincial governments have worked with the private sector and with other organizations to help those in financial distress due to COVID-19. Some of these measures may have an impact on your home purchase or sale.

In this article, we look at what measures and policies have been put in place to help fight or recover from COVID-19. Particularly the ones that affect the home purchase and sale process. This includes the restrictions and bans on open houses, the ability for homeowners to defer mortgage payments, and interest rate cuts by the Bank of Canada.

The Ban on Open Houses

Open houses are an easy way for COVID-19 to spread. A dozen people wandering inside a 3,000 square foot or smaller home is the ideal environment for transmission. That’s why real estate boards in Canada have called for the end of open houses ever since measures were put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. As a substitute, agents have gotten creative with technology and held open houses through online live streams or pre-made video tours.

Most realtors now will not conduct an open house for the sake of safety and the law. This is not only due to the strong urges from realtor boards, but provinces like Ontario have prevented gatherings of more than 5 people, which can make the idea of an open house more or less impossible. Instead of urging its realtors to not conduct open houses, some boards like the Alberta Real Estate Association (AREA) have outright banned open houses.

If you’re currently looking to purchase a property, you’ll likely have to make do with virtual home showings. If you’re very serious about a property, it may just be a reason for a realtor to provide an in-person showing.

As a seller, you need to understand that realtors are now more limited than before. Without the opportunity to hold open houses, your agent has lost a tool in their belt, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t continue to do the best that they can.

The Ability to Defer Your Mortgage Payments up to Six Months

When a bank provides a mortgage, the debt doesn’t stay with the bank for long. They commonly pool together these mortgages and sell it to someone else, taking a cut on the way. What they sell is called a mortgage pool. If banks want to keep providing mortgages, there needs to be demand for these mortgage pools. To help provide this liquidity, the Government of Canada committed to the Insured Mortgage Purchase Program (IMPP). In this, they’re prepared to purchase $150 billion of insured mortgage pools. This is to ensure lending continues in this dire time.

As a result of the IMPP, the government has also ensured agreement with the leading six Canadian banks that they would allow for up to six months of mortgage payment deferrals. This will ultimately vary on a case-by-case basis. Banks are also set to provide relief on other credit products such as credit cards.

The ability to defer mortgage payments will provide Canadians with some much-needed financial flexibility. If you’ve lost your jobs or lost other sources of income, it can help to defer payments till later on so that you can use your money on necessities like food.

However, this deferral will not be interest-free in most cases. So, if you do decide to defer your payments, you’ll end up having to pay more money back to the bank.

This deferral also helps those who are renting. Landlords who can defer their mortgage payments may be more lenient in deferring or reducing rent.

Estimates believe that these deferrals will leave homeowners with roughly $663 million in their pockets per month. This is based on monthly Canadian mortgage payments averaging to $1,326.  However, everyone is now rushing to their bank to defer their next mortgage payment—whether they need to or not—and therefore, it may take some time to get through.

This opportunity to defer your mortgage can be useful if you’re selling your property due to a loss of income, since this may mean you need extra capital. Delaying your next mortgage payments can hopefully put some money back in your pocket until the economy returns to normal.

Interest Rate Cuts by the Bank of Canada

The Bank of Canada announced three cuts to interest rates in March. This effectively brought the rate to 0.25% and has brought prime interest rates to 2.45%. In a statement, the Bank said that these rate cuts would cushion the economic impacts of COVID-19 by easing the cost of borrowing.

At first, this brought down the cost of borrowing money, meaning lower mortgage rates. That’s why in the first weeks of the rate cuts, there was an unprecedented rise in mortgage refinances. And although day-to-day Canadians will have an opportunity to borrow at lower rates, the rate cut by the Bank of Canada does not equally reduce the cost of borrowing at your local bank. Instead of passing on the complete interest reduction to the consumer, many banks are increasing their margins. This is because lenders are seeing more risk in the borrower’s market. As more individuals lose their jobs, the risk of them defaulting on their loan goes up. These higher margins are to take this into account.

Overall, it may still be cheaper to obtain a mortgage now than before. But with such a high demand for mortgages at current interest rates, banks may further fatten their margins. Although the era of COVID-19 may decrease the number of transactions going on in Canadian markets, we can hope that lower interest rates can improve that situation.

The coronavirus has resulted in new policies and changes such as a ban of open houses, the ability to defer your mortgage payments, and lower interest rates. These changes will likely help or hinder your home buying process. However, it’s important to remain hopeful that we’ll get through this storm.

The post The COVID-19-Related Policies and Measures That a Home Buyer or Seller Needs to Know first appeared on RankMyAgent - Trusted resource about Buying, Selling and Renting.

Not only are online reviews widely used, but they’re also important in how we make buying decisions. 57% of consumers in the same survey stated that they only patroned a business with an online review of four or more stars. 

But how accurate are these reviews? It’s not uncommon for business owners to either fake positive reviews for their own business or negative ones for their competitors. Reviews can also be biased due to influence from the business in the form of discounts and promotions. In this article, we review how to weed out fake reviews and see if a business is truly as bad or good as you hear. 

Can you actually trust an online review? 

Fake and bias reviews run rampant on every site. One survey found that 58% of businesses reported receiving a fake review. This is true on e-commerce, social media, and even dedicated review websites. Businesses also use promotions and refunds to entice consumers to leave good reviews or to remove bad ones. 

In e-commerce for example, aside from untrue reviews, businesses may provide refunds to anyone not satisfied with their product in exchange for the removal of their review.  As a result, the overall rating of the product is swayed towards five stars, as anything less than that has been removed. This can provide an improper picture of how the product actually is. 

Similar issues occur with social media websites like Facebook or Google (while Google Plus is gone, Google Review is alive and well!). Business owners commonly entice positive reviews with free products or discounts. It’s also not uncommon for their marketing team to create fake Facebook and Google users to leave reviews that push their rating closer to that perfect five stars. At the same time, these fake accounts can leave poor reviews on their competitor’s pages.

Then there are dedicated review websites such as Yelp, Angie’s list, and RankMyAgent. These websites value the trust of their audience and know that fake reviews would eliminate this trust. Dedicated review websites usually put more effort into monitoring posted reviews. Some review sites such as RankMyAgent go as far as to verify that all reviews first. Others like Yelp allow businesses to report what they believe to be a fake review, and their moderators scour through postings for suspiciously positive ones. These sites also watch out for businesses trying to solicit favourably bias reviews.  

If you really want to know if a review is trustworthy, it’s important to find out a site’s procedures in tackling fake and bias reviews. A site that is passive towards fake reviews is ultimately not as trustworthy as a site where reviews are heavily monitored or require verification. 

What to look out for when reading an online review 

No website is perfect in monitoring their reviews. So how can you figure out whether a business deserves the number of stars or positive/negative ratings it has? Furthermore, how can you get the best flavour of whether this product or service is really worth your money? 

Check the number of reviews: The number of reviews says a lot about a product. When the total number is low, a few bad or good reviews can easily slant the overall rating. This could incentivize someone to post fake reviews—whether positive or negative. However, if a product or service has hundreds or thousands of reviews, the rating is robust and a few good or bad ratings won’t make any substantial changes. It’s also very difficult to fake hundreds of reviews.  

Check the number of reviews: The number of reviews says a lot about a product. When the total number is low, a few bad or good reviews can easily slant the overall rating. This could incentivize someone to post fake reviews—whether positive or negative. However, if a product or service has hundreds or thousands of reviews, the rating is robust and a few good or bad ratings won’t make any substantial changes. It’s also very difficult to fake hundreds of reviews.  

Look for Patterns: Patterns are an indicator of what the business is good or bad at. For example, a particular item on their menu or a certain trait about their abilities as a realtor could be brought up multiple times in various reviews. But patterns go beyond this. Look for patterns in spelling and grammar, length of review, and the names of the reviewers. If coincidences are popping up, it could be a sign of a single person using multiple accounts to write fake reviews. 

Detect Bias: The people writing reviews are not professional reviewers in most cases and are likely not neutral. A reviewer who happens to be a friend or family member will likely give the business five stars. Although it’s hard to weed these bias reviews out, it’s important to look at both positive and negative reviews, even if the business has 4.5 stars. 

Read three-star reviews for the most balanced picture. Five-star reviews are commonly overly gushy about how great the business is while one-star reviews are often a spill of venom when someone is in a bad mood. Neither situations are helpful to you. Three-star reviews look at both the pros and cons of the business and are less extreme than its one- and five-star counterparts. 

While online reviews are a great resource for seeing if something is worth your money, it may not always be the most accurate portrayal of a business. Fake and bias reviews run rampant for any website with a review system. Look at how the website moderates its posts to see how trustworthy it really is. Designated reviews sites like RankMyAgent are sure to provide a more accurate portrayal than websites that don’t verify whether a posting is real or fake. 

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