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HomesExplorer™ is a detailed Listing of all New Homes and Condos in Ottawa-Gatineau built by the Region's Major Builders.  It includes prices, features and dimensions for about 98% of the market, in one place and in one simple format for fast and easy comparisons.  And we provide a Satisfaction Guarantee!

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3.4 % * Average from 28 Financial Institutions for Closed, variable rate mortgage

Ottawa's Best Buy!

Sometimes home buyers wonder if builders are paying attention to what consumers want. Certainly Monarch's new designs for their town homes and semis in SoHo West indicate that this excellent home builder is paying attention. Their Union town home offers super value and must be one of the very best buys in the new homes market at the present time:

• Good size Living Room with gas fire - 19'2 x 12'6
• Separate dining open to a galley kitchen
• Walk-in pantry
• 2-car garage
• End unit with side access into a spacious hallway
• 2nd floor laundry
• Master suite includes a luxury bathroom & walk-in closet
• 1,712 Sq Ft priced from only $277,990 (as of December, 2008)

View the floor plans and compare it with other townhouses on the Ottawa housing market. It also wins our 5-Star Award for design excellence.

Design of the Month Reviews :

Minto has released The Hudson, a neat new design for a single family home. The builder's strategy typifies a current trend to create new and more compact homes to replace larger ones that have risen in price beyond the means of many buyers in this most important market sector.

The Hudson is priced starting in the low $270's when located in the community of Morgan's Grant, (Kanata), and slightly more in Chapman Mills (Barrhaven). It includes just about everything that a young couple with small children might require (or an older couple downsizing, for that matter).

Most of the finished space is allocated to the main level, with a master suite that identifies it as having been designed particularly for the retiring boomer generation. That also distinguishes it from all too many 2-story plans in which wasted and costly space is distributed haphazardly across unnecessarily large upstairs bedrooms which home buyers are obliged to pay for.

The Almonte in Phase 11 of Hidden Lake Estates is a distinguished 2-storey detached house with an elegant front elevation and floor plans that separate it from many other Ottawa homes consisting of 2,314 finished square feet.

Most of the finished space is allocated to the main level, with a master suite that identifies it as having been designed particularly for the retiring boomer generation. That also distinguishes it from all too many 2-story plans in which wasted and costly space is distributed haphazardly across unnecessarily large upstairs bedrooms which home buyers are obliged to pay for.

In short, this is a better-balanced design than most, because Holitzner's planner is a master craftsman who understands "harmony in the home".

Despite the fact that this is the smallest, and therefore the lowest-priced home in Hidden Lake Estates, its designer has not stinted on his imagination and care to design a beautiful home that anyone would be proud to live in...

As the number of new Ottawa residents who can afford to buy a detached single family home continues to shrink, and builders register fewer starts of that housing type as a consequence, those renting homes must wonder what will be in store for them if and when they can finally afford to buy a family home.

The obvious secondary choice is a semi-detached home. But, although more of them are being built, few offer much more than the benefits of a spacious and well-designed town house. In most cases the width of the house is the same; 20ft - 23ft. So an end unit is much like a semi anyway.

Tartan - who are also the biggest suppliers of semis - have come up with another solution. It is not an entirely new concept - Costain built a number of town houses in Orleans three decades ago that were connected at the garages. It was of considerable benefit to home buyers then because builders and suppliers of building material had not yet solved the problem of ineffective sound insulation between neighbouring houses...

Two-level Terrace Homes are really "stacked housing." It means that one 2-bedroom home is constructed on top of another 2-bedroom home. When built in England in the 1930s they were called maisonettes (or "little homes"). There are distinct differences in character between the upper and lower floors.

The advantage of the home at street-level - in this case Minto's Radcliffe 1V - is that you don't have to climb upstairs to get to your front door. The disadvantage is that, since it is the lower unit, it is built half-way below grade (or ground-level). You get compensated for that, however, by a lower price for the lower unit. When we last looked it was priced at about $11,000 less than the Gramercy IV upstairs.

In the case of Minto's Gramercy IV there is a unique advantage in including a home office which the lower unit (The Radcliffe IV) does not possess. Both designs are available only in Chapman Mills, Barrhaven (SW Ottawa) and Avalon in Orleans (Ottawa East).

Since we first started visiting Terrace Homes in all of the Ottawa suburbs (and in Gatineau), this type of condominium has achieved a distinct significance as housing prices have continued to rise, leaving them the most affordable homes in town - or rather, on the fringes of town. But as demand for them has surged as a consequence, builders have not been slow in raising their prices too...

Latest New Homes Articles :

Predictions over the past two years that the housing boom was over had all turned out to be wrong. When building permit values surged upwards by 19.3 percent in October - despite the global financial turmoil and massive Ontario lay-offs due to a rapidly shrinking manufacturing sector - it sent mixed signals. Either the housing boom in Ottawa was still in progress or home builders had greatly miscalculated.

The answer came in November when Ottawa's housing sales took a dive by 27.4 percent for the past 12 months. The housing boom was officially over!

William Watson, who teaches economics at McGill University, had this to say about our present woes. We thought we ought to share it with you:

Watson thinks maybe all the bad news is a good thing. Here's his explanation why, after reading Robert Shiller's new book, The Subprime Solution. Shiller is a professor of finance at Yale University who has been what Watson calls a "prophet in the wilderness" for two decades.

Shiller warned against irrational exuberance in the stock markets well before Alan Greenspan did in 1996. But, unlike Greenspan, he turned a skeptical eye on the U.S. housing boom and growing bubble. He and his colleague were so concerned about catapulting home prices that they designed their own pricing index of housing values, called the Case-Shiller index. Apparently it is now the standard calculation of where the U.S. real estate market is going, and could help us to understand what might happen also in Canada...

There really is no such thing as a level playing field on which you can compare builders' prices for new homes and condos with any accuracy, because of the multitude of factors involved in the equation.

You could gather all of the builders' brochures, extrapolate the relevant information, and create a database, or, alternatively, you could take advantage of our HomesExplorer search engine, that provides all of the essential criteria for you.

Even so, establishing where real value lies is part art and part science...

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Our New Homes and Ottawa Real Estate listings include Terrace Home Apartment Condos, High-Rise Apartment Condos, 3,4, and 5 Bedroom Single Homes, Semi-Detached Homes, Townhouses (Townhomes) and Bungalows. We cover 22 Top Ottawa Home Builders from Ontario, and all areas in Ottawa and Gatineau - Ottawa Downtown, Alta Vista, the Glebe, Ottawa South, Ottawa West and East, Barrhaven, Kanata, Westboro, Stittsville, Richmond, Gatineau, Aylmer and Hull. We also provide the latest Ottawa Mortgage Rates from over 30 Ottawa Mortgage Brokers.