Anne Marie Lorusso, sales representative

As you know, I’ve been doing my best to keep you informed about what is going on in the real estate market locally. It’s been interesting to observe how slow the media has been to report the real story. Only recently the media is reporting the “hot market” and have only recently picked up on the drastic drop in inventory numbers. I just did my mid-month check of the Toronto Real Estate Board stats. Here’s what I found. TREB has reported 4,002 sales so far in October which means this will be another record month; the highest number of sales for any October in history. I guestimate there should be almost 8,500 sales. Pretty exciting stuff! What still is a phenomenon is the lack of numbers of homes for sale. It’s still dropping. Typically (even in a hot market) natural trends cause the inventory to increase by 5 to 10% between August and October. This year the numbers have actually decreased slightly. What’s happening here at our office is that it’s gotten to the point where it’s almost unusual for one of our listings to be sold without multiple bidders. It’s going to be a very interesting fall. There are some amazing opportunities out there for both sellers AND buyers. They key is working with the right agent. That’s where I come in. When you hear of anyone who wants to take advantage of these extraordinary market conditions, please call me right away. Please rest assured I will work hard and give them the “red carpet” treatment.

 

 

A referral is sending someone you trust to look after someone you care about.   If you are pleased with my service, please don’t keep it a secret!

Image credit: Kagan McLeod

Forget Niagara cherries. How about Niagara Street cherries? Toronto’s comically fertile fruit trees have long been servicing the city’s bees and stickying summer sidewalks. Last year, Laura Reinsborough, an environmental studies grad, had an ingenious idea while plucking heritage apples from the Spadina House orchard: why not harvest the untapped residential crop, too? With 30 nimble friends, she launched Not Far From the Tree, a non-profit that dispatches volunteers to help homeowners unburden their trees. One-third of the picked fruit goes to the homeowner, one-third to the volunteers, and one-third to local community groups who help feed the city’s homeless and disadvantaged. Last year, 3,000 pounds of fruit were picked from 40 trees in the St. Clair and Bathurst area alone. The group is expanding to three more neighbourhoods in 2009. And, in the spirit of zero-impact enviro-goodery, the bounty is delivered by foot, cart and bicycle. Once you’ve tasted straight from the tree, Reins­borough says, you start to spy fruit-bearing trees everywhere, growing in the unlikeliest places.

—Heidi Sopinka

Toronto Life

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=40

 

Image credit: Roberto Baca

Our public libraries are the busiest in the world: 30 million items were loaned out at our 99 branches last year. And, despite the many predictions of the death of print, the object of our affection grows and grows. The Toronto Reference Library, the exquisite centre of the TPL universe, recently started a $30-million renovation that will add a soaring glass entrance, a 600-seat event space, and a gift shop with more of those hipster-endorsed TPL bookbags. It’s all part of a plan to turn the library into a gathering place—for meet-the-author sessions, language classes, movie screenings and town halls. Not that they’re hurting for attendance. As this recession deepens, librarians have noticed a surge in users. Some were reading up on how to switch careers. Some were using computers to look for jobs. Some were just discovering the brilliance of free books.

—Chris Bucci

Toronto Life

HTO park on Queens Quay West
Image credit: Neil Fox

A beach where swimming is forbidden, an urban idyll with views of abandoned malt silos—HTO park is a curiously artificial place. Which is also why it’s such an amazing patch of the city. By manip­ulating the land into a hyperrealist dream­scape—impossibly cute hillocks, waifish willows, a sandy beach dotted with optimistic sun umbrellas—the designers have distilled Toronto’s ambivalent and bureaucrat-bedevilled relationship with the lake into a place where people want to go and linger. Possessing the unrelenting cheeriness of a lollipop farm, the park is a testament to the power of positive thinking.

—Kathryn Hayward

Toronto Life

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=35

An organic urban farm in the shadow of the 401

Image credit: Melanie Gordon

The Stop Community Food Centre, an organization that promotes universal access to healthy food, will soon plow its first urban farm at Weston Road and the 401 on six acres of land owned by the Sorbara Development Group. The company is leasing the land, currently zoned for a 550-unit high-rise, to The Stop for approximately $10 a year. And there are future plans to similarly develop other Sorbara-owned acreage in the Greenbelt. The Stop, it seems, is just getting started.

—Jason McBride

Toronto Life Magazine

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=31