The questions I get asked most, answered straight.

No, and I want that to be the first thing you read rather than something you find out later. I am not registered under Ontario's Trust in Real Estate Services Act. I do not represent anyone in a transaction, I do not negotiate on anyone's behalf, and I am not paid on the outcome of a purchase or sale. I am working toward registration. What I offer today is guidance and education — neighbourhood orientation, city knowledge, and an honest outside opinion on where you would be happy living. When it is time to transact, you will hire someone registered to act for you, and I will help you understand what to ask them.

Clarity about where to look, before you spend six months of weekends looking in the wrong places. Most people arrive at a neighbourhood decision through a price filter and a commute time, which is how you end up somewhere adequate. I work backwards from how you actually live — how you cook, how far you genuinely walk, what your Saturday looks like, whether you want a car — and give you a shortlist with reasons attached. People tell me the most useful part is the list of neighbourhoods I tell them to stop considering.

Because I chose this city on purpose, after seeing the alternatives. I lived in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Marrakech, Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Mexico City before I got here, and I arrived with no family history, no nostalgia and no reason to be generous about the place. I stayed anyway. Someone who grew up here knows things I never will; what I have is comparison, and the very recent memory of arriving knowing nothing.

I think the Greater Toronto Area is the best place to eat that I have lived, and I have lived in some serious contenders. The claim needs one piece of precision, though: this is not the city that does one cuisine better than anywhere else. Tokyo will beat it on sushi and Mexico City on almost everything I love about Mexico City. What no other place I know matches is the breadth — dozens of cuisines cooked seriously, for their own communities, at prices that assume you eat there weekly rather than annually. That is a different and rarer thing.

A lot of it, yes, and it is the single most common thing downtown residents are wrong about. The best Chinese food in the region is in the plazas along Sheppard and Midland and up into Markham, not in downtown Chinatown — which I say as someone who lives in downtown Chinatown and loves it. The same pattern repeats across the region: the cooking follows the communities, and a great many of those communities are in the suburbs. If your mental map of this city's food stops at the old city limits, you are missing most of it.

Rent first, in the neighbourhood you think you want, for a year. I say this to almost everyone and I mean it. You cannot know how a place feels in February from a website, you cannot know how a commute wears on you until you have done it two hundred times, and buying into a neighbourhood you have not lived in is a large bet on very limited information. Spend that year eating widely and walking a lot. Then decide.

The land transfer tax, without question. Toronto charges its own on top of Ontario's, so buyers inside the old city boundary pay it twice — on a typical house that is tens of thousands of dollars due on closing day, in cash, on top of the down payment. First-time buyers can claim rebates against both, which softens it considerably. The other common surprise is how much the cost of a car changes the maths: going car-free is worth a great deal of housing budget, and many downtown neighbourhoods make that genuinely practical.

An enormous amount, and it is priced in. Proximity to Line 1 or Line 2 shapes what homes sell for more than almost any other single factor, which is why the blocks around the Danforth stations cost what they do. The useful corollary is that the regional rail network is systematically underrated: Agincourt GO reaches Union in about thirty minutes, which beats plenty of downtown-adjacent commutes, and the housing near it costs a fraction as much. If you can build your week around a train rather than a subway, your money goes a long way further.

It depends far more on how you live than on the financial arguments people online will make at you. A condominium suits someone who travels often, does not want maintenance, and values being in the middle of things; a house suits someone who cooks a lot, wants outdoor space, or needs room that will change shape as a family does. If you are considering a condominium, understand that the monthly fee and the health of the building's reserve fund matter more than the purchase price does — a suspiciously low fee is very often deferred trouble, and a lawyer should review the corporation's documents before you commit.

That they come with patterns rather than problems. Victorian and Edwardian houses across the older parts of the city commonly carry some history of knob-and-tube or aluminum wiring, galvanised or lead supply lines, clay drains that tree roots enjoy, and foundations that have moved a little over a century. None of that is automatically a reason to walk away — most has been dealt with in renovated homes — but each carries a cost and an insurance implication. Knowing which questions to ask, and what a proper repair should have looked like, is worth more than any general reassurance.

Toronto now permits multiplexes of up to four units in most residential neighbourhoods, and allows detached rear-yard homes — garden suites — on many lots, alongside longstanding laneway-suite permissions. For an owner this can be real option value: a deep lot or a laned street may support an extra unit that offsets a mortgage or houses family. For a buyer, it changes what the word potential means when a property is described as having it. Whether a specific lot qualifies depends on access, setbacks and servicing, so treat it as a question to investigate rather than a promise to pay for.

Start by sending me a note about where you are and what you are trying to work out — that first conversation costs nothing and often settles the question by itself. If it turns into something more involved, like a neighbourhood shortlist or a walking tour, we agree on a fee for that work up front, in writing, before it starts. I am paid for my time and my knowledge, never on the outcome of a property decision, which is precisely what lets me tell you a neighbourhood is wrong for you.