Canmore Alberta Real Estate Agents, Richard Greaves & Darcy Chilton with REMAX Alpine Realty

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This past weekend in Canmore saw the third annual Canmore Winter Carnival.  It’s our town’s way of celebrating winter and I have to say, we do a great job with it.

On Thursday evening we close down main street Canmore and start to pile snow all over the road for two blocks, once we have enough snow to pack down we track set it and get the street ready for cross-country skiing all weekend.  There are children’s races, adult races, fun races and even dog sled races for everyone to take part in.

If skiing or dog sledding is not your thing there are plenty of other activities to take in from ice carving and snow sculpting to log sawing and photography shows.  If you missed out this year be sure to mark it down on your calendar for 2013, it’s one of those weekends you really don’t want to miss!

Just another great reason to live in Canmore!

I thought I’d write a quick post regarding Title Insurance and how it may help you as a Buyer or a Seller when purchasing a home in Canmore.  I’ve had two clients recently, one that bought a home and another who sold a home where title insurance potentially saved them both a lot of money and future aggrevation.

What is Title Insurance?

Title Insurance is an insurance that you can purchase, typically through your lawyer, that protects your ownership or title against losses incurred as a result of undetected or unknown title defects for as long as you own your home.  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a new year and with it I’m sure renewed hope from Sellers that the Canmore real estate market will at last start to work it’s way towards a more balanced market.  Over the past three and half years Buyer’s have had the upper hand in the market and will do for several more months, but maybe 2012 will be the year we start to see Canmore recover.  I’m all done predicting what I think will happen in the Canmore Real Estate market and although I have my opinions I think I’ll reserve judgement on sharing those opinions until I’ve seen a couple more of months of sales data.

To recap the Canmore real estate market for 2011 – we saw our second worst year on record for sales volume with only 283 properties selling in the year. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s becoming a tradition in our family that sometime after Christmas we grab our skis and snowshoes and head into the back-country for a couple of days to relax, unwind and enjoy a winter camping experience with a few other local families in one of the Alpine Club of Canada’s back country huts.  Last year we chose a fairly easy trip and stayed at Wheeler Hut for a couple of nights last March.  This year we decided to kick it up a notch and see how the kids would handle a 12km ski up over a mountain pass and into a hut.  On January 9th my two boys and myself stuffed a back pack each full of clothes, food and sleeping bags and headed from Canmore to the Lower Kananaskis Lakes to start our trip into Elk Lake cabins with four other Canmore families.  My wife decided that she’d let the boys and myself go by ourselves this year (I think she just wanted to spend some time by herself after a busy Christmas at home with the three of us). Read the rest of this entry »

So another year comes to an end for the Canmore real estate market and 2011 turned out to be a much more challenging year for Sellers than I think any of us anticipated coming into the year.  Looking back at 2010 our market continued to recover from the drastic down turn we saw in 2008 and 2011 was looking promising to continue on the road to recovery.

Then January hit and the market came to a standstill.  If you can remember back to last January and February I’m sure you will remember the battering we got from all the storms throughout those two months.  Every weekend, starting on Friday, we’d receive a wicked snow storm that basically made the highways unsafe for travel and stopped all but the most determined skiers from making it to Canmore for the weekend.  Once the storms stopped and the weather slowly improved it felt as though Buyer’s had lost interest in the process, gotten busy with life and all of a sudden we were left wondering what would happen to our real estate market once again. Read the rest of this entry »