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Homebuying Made Easy: The Canadian Guide for First-time Home Buyers, 2nd Ed.

by Douglas Gray

The bank ads are all wrong with their images of beautiful couples happily entering their new homes seeming to have made their purchase with little strife. Buying a house is never an easy task. It’s scary, exciting, nerve-racking but never easy. And for most people, it’s the first major investment of their adult lives and they want to ensure their decision is the right one. Homebuying Made Easy: The Canadian Guide for First-Time Home Buyers attempts to ease the worry associated with real estate. While the book can’t live up to its title in all cases, it can help home buyers prepare for the big purchase.

Homebuying Made Easy is an updated, revised, and expanded edition of retired lawyer Douglas Gray’s 1993 book. Along with updating the book for today’s real estate market, Gray has added sections on using the Internet as a tool for home buying, how to buy a house before it’s built, how to purchase a house by auction, and how to use a buyer-broker, a relatively new concept in real estate circles.

Homebuying Made Easy is thorough, covering every aspect of the realty market: types of residential real estate, factors to consider when selecting a home, and particularly useful advice about mortgages and negotiating strategies for the anxiety-inducing process of arriving at a price. Gray includes sample forms to calculate financing, amortization tables, and a list of top renovation projects, among other handy items, plus an extensive checklist to help prospective buyers decide if they are ready to take the plunge.

In fact, Gray packs so much information into this slim volume that at times one gets bogged down in the details. This is a book one wants to dip into for specific information, not read cover to cover. Homebuying Made Easy would benefit from better presentation. More pull-outs and sidebars, part of a planned redesign, should allow for an easier read.

 

Reviewer: Julia Rhodes

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Ryerson

DETAILS

Price: $17.99

Page Count: 208 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-07-552900-9

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 1997-3

Categories: Health & Self-help