In the beginning, we thought we would buy a house on acreage. Cooped up in a townhouse with a small backyard and little space for projects, we looked around and realized that country homes a few minutes outside the city core cost about the same as a box squeezed into a small lot in the suburbs. We signed up with a realtor and went to look at a few places, placed a few offers, and lost all our bids. In truth, the whole process was an emotional rollercoaster that saw us finding a house, getting our hopes up, and being let down while making more and more compromises and expanding our search criteria each time. 

As I mentioned in my previous post, while navigating the market, we began to toy with the idea of building an eco-friendly passive-style house. While building a new home in the country is not exactly the greenest lifestyle choice, in a car-centric, sprawling city like Ottawa, it certainly had more appeal than a house in the ‘burbs where a car is essential for nearly every trip outside the home. At least in the country we could expand or vegetable gardens, raise chickens, and find our entertainment at home in the woods. If we could do so in a house with a low energy footprint, more the better.

We came across Ekobuilt, an Ottawa-area company that sells passive house packages. This company has the admirable goal of making passive homes more affordable. As we explored packages with them, building a house began to look financially viable. We turned our sights to buying land. But, as we soon discovered, if buying a house seemed a tall order, then buying a building lot is a whole new mountain.

Now, I in no way mean to disparage realtors, but I admit to a bit of disillusionment with the process of working with a buyer’s agent. We found that, with access to real estate listing apps like Redfin and HouseSigma, we could find our own listings and check sales data for comparable properties on our own. The realtor was primarily there to present the offer (which we were pretty confident we could do on our own). As we turned our search to land, it became clear that we would be doing lots of leg work either way, so we parted ways and continued our search. What a process that was! More on that to come.