I was sitting outside today on my balcony and noticed that there was a for sale sign on an apartment across the street. So I thought I would check out MLS and see how much they were selling for. Backtracking a little, we always receive pamphlets in the mail from real estate agents about how much condo’s are selling around my area. The last pamphlet I got the average price was about $200,000. Not too shabby. So when I saw the listing on MLS I was floored.

They were listing the condo for $254,000. Seriously. The same size, make and model of mine with just different colors was listed at a ridiculous price. But probably because of the out-of-control Calgary real estate market, they may get close to that.

So for this small, dinky condo, if I sold it today, I could make over $100,000 from it! For only living here 10 months so far, I say that’s quite an investment. 10 months! If the market doesn’t slow down, I hate to see what it is in another year. If I ever move back to Manitoba (and that’s a big IF), I could buy a pretty sweet house. But there’s a downside to the high prices. When I move out of this condo and purchase the house, I’ll have to pay a ginormous price for a house. Currently the average price of a house here is somewhere in the vicinity of $350,000. And that’s just for an average 1,000 square foot house. Nothing spectacular, just for your everyday Joe and Jane family house.

In other news, I’ve made some small changes to the gallery. Now when you click on an individual photo, it uses these fancy-ass, lightbox, javascript techniques that I think are pretty neat. If you still want to view the large, original pics, you’ll have to visit my flickr account, but for most people that just browse, this new change will work wonderfully.

Only three more weeks until my vacation to BC. Can’t wait!
We’ll out to enjoy the day outside today. All this week it’s been raining pretty hard. Kind of sucks when you have to walk to the train station. Speaking of investments, I should probably invest in an umbrella!

Good to see ol’ BU buddy Joey Baumgartner finally get a site up. Interesting choice using JSP.
I’ve added it to my links on the left

So my good friends Dione & Shaun (otherwise known as my Calgary adoptive family) are expecting in May. She put together a website for their baby so that everybody could see pictures, they could post news, and everyone could get the latest dish of the life a pregnant lady.

But after looking at it, I think it needed a little help so I put together www.tristynlockyer.com for them.

Check it out. I whipped it together in a matter of hours using wordpress and plogger - all free and open-source!

I decided that the cheap Pentium 1Ghz machine that is sitting in my closet just didn’t cut it anymore and so I spend the $7 a month to host it on a server somewhere. After looking around I finally chose bluehost.com as they offered the most bandwidth usage, most available size, PLUS it up to 5 domains on the same account. Which means I can purchase other domains and host in with the same account.

So I moved everything over and things seemed to be still intact. If not, let me know.

-Matt

I just added the ability to sign-up to receive my blog postings in your email. All you need to do is click on the sign-up link at the top of the page, enter your email address, and any new posts will automatically be sent to your inbox!