Cliff Barron from Remax here with my weekly update for Milton and Georgetown/Glen Williams areas. 

Before I get to that, I always come up with a little pointer and today I'm going to talk about closing and what happens with the keys. I've had quite a few people ask me about that recently because when you're watching TV (like HGTV) and the buyers purchase their new house, the agent shows up with their keys and they're like, "Hey, here you go, welcome to your new home."  It doesn't happen that way in Canada - it never has in Ontario anyways.  The keys are usually exchanged at the lawyer's office, but right now with COVID, you don't go see the lawyer anymore. When you sign your documents, you actually sign them electronically through something called DocuSign, which is a very, very secure method of completing a legal transaction. You sign everything through DocuSign, and then when the time comes to pick up your keys, you don't have to physically go to the lawyer anymore.  The lawyer releases the lockbox code to you - just like when you go to see a house with your agent.  The agent opens a lockbox and then with the keys, opens the front door and goes in. So now what happens is the lawyer will release the code for the lockbox to you. You'll probably have one key in the lockbox - you'll take that key out and you'll go into the house.  Then, in the kitchen, if the sellers are nice they'll leave a note for you saying where the mailbox number is, where the key is, etc. The garage door opener remote (and any other remotes will be left there, too). Everything will be left in the kitchen for you.  So these days, on closing, the keys are in the lockbox 99.9% of the time.  I haven't seen keys exchanged through a lawyer since COVID started - your keys will be in lockbox.  Here's a hint too: when you take the keys out of the lockbox, leave the lockbox on the door - close it up, leave it on the door and the selling agent will come by and pick it up. You don't have to do anything else - that's it.  Recently, I've had experiences where boxes have just gone missing.  And it's just frustrating trying to track them down.  So, just leave it on the door the agent will come by and pick it up. 

Now onto the update for Milton and Georgetown/Glen Williams.  This is for January 24th to the 30th, 2021.  I'm going to start doing these weekly again because I've had some people asking - "Where were you?" because I had started doing them biweekly.  I guess people like these things!  I'm going to do it differently though. I'm not going to talk about the volume of sales and the days in the market, because these days everything is flying out the door, so it's kind of irrelevant.  I'm just going to give you a ballpark idea of what the average sales are. Let's see, in detached we have two storeys in Milton at $1.123, and bungalows which are usually the old parts of Milton (sometimes it's the new) with the average at $981k.  There was, I think, 1 sale. Townhouses averaged $897k - which is crazy. And in semis, there were only 2 sold in Milton for a million on average. Condo apartments, $550k on average - 2 sales.  Condo towns, $662k on average with 2 sales. So things are still going crazy. 

And then we go to Georgetown/Glen Williams.  For two-storey detached, the average was $1.094.  A bungalow in the older part of Georgetown sold for $1.09 million. But just to let you know that, that was a different lot. It had actually 2 residents on it so 2 homes on it - that's why it's sold a bit higher. And then, let's see, we got 1 sale of a townhouse, at $775k on average. 1 semi sold (a big one) for $990k. There are some, actually some older semi bungalows in Georgetown, which is unusual. You don't see them that often in any other towns - you don't see them in Milton at all. And there were no sales of condo towns or condos the past week in Georgetown or Glen Williams. 

So that's a bit of an update for you. I'm going to talk next week about what to expect when you actually list your house so stay tuned for that.  Any questions let me know. DM PM, email or phone call works - I'll be sure to help you out. And thanks again.  Cliff Barron from Re/Max - I'll talk soon - take care.