realtors – BIG

As many Millennials are coming to learn, home ownership may not be a viable option in urban centres. Instead, some property seekers are turning to co-ownership as a solution, sharing their mortgage with a partner or multiple partners. But finding a trustworthy person to partner with isn’t easy. That’s where Husmates comes in.

Described as the Tinder of the real estate world, the platform created by Toronto realtors Lesli Gaynor and Parimal Gosai matches people looking to co-own property. The idea came from Gaynor’s tenuous relationship with tenancy.

In the early ’90s, Gaynor, a single mom working as a social worker in Toronto, was renting from an unreliable landlord. “Every day, it was like I could have been evicted. I could have been kicked out,” she says. “My landlord, she would tell me that her brother was coming back to town, that she might need my unit. It just never felt really safe or secure.”

Gaynor and two friends decided to buy a duplex together to find some stability. They held onto the house for seven years, with Gaynor’s friends living upstairs and her living downstairs. “It was probably one of the best decisions I ever made,” she says.

Gaynor says that co-ownership is the direction real estate needs to head, especially in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), where prices continue to skyrocket. She foresees the rise of multi-unit homes, modelled on the condo framework but without the box-in-the-sky feel. Instead, they’ll be low-rise buildings where multiple families have their own units but might share a communal space, such as a living room or backyard. “I believe that co-ownership provides more access to build generational wealth and community,” she says.

Once Gaynor got her real estate license, she started using her social services background to help people buy property together. During this period, she met Gosai, who worked opposite her on a real estate deal. The two hit it off.

“We chatted, and we courted for a little while,” Gaynor says. “I realized that his passion aligned with mine. I didn’t want to work with a real estate agent who was looking to do real estate for the sake of making money. I wanted somebody who really understood why I was doing what I was doing. And Parimal really understood it.”

In 2019, Gaynor and Gosai launched Husmates. The platform, which is free to use, allows people to sign up and fill out details about themselves, such as their financial situation, hobbies, pets, and location preferences. Users can scroll through other profiles and “like” the ones they think would be a good match. Sometimes it’s two people matching; sometimes, it can be a group of people, Gaynor says.

“If you love dogs, you probably don’t want somebody who hates dogs. Or someone who’s a vegan, you don’t want to be with someone who puts a smoker in the backyard and uses it every day,” she says. “We’re not asking you to be best friends. We’re not saying you’ve got to hang out every Sunday, but you’ve got to have some synergy.”

Once people match, they tend to reach out to Gaynor and Gosai to facilitate the first meeting. This way, the two realtors can walk the prospective buyers through the mechanics of co-ownership. “We help them start the conversation, and then we let them go off on their own,” Gaynor says.

As with all real estate scenarios, co-ownership comes with complications. That’s why Gaynor stresses the need for an ironclad co-ownership agreement written by a real estate lawyer. To help the process go smoothly, she suggests setting up an anti-tsunami clause. This clause dictates that any major decisions require a three-month window to process. For instance, if one partner gets a job in another city and wants to sell their share, the other partner has three months to figure out their finances or find another co-owner.

Gaynor also suggests setting up a reserve fund with three months’ worth of mortgage payments in case something happens, such as one of the partners dies. That way, the other partner isn’t left scrambling to cover the mortgage.

“We spend a lot of time having conversations about what you need to be putting in place to make this work well,” Gaynor says.

For now, the platform is focused on properties in the GTHA, but there are plans to expand Husmates, possibly as far as Ontario’s cottage country. “ReMax does real estate all over,” Gaynor says. “Why not Husmates?”

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A new report found that more than 300 students in Humber College’s Real Estate Education program cheated on their licensing exams, much higher than the 34 initially discovered when the story broke last fall.

The report was conducted by Ontario’s Auditor General as a price performance review of the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO), the province’s regulatory body for the profession. When the cheating was first unveiled, both RECO and Humber didn’t specifically indicate how it happened, but the report found that the exam proctoring software was a key culprit. Most exams were done online and remotely, and the software couldn’t prevent screen-sharing or maintain supervision if there were technical issues, the report stated.

At the time the report was released, some of the students had already been working as real estate agents, mostly in the Toronto area. Ultimately, more than 50 were stripped of their licenses. With the revelation that there were hundreds more students who also cheated, a representative from RECO said they are working with Humber College to hold each one accountable.

Anyone can check the status of a brokerage or salesperson through RECO’s online search tool, said Joseph Richer, RECO’s registrar. If someone does not come up, that means they are not registered to work in Ontario—the names of individuals who had their registration voided are also available on the site.

Richer stated that employers were also notified and are expected to take disciplinary steps in addition to reviewing deals that the individuals were involved in. He also recommended that buyers and sellers ask their respective lawyers to review transactions for errors. “If any transactions occurred after RECO registration was voided, this could be subject to prosecution,” he said. He reiterated that most of the Humber students were caught before they were able to register with RECO and start working.

In a statement, a media representative from Humber College said that the Auditor General “is reporting on a specific point in time and did not directly contact Humber for information.” They added that when the issue first arose, the college investigated students, worked with RECO, and “continues to ensure high standards around exam security and integrity.”

Upon the report’s release, a representative from Humber told The Globe and Mail that the school has added stricter measures for online exams, such as requiring students to have a second camera, and more rigorous security checks before the exam starts. However, the report alleged that RECO “has taken no steps to independently verify that the issues that led to the breaches have been satisfactorily addressed.”

With the reporting being an overall audit of the organization, several concerns were raised about its processes, such as the rigorousness of criminal background checks on realtors, the reporting system for ethics violations, or the ability to flag suspicious transactions.

Richer said the organization is committed “to increasing consumer confidence in the real estate industry,” and that the individuals who cheated “should not be allowed to compromise the integrity of the real estate profession as a whole.”

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