Define the home

A search profile specific enough to filter with, and a needs list that survives contact with reality.

The idea

You can change almost everything about a house. You cannot change the lot, the location, or the price you paid. Spend most of this week on those three.

Needs and wants are different, and almost everyone mislabels them at first. A need is non-negotiable — the thing whose absence makes the house wrong regardless of everything else. A want is something you'd like and could add, change, or live without. Paint colour is a want. A second bathroom might be a need, or might be a want dressed as one. The test isn't how strongly you feel about it. The test is whether you'd walk away from an otherwise perfect home over it.

A needs list nobody has ranked isn't a list, it's a wish. Most people's first draft has nine needs, which is a way of avoiding the decision rather than making it. So this week's worksheet does two slightly uncomfortable things. It makes you rank them top to bottom, and then it asks you to name the one you'd drop if the right home had everything else. You'll almost certainly face that exact trade in Week 7, under time pressure, with a partner, possibly in a hallway. Better to have had the argument now.

Property type is a monthly cost decision as much as a lifestyle one. Four broad options, and the real differences are control, maintenance, and what your monthly payment actually covers.

A condo buys you the lowest entry price and the least maintenance, and hands you a monthly fee and a set of rules you don't set alone. A townhouse is usually a condo legally, with more space and often a bit more autonomy. A half-duplex gets you a yard and typically no condo fee, with one shared wall. A detached home gives you the most control and the most responsibility — nobody is coming to fix your roof, and nobody is charging you a monthly fee to plan for it either.

Note what that last point really means. A condo fee is partly a forced savings plan for the building's big repairs. A detached home has the same repairs; they just arrive as a surprise instead of a bill. The absence of a fee isn't the absence of the cost.

What a fee costs you in purchase power. Every $100 of monthly condo fee is roughly $73,000 of mortgage you could have carried instead. That's the honest way to compare a $340,000 condo with a $520 fee against a $395,000 half-duplex with none — not price against price, but total monthly against total monthly, which is exactly what Week 7's scorecard does.

Then look five years out. Not to predict your life, but to notice the obvious. Kids or not. A pet you'd like to have. A parent who might need to move in. Whether you work from home and need a room for it, or would need one if that changed. Whether stairs are fine now and might not always be. Whether you'll have a second vehicle. None of these have to be certainties. They just shouldn't be surprises.

Edmonton specifics

Quadrants. Edmonton is usually discussed in quadrants, and each has a real character and a real price range. It's worth browsing the area pages before locking a search area, because the price difference between neighbourhoods twenty minutes apart can be substantial — and because "I only want the southwest" is a filter that quietly removes a third of what you could afford.

Mature neighbourhoods versus new suburbs. This is Edmonton's central trade-off and it's more consequential than the quadrant. Mature areas give you bigger lots, actual trees, established schools, shorter commutes to downtown and the university, and houses that are forty to eighty years old — meaning original systems, smaller closets, and a basement with a history. New suburbs give you current construction, efficient heating, open layouts, and attached garages, in exchange for smaller lots, young trees, longer drives, and sometimes an unfinished amenity picture.

Neither is the right answer. But they fail differently, and the Week 6 showing checklist looks for different things in each.

Garage. In most cities this is a preference. Here it is close to a need for a lot of people, and the distinction between attached, detached, and none is a January question, not a storage question. An attached garage in a mature neighbourhood is relatively rare and prices accordingly. Whether the alley is paved matters more than you'd think.

Basements and suites. A finished basement adds real living space at a fraction of above-grade cost. A basement suite is a different matter. A permitted secondary suite can offset your mortgage significantly; one built without permits can create problems with financing, insurance and the City. The difference is not cosmetic, and a listing description is not proof.

In Edmonton a secondary suite needs both a development permit and a building permit, plus the trade permits for whatever was actually done — electrical, plumbing, gas, HVAC. Work started without them can bring stop-work orders, fines or administrative penalties, and those land on whoever owns the house then, not on whoever built it.

You can check before you offer. The City publishes Secondary Suites (Completed Permits), a map of the suites that hold both permits and have passed Safety Code and Fire Code inspection. Read it the way the City asks you to: it "should not be relied on to determine compliance of any property with any regulatory requirements", and a properly permitted suite can be missing from it if the owner never registered. An address that does not appear is a question to ask, not a verdict — put it to the listing agent in writing and ask for the permit numbers.

Condos at the entry price point. A large share of Edmonton's genuinely rent-comparable inventory is condo or townhouse. If that's where your number lands, Week 10's document review section is the most important reading in this course — the building's finances will affect you more than the unit's finishes.

The worksheet

A. Needs versus wants

Two columns. Write freely first, sort second.

- item / column — Everything that matters, sorted into needs and wants. Minimum three needs. If you have more than six, they aren't all needs. - why — Optional, but useful. "Two bathrooms" is a need for a reason, and naming the reason sometimes reveals a different solution.

Then two harder steps:

rank — Order your needs, most important first. No ties.
drop_one — If the right home had everything but one, which one goes?
drop_one_why — Why that one?

If you're buying with someone, do this separately and compare. The gaps are the conversation.

B. Home search profile

This becomes an actual saved search, so specificity pays off.

- areas — Which parts of the city? Quadrants, or name specific neighbourhoods. - property_types — What would you consider? Selecting more than one is normal at this stage. - beds_min / baths_min / sqft_min — Minimums, not ideals. - price_max — Prefilled from your comfort ceiling in Week 2, shown as both a monthly payment and a purchase price so you can see them side by side. - garage — Attached, detached, none, or no preference? - basement — Finished, unfinished, suite, or no preference? - outdoor — Yard, balcony, or doesn't matter? - commute_to / commute_max_min — Where do you go most days, and what's your limit? - pets / accessibility / future_plans — Anything the search should account for? - dealbreakers — What would make you say no immediately? Busy road, no parking, age restriction, above a commercial unit.

What this unlocks

Your profile is saved as a real search on your account and opens the map filtered to it. From here the site is working on your behalf between weeks — new listings that match will find you rather than the other way round.

Your ranked needs come back in Week 6, where the showing checklist automatically checks each home against your own list, and again in Week 7, where they become the weights in your comparison scorecard. The ranking you just did is the reason those weeks take minutes instead of an evening.

Month 1 complete. You know whether this fits, what it costs, what you need to qualify, and what you're looking for. That's the entire foundation — the next thirty days are the fun part.

🎉 Month 1 complete

Go deeper: read the full article on this →

The information in this course is general education, not financial, mortgage, legal, tax, insurance or real estate advice. Rules, costs and eligibility change and vary by situation. Talk to a qualified professional about your own circumstances.