My girlfriend and I are in the market for a new place, and we had originally planned to buy a resale house in or around downtown (say, Ossington to around Parliament, and King up to Bloor) but have noticed a few preconstruction townhouse projects on the market now that seem to offer good layouts and relatively good locations for a fairly low per-square-foot price (eg Motif Townhomes and Trinity Bellwoods Townhomes). Given that we were originally thinking resale, we wanted to get an honest opinion on the pros and cons of buying preconstruction, so we thought that it would be good to talk to a real estate agent. We looked on the web and thought that this site:
http://truecondos.com/ looked fairly professional and had a lot of good information, however it doesn't appear that this guy is willing to talk to you unless you sign a buyer's agreement.
Now, from what I've seen a buyer's agreement generally doesn't seem to be a bad idea, but I'm worried that (a) this guy (or whoever we talk to) may be knowledgeable in the preconstruction area but may not know so much about the resale market, and (b) if we sign an agreement first he may just be interested in getting us to buy a place, when all we really need at this point is (basically) an honest appraisal of the potential problems with buying preconstruction (somewhat tailored, if possible, to the specific preconstruction projects that we're looking at, ie whether they may be more or less likely to have problems than your average project based on the builder, number of units, absence of parking garages, layouts, etc. etc).
People in this thread seem to have good experiences with agents even without having to sign an agreement...did that include providing the kind of information I'm looking for or was it just mainly finding potential purchase opportunities (which I generally think that I can do on MLS myself)? Any advice is appreciated.