I owe the folks up in Gravenhurst, Ontario an “I’m Sorry.” I have had this site going on 3 years now, and up until today, Gravenhurst was not a city choice on my site. I really thought when we added our cities in the first place, that we covered all of the towns and cities with more than 5,000 or so people in them – most certainly towns over 10,000.
I am glad someone e-mailed me and asked me to add Gravenhurst to the site. I hope that people up there will use it for their cottage rentals or vacation rentals. You can see the Gravenhurst Rentals page on the site now.
I found a nice little video clip of Muskoka Wharf in Gravenhurst. You can see it here:
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Apartment construction costs in Edmonton and Calgary
I saw an article today that talked about construction costs “increasing faster in Edmonton and Calgary than any other major city in Canada, according to a Statistics Canada report released on August 15, 2008.”
When I read the article, I thought to myself “It’s about time” thinking that this means that there has been an increase in apartment building in these two cities, who desperately need more housing (don’t believe me – look at the vacancy rates in these cities – the lowest in the country).
Unfortunately, the costs were due to higher labor, fuel and materials costs.
What this probably means for the near future is that apartment building will cool off a bit. The economy is certainly not “new building friendly” right now. I imagine the vacancy rate in Edmonton and Calgary will stay in the low single digits for some time.
Sneaky scammers paying for listings
I have been waiting for the day that a scammer actually pays for an ad on the site, uploads photos, and the rest of their information. The operative word here is “pays.” This happened yesterday when I got an ad for a flat in Toronto. The signs were all there that it was fraud – the text had the same “tone” as a typical scam email – the fellow’s name was Joseph – and the ad started like this “My name is Joseph. Bright 3bedrooms apartment with modern bathroom, bed linen. It also has its own private kitchen with all cutlery and crockery.”
Crockery? Why would you leave this at an apartment you are renting? And cutlery? The title of the ad also said 2 bedrooms which contradicted the text in the ad that said 3.
I cut and pasted some of this guy’s ad text into a google search, and he had posted the exact same ad on several other websites – but for different cities.
The photos were very bad, and looked like they were stolen from a variety of different ads from different sites too.
I then tracked the guy’s IP address (I capture these for every ad) and lo and behold – Nigeria!
The payment came from someone in the UK – so it might of been his boss or subordinate paying with a stolen card or something like that. I didn’t accept the money (you can refuse payments in Paypal.).
Just goes to show the lengths these chodemonkeys will go to steal from you.
Fortunately we catch and block most of these idiots before they do much damage.
Roommate Finder Canada
I finally added my roommate finder on the site – it is a service provided by easyroommate. I will be interested to find out if it is helpful to my visitors or if it isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. I have looked into their website, and service and it looks pretty good to me. I know that finding a roommate can be a daunting process, and their service seems to be able to screen people and match people based on their interests and personalities. I have added a little section on this page too where people can add their roommate stories – I think everyone has at least one. A few people have offered their tales from the roommate abyss.
I hope this was a good addition to the site. I plan on keeping it on the site for 2 months, and at that time I’ll decide whether I’ll keep it on there or not. You can also post an ad on there if you have a room to rent.