Corey Lacey - Real Estate Sutton Group

I grew up in an apartment above a grocery store with my family of six in a small town on the east coast. I dreamt then of life in a perfect home, a future ideal to call my own. I moved to Ontario in 1988 and lived all over the GTA - in a basement apartment in downtown Mississauga, in a leafy neighbourhood in East York, and in a house with a contractor roommate in Scarborough. I got to know the Greater Toronto Area and its many styles of homes. When I met my wife, we bought a townhouse in Oakville together. It was sorely outdated and I had to convince her that it was worth the effort to get it up to speed, but the home had great bones and was situated in a terrific community. Get it up to speed we did, through countless hours of blood, sweat and tears, and it was a wonderful home to call our first. We lived there for six years and then something unusual happened. My wife was poking around on MLS, helping her parents in their quest to downsize the large family home. She saw a picture of a house that struck a chord with her, and we all agreed to go and see it. It was an unusual house, nothing special from the outside, and old enough that it needed work here and there. The layout was atypical for a single family home - bed rooms spread out over three floors, rather than grouped together upstairs - and as a result it had been on the market on and off for nearly two years. But what we couldn't see from the street was the home's remarkable view over a ravine: picture windows looking out over Oakville's Morrison Creek. When we saw that view, we were sold. And the layout, which presented such problems for most families, presented an opportunity for me and my in-laws: an opportunity to live together. We took the plunge. Three years later and I couldn't be happier in my unusual home. I live with my wife and my in-laws, so I always come home to family: my father-in-law reading by the fire, my mother-in-law cooking up a Spanish storm, and my wife arriving home from work in the evening. The lay out is unusual but it suits us. The house needed work, and we've done a lot to it (and there's always more to do). But it's the home I've always dreamed of. And when I sit looking out the picture windows at the Oakville trees, I know I'm living in the future I dreamt of as a boy on the east coast. My point is this. My dream home is a 1970s suburban backsplit in a quirky little neighbourhood, with a quirky lay out, and some pretty crazy quirks (which have included electrical on the fritz, a cracked foundation, and an audacious family of racoons). I live there with my idea of my dream family and we live our dream lives, but my idea of all that is different from your idea of all that. Some people want neighbours to party with and others want to be as far from neighbours as possible. Some people want a house with traditional charm and others want the latest magazine looks. Some people want a house with historical character and others want something brand new that won't give them any hassles. Some people want to outsource every minor job and others can't wait to crack out the old drill. Some people want a garden to cultivate and others can't tell a weed from a willow. But we all want a home, a place to come home to, a background for our lives and families. I became a real estate agent in order to help other people find that. Typical real estate agents want to sell you the houses that are on the market, but I want to find the real deal: the house of my clients' dreams. I want to share what I've learned through my experience as a home owner and home dreamer, a real estate investor and a real estate agent. I want to share what I've learned through successes and also through failures. And I want to inspire people to live in the home of their dreams. Because a house is truly more than bricks and mortar; it's...