Our landlord dropped by yesterday and told us that because of the economic crisis (and his father’s reaction of dumping all his stocks) that he has to put our house up for sale to get some instant cash.  However, as he pointed out, the market for housing is terrible for sellers right now, and it could take months before the place sells.  He thinks the soonest he can sell it is February — there are three or four similar houses in our neighbourhood that have been listed for months already.

To cushion the blow, he’s lower our rent for a bit as long as we’ll be here, but it still totally sucks.  We love the area we’re living in, and while this house has faults none of them are major.  Loki has a big back yard to play in, we’re in walking distance to Metrotown, many great restaurants, and Skytrain.  On top of that, despite being by two major roads, we’re off them enough so that the area is quiet, and gets little through-traffic.

But now we have to look for a new place.  We’ve got too much stuff to go for an apartment, and house-hunting is difficult.  Most say “no pets”, though the last two we’ve rented have said the same until they met Loki, who is awesomely loveable.

And no, there’s no way we could afford to buy right now, even with a slumping market.  We don’t have a downpayment, and prices where we’d want to live are still high.  Moving further away would just increase our fuel consumption to get Mel to and from work every day and with gas prices the way they are we might as well just live closer and pay a bit more.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and the house won’t sell, and our landlord’s finances will recover some other way.  He really felt bad about giving the news to us, and his long-term plan was to keep the house with good tenants (us) in it as a future investment and this is a blow to him as well.