Call it a gimmick, call it a brilliant marketing move, or call it crazy, one home owner in East York has put their home up on the market for $1.00.

The home is located near Dundas and Carlaw, an area where similar homes routinely sell for $375K +. It has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and was recently renovated by a professional home flipper.

Dozens of would-be buyers were searching the streets of Brooklyn, New York, looking for a house advertised as mini-bargain in a city well known for its astronomical real estate values. Problem was, the house wasn't in Brooklyn, it was in Toronto.

The house in question is notorious Smallest House in Toronto. The house is located at 128 Day Avenue near St. Clair and Dufferin. Apparently the house was advertised in an email hoax as being located near Avenue T in Brooklyn, NY. Priced at $179,000, it would have seemed like a steal of a deal to home buyers in Brooklyn used to seeing homes priced at four to five times that amount.

Despite recent doom and gloom predictions for the Canadian real estate market, people are still lining up for condos here in Toronto. Case in point: College Park Phase 3: Aura. After watching the conversation on my last post on the development degrade into a weird debate on the validity of Chinese numerological beliefs, I thought maybe it was a good time to update the subject.

I'm back with my semi-regular round up of news related to real estate in Toronto. Quite a lot going on this week as the first week of March is traditionally represents the beginning of the spring market and the busiest time of the year for the real estate industry.

Students and homeless people rejoice: the line up for condos at College Park is over and finally everyone can go home and get some sleep. Things were fairly civil although it briefly turned ugly before order was restored as agents got their priority numbers and were allowed to go home.

Here we go again. After the well documented insanity that was the broker's sales event for 1 Bloor, I should not have been surprised when the line up for sales at downtown's newest entry into the Tallest Tower in Toronto Contest started a full 2 weeks before the actual sales event.

It's a question that gets asked a lot in this city. We are now the condo capital of North America, selling more of these concrete boxes in the sky than cities like New York and Chicago. We are obviously in love with condos, but are they good for us? Architectural critic for the Globe, John Bentley Mays, will be doing a live web-chat on the subject today at 1pm.

Mays recently wrote a piece expressing his disappointment with the failure of an architecturally unique condo development on College Street. N-Blox was something new for Toronto-a high end, boutique style condo on a major pedestrian street with a real focus on architectural excellence. It looked like something out of Berlin or Amsterdam, certainly nothing like it in Little Italy.