By Chris Purdy
There are only so many Seinfeld reruns a person can watch. I think I’ve seen them all.
Earlier this year, I spent several months struggling to keep busy in a tiny basement apartment in Saskatoon. It’s exactly 338 square feet. I know. I measured it during commercial breaks.
I moved here from Edmonton with my fiancŽ and, because I didn’t know anyone in the city and wasn’t working, Jerry and Co. became my new best friends. Slouched on a saggy futon, I channel surfed while taking in the view outside our window – tires crunching over gravel in the parking lot off the back alley. I counted footsteps overhead. I made eggplant casseroles. I plucked my eyebrows more than I should have. Sometimes, after a nap, I forced myself outside for oxygen and exercise. I tried to stay close to the phone, however, in case our Realtor called with good news. Usually it was bad. I was in the middle of house-hunting hell.
Blissfully in love, Graham and I came up with a plan: leave the frantic pace of pricey Alberta and head home to Saskatchewan, where we both grew up. We would be closer to our families. We would devote more time to our lives than our careers. We would sell our small Edmonton house, make a whack of money and buy a bigger home in Saskatoon that we would someday fill with kids. And while Graham started working, I would take a much-needed, five-month break while organizing the move. We thought it was the perfect plan and jumped right in.
Seems a lot of people had the same idea.
During the final four months of 2006, for the first time in a decade, more people moved from Alberta to Saskatchewan than the other way around. Others came from B.C. and parts east. The numbers are still rising. From April to June 2007, Saskatchewan recorded a net 1,507 migrants from Alberta, bringing the total population to a whopping 996,869. Strong oil, gas and mining industries are credited with creating a record number of jobs here. Suddenly Saskatchewan has become a great place to call home.
It used to be a well-kept secret. I blame the bloody billboards.
The Saskatchewan government spent $200,000 last January plastering Alberta with ads on billboards, buses and the walls of campus bathrooms. “Rush hour is just minutes,” read one slogan, though my favourite was, “This house was $178,000.”
That’s right, was $178,000. By May of this year, with the stampede to Saskatchewan underway, the average price of a home in Saskatoon jumped to $234,000, up 46% from a year earlier. Of course, compared to Alberta, it was still a bargain. But it wasn’t what Graham and I had expected. We were going to have to pay more for that big dream home, and we were going to have to fight like hell to get it. Alberta-style multiple offers and bidding wars had crossed the border with us. We lost the first house we bid on to a dude driving a BMW with B.C. plates; he bid $62,000 over the list price.
Realtor Norm Fisher with Royal LePage told me that one-third of his buyers are investors from Alberta and B.C.; many buy sight unseen, over the phone. Another third are Saskatchewan ex-pats like Graham and I who want to cash in their Alberta riches and come home. The final group consists of locals left scrambling to buy their first home before the invasion makes it unaffordable. And it doesn’t look like the market will be slowing down soon. In June, the Saskatchewan government spent $300,000 on a second billboard blitz across Alberta. One slogan really stings: “More life, less stress.”
That was our plan: more life, less stress. Graham and I are both 34. We’ve each spent more than 10 years in the newspaper business. For most of that, I worked at the Edmonton Journal, covering grisly crimes and court cases. I won two National Newspaper Awards. I worked hard. It was time for more life, my life. Managers at Saskatoon’s daily newspaper offered both of us senior jobs, with smaller salaries, but had a tough time believing we were serious.
It only took one weekend of sightseeing to fall in love with Saskatoon. I’d only really driven through it on the way to visit my parents in Tisdale, a small town up north, a town I left when I turned 18. But Saskatoon is like a mini-Edmonton, with the same beautiful river valley, without the traffic. Parking meters still take dimes and a parking ticket costs $6. Seriously. A restaurant called Baba’s Perogies has a drive-thru. Admission to the local art gallery is free. And our house hunt had a happy ending.
Once we expanded our search outside city limits, we discovered Waldheim, a quaint Mennonite town of 900 that’s only a 35-minute drive from downtown. We found a turn-of-the-century character home, completely gutted and restored. And we beat a couple from Calgary to get it. U
Category: Career Track, Entrepreneurship, Work
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