National Post
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Page: A3
Section: News
Byline: Allison Hanes
Source: National Post

Steve Farkas's slice of paradise is 31 hectares of woodland waterfront on a southern strip of Cape Breton's Bras D'Or Lakes.

The tide rises barely a metre on the inland saltwater sea and locals tell the 45-year-old Minnesota engineer the temperature soars to a balmy 30C in the summer.

"It looks like a good place for me to retire," he said. "I'll build a house in the next couple of years, then I'll retire there one day."

Mr. Farkas closed the deal on his dream lot last month with the help of a long-time Nova Scotia private land developer and the online auction house eBay.

While Canada comprises a small fraction of the properties for sale on eBay, land in Nova Scotia makes up a disproportionately large proportion of all the Canadian listings on the site.

Roughly half of all the offerings observed this past week were from Nova Scotia and some weeks they account for the bulk of Canadian properties on the market. There is also a far broader array of Nova Scotia land up for sale, from quaint cottages to treed tracts of remote wilderness, as opposed to the typical timeshare condos on offer at Whistler or Mont Tremblant.

Experts have difficulty explaining why exactly this is, but point to a convergence of factors.

Location, for starters. Nova Scotia, with its foothold in the Atlantic, is ideally situated a short flight from Europe and within a day or two driving from many major American cities.

Prices in most areas are reasonable. In fact, oceanfront property in Nova Scotia is downright cheap in comparison to waterfront

With its endless oceanfront, Nova Scotia has long lured foreigners to make this their home away from home and recently eBay has been helping people find property in such places as Clam Harbour, top, Stewart Lake, middle, and Liscomb Harbour, bottom.

lots anywhere else in Canada and beyond.

In 37 years of developing properties in Nova Scotia, Alex Hartling and his wife Judy have seen their business undergo dramatic changes since the advent of eBay. Neither are licensed realtors. They buy and sell desirable property privately, sometimes offering financing. What was once an arduous process of placing ads in foreign newspapers and specialty magazines to attract discerning buyers from the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States has now been reduced to setting up a "stall" for Shore Side Properties on eBay. Now a market of 146 million potential customers from Frankfurt to San Francisco is just a few mouse clicks away.

Mr. Hartling said he still advertises the traditional ways, but through eBay, can get as many as 30 to 40 e-mail inquiries a day.

Shore Side Properties uses eBay to show listings sold the old fashioned way, but some vendors use the site to offer more unorthodox opportunities. In some cases, buyers bid on a down payment, sometimes for as little as $200. They can also bid on making monthly instalments over a certain period, until title to the property is transferred.

These methods have led to people snapping up property they have never even seen -- perhaps even in a place to which they have never been.

In Nova Scotia, the phenomenon has led to litigation involving at least one vendor and a pair of dissatisfied American customers.

John and Sadie Smith, a Virginia couple, stopped making payments on four pieces of property they purchased sight unseen, including three parcels of land near Yarmouth for a vacation home and a 90-acre Cape Breton lot for hunting and fishing.

The vendor, Nova Scotia Land Sales Ltd., operated by Kevin and Carmen Blinn, began foreclosure proceedings when the money stopped coming in.

In their statement of defence, Mr. and Mrs. Smith say they were promised "ocean vistas with perfect sunset views" and "excellent building sites that were high and dry." They claim the photographs they were sent were not of the land they bought.

Gary Richard, a lawyer for the Blinns, dismissed the buyers' claims as a defence strategy, and maintains there were no complaints about the properties until the foreclosure began.

The Nova Scotia Real Estate Commission has had a handful of complaints about eBay property deals, but there is nothing the regulatory body can do because the vendors were not licensed brokers.

Brad Chisholm, the commission's compliance officer, advises people to use a licensed professional. If, however, buyers are intent on dealing privately, they should visit the property to make sure they like it, and have professional surveyors and engineers inspect the site. But Paul Chwelos, a professor of information systems at the University of British Columbia's business school, said impulse buying is a hallmark of eBay: "There's absolutely an emotional component to auctions. People get wrapped up in trying to win."

He said hopping on a flight from California to check out a plot of wilderness in Nova Scotia may be sensible, but it goes against everything that attracts people to eBay. Mr. Farkas admits he was wary about spending his savings on a piece of land he had only seen in online photographs from a person he'd never met.

"I was very leery about buying something so important on ebay," he said. "It's not like I'm going use Pay Pal to send thousands and thousands of dollars ... I tried to be careful."

He took time off work and drove to Nova Scotia in February to meet with the vendor, discuss his plans with surveyors, and visit the property. Trudging through the deep snow to the water's edge, he fell in love. "It turned out to be the real deal," he said.