price.howard10

Hi we are due to visit Toronto next week for four days from Northern Ireland with the potential to immigrate in the near future.

Just wanting to know good areas in Greater Toronto to live in with a young family and good job prospects (mechanical design engineer and support services supervisor).

Any info greatly appreciated as we would like to see as many potential neighbourhoods etc during our stay.

Thanks

HGerchikov

The GTA covers a huge area, could you give us a little more information into the type of neighbourhood you will be looking for? Without any more info, I would suggest looking along the Lakeshore GO line, both east and west as this offers the best commuting options if you are working downtown. If you are not going to be downtown then you need to look where your job will be as it can take many frustrating hours to crawl from one end of the GTA to the other in rush hour. I am guessing at this point that you don't know where you will be working as you ask for places with good prospects, I recommend you find the job before getting too sold on one particular neighbourhood.

Will_PA

budget?
buy / rent?
house / condo / apartment?
subway / Go access?

dbd33

What they could do is to look for the type of neighbourhood; urban, older suburb, new suburb? Walking distance to McVeigh's?

A preference for one or the other combined with a budget restriction would eliminate a lot of the GTA.

glendem4

if you like green spaces with great places to walk then I can recommend Don Mills area. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Do...756afe2dee4ff9

Allie73

This thread might be helpful to you:

http://britishexpats.com/forum/canad...uburbs-898206/

price.howard10

Thank you for the responses.

We are in the very early stages of immigration and just wanted to take a trip to Canada to get a feel for what it might be like to live there, so are hoping to look at areas we could potentially live as opposed to trying to narrow places down at this stage. We have been interested in Canada and the idea of living there for a long time but have never been! We have lately considered actually making the move towards immigrating however we thought going out there first would be a good start. Travelling in January because we are a bit unsure of how we would find the winters. Some more information:

• We would plan to rent first then buy a house after jobs have been secured etc
• The home we own should sell for £250k min, so hopefully could buy an equivalent around Toronto. We own another house in Belfast that we would plan to keep for security
• CRS score is 434
• We would ideally like somewhere relatively quiet (as in not too near the city) with lots of greenery (we love the outdoors), but would hopefully not need to commute too far for work. I know this is very dependent on where you work, so as I say, it’s all very hypothetical, just hoping to get familiar with the areas, we are not trying to determine potential places to live at this stage. We would just like some guidance on where to start that might be suitable as I know it is a large area.


We initially looked at Toronto as I work with 2 people from there and I have always enjoyed speaking to them about their experiences. We are also open to other places, we liked the sound of Ottawa too. As I say, this is very early stages for us. If we go out and decide to take it further we will have a lot more questions. We have been worried about having difficulties finding jobs due to lack of Canadian work experience but that is for a different thread, we have read a lot of forums were people have experienced difficulties securing jobs in their original fields of work.

Our main reasons for wanting to immigrate: we are very happy where we live but we have always lived here, N.Ireland is small and life is too short, Canada seems fascinating and we have always found the people we have met from Canada to be very interesting and have enjoyed their company. We love the outdoors.

Again, any advice much appreciated. We go in four days

glendem4

Market Stats for Toronto show average price of property sold being $707K = £416k
https://www.zolo.ca/toronto-real-estate/trends

You will be lucky to get any house with £250K = $425K in GTA

christmasoompa

Just checking, the £250k would just be for a deposit? If that's the whole budget for a house you'll struggle in the GTA.

If you decide Canada is for you after visiting, I'd recommend you apply asap if you'll lose points due to a birthday during the year, as that score is borderline already so you really can't afford to lose anymore points. So don't delay unless you're young enough to not worry about points loss.

Lots of greenery and the GTA aren't things I'd put together tbh, it's quite built up IMO unless you can afford to live in a posh leafier suburb. But it will depend on where work will be, maybe living further out will work if you don't work in Toronto itself?

Good luck, enjoy the trip.

mahdawg

Christmasoompa makes some good points

As I'm also N. Irish, a fan of the great outdoors and living in Toronto, I would not recommend coming here to the GTA for the greenery. It won't compare at all to what you have convenient access to in the Emerald Isle.

Now if you are on the outskirts of the GTA, or are happy for long drives (looking at 3 hrs plus), you'll have access to some amazing scenery. That or other provinces!

Will_PA

I live in High Park, which as the name suggests, is next to a large park.

It's OK to commute to downtown as it's on the subway (tube).

It's not cheap to buy here but rental is OK, depending on your budget.

If you want to grab a coffee while you're here let me know. I'm around during the day, waiting for my OWP...

price.howard10

Thanks again for the info, we found that useful.

We planned to bring about £130k to use as a deposit.

Ideally we would like to live and work out of the city, we thought possibly it might be easier to get jobs in Toronto to start off as there may be more opportunities, could be wrong. To be honest, I don’t think we would have ever planned to buy in Toronto, just rent possibly to start off. We would rather live in a location that was closer to the outdoors and travel very occasionally (happily drive a few hours) into the busier city areas as opposed to the other way around. Just not sure at all how that would work with jobs. Where we currently live at the minute there are a lot of engineering companies spread out around the place. We like the sound of other provinces too but a bit wary of the winters, definitely would not rule them out though.

Does anyone have any experience of Guelph, Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge etc or London?

We are hiring a car during our stay to travel out and try to see as many of these areas as we can.

Our CRS score drops to 434 at the end of January, so we have just over 1 year before losing more points, so yes, hoping to try and make decisions this year. Definitely finding it difficult, there is a lot to weigh up.

price.howard10

Hi, yes would be good to meet up if you’re about.

We are staying in Fairbank from Friday to Tuesday.

Thanks

HGerchikov

We live on a rural property about 20 mins north of Guelph. We lived in Oakville for 13 years before moving here. I think this area would be a better fit for you in terms of wanting open spaces etc. it's also considerably cheaper than the GTA.

dbd33

I know Guelph quite well. We used to live there and now commute to there from the countryside for work. There's lots of engineering in Guelph though that's not what we do and I don't know anything other than the names on the factories; Linamar, SkyJack, Hitachi heavy equipment, etc.

Guelph is more expensive for housing than Kitchener-Waterloo or Cambridge, probably because it's nicer to look at. Historically Guelph had a mainly Italian population. Last week a bank was robbed and the woman who told me about it lamented multiculturalism "that sort of thing didn't happen when we had the mafia here", which put me in mind of the crap we hear about the Krays. There's still an Italian club and a pool hall with an espresso machine but there's also sharwma shops, Thai, lots of sushi, some jerk places.

I am reliably told that all the plastic bars in Guelph are terrible so, when in Guelph, we go to the Wooly.