Stephen Hertel and husband Daniel Rawlins were in the market for a house but couldn’t come close to affording what they wanted in Toronto. So they joined a growing number of first-time urban buyers, and they kept driving — right past the suburbs — all the way to cottage country.The four-seasons lakefront cottage they bought in October on Moore Lake near Minden for about $500,000, has a finished basement, a double-car garage, a gourmet kitchen and a dock. Only about 150 metres off a plowed road, it has internet and satellite.“We looked at houses in Toronto, and we left the downtown core. We went east of the Don Valley. We just couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t get anything for less than $800,000. Even then there was a bidding war,” he said.Hertel, 49, who works four days on and four days off as a campus cop at the University of Toronto, and Rawlins, 44, a teacher, spend as much time as possible at the cottage. The two-hour door-to-door drive is less irritating than the constant bumper-to-bumper in the city he says. Some services, including gas stations, close earlier in the country, but everything’s available, he said.“I might not be able to buy foie gras but if you’re looking for shrimp and steak, it’s all up there. Prices aren’t hugely different,” said Hertel.While vacation properties have soared in price in recent years along with Toronto real estate, some resort areas within a two-hour drive of Toronto remain relatively affordable for couples like Hertel and Rawlins, who opted to buy a principal residence in the Haliburton area, while continuing to rent their place downtown.Their situation is one of the trends identified in a recreational property report published by Re/MAX this week. Other priced-out urbanites are simply investing in vacation homes and renting them out. A third of those want to own or already have a cottage, seeing them as investments.Given that 60 per cent of Canadi ...
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