It’s always the square footage.

“How many square feet do we need? Is 1,200 enough? What about 1,400?”

The number doesn't tell you much. A well-laid-out 1,200 square foot condo with three bedrooms, a park across the street, and a building full of families will work better than 1,400 square feet in a place meant for retirees and young professionals.

Layout beats size. Every time.

Bedrooms: you want three. Two means someone is sleeping in a den, and that arrangement has an expiry date. Layout: can you close a door between the kids and the living room at 8 PM? That eliminates half the units on the market. Construction: concrete is better. Kids are loud. Your neighbours know this.

Culture matters too. Some stratas effectively discourage families through restrictive bylaws, complaints about normal daytime activity, no storage for bikes and strollers. You can feel it when you walk the halls.

Then there's the neighbourhood. Proximity to school and parish. Walking distance to a playground. A grocery store you can reach without loading everyone into the car. These things build up. Over five years a five-minute walk to the park is worth more than an extra hundred square feet of living room.

Three-bedroom condos in Victoria that meet these criteria are rare. The inventory is thin at every price point. When a good one comes up, it moves. This isn't a sales pitch, you’ve just got to know about it. If you're looking at condos you need to be watching the market before you're ready to buy, because the window on a good family unit is tight.

For some families, a condo isn't any kind of compromise. It's a deliberate step. Buy into the right neighbourhood, build equity in a place your kids can walk to school, upsize if and when the time and money line up.

And stop worrying about “settling”. This is a bullshit idea invented by marketers.

The real question isn't whether a family can live in a Victoria condo. People do it all the time. The question is whether the specific unit, the specific building, and the specific neighbourhood are set up to support the life you want.

If this is what you’re working through give me a call and let’s get it done.