Moving to Yellowknife? Get to Know Our Neighbourhoods

At Century 21 Prospect Realty, we spend a lot of time thinking about ways to improve the home buying process for newcomers to our city.  Many of our clients are sent here by their employers for very brief house-hunting trips with the expectation that, within a few short days, they will familiarize themselves with their surroundings, learn the ins and outs of our real estate market, find a suitable home and secure a purchase agreement.  We know that this can be a challenge, so we’ve come up with a few tricks to speed up the learning process.

The first and most important is to connect with a Century 21 buyer agent well in advance of a scheduled house-hunting trip.  Once you’ve let your buyer agent know, in general terms, what kind of home you are looking for, he or she can you send information on recent sales to allow you to both narrow your search parameters and familiarize yourself with the types and prices of housing in our city.

The next step is to do what you can to orient yourself, even before you have boots on the ground.  Some house-hunting trips are as short as three days, and many of our clients spend a half day just familiarizing themselves with Yellowknife’s layout.  Your two best tools in this regard are our map of Yellowknife’s MLS neighbourhoods and Google Streetview.

MLS stands for “Multi-Listing Service,” the online manifestation of which is the website Realtor.ca.  You can search Realtor.ca by many different parameters, and your buyer agent can send you listing alerts according to those same parameters, and one of the most important ways to narrow your search is by neighbourhood – which is why we created this map.  The attached version is not full resolution, but your buyer will have a paper copy for you when you arrive in Yellowknife, which is big enough for you to see street names, parks, etc.  Yes, a paper map is a bit “last century”, but we find it helps people orient themselves.  Plus your kids can doodle on the back of it.

And one small word of caution with respect to the second tool we mentioned above.  The good people at Google have not darkened our door since 2009, so there are many buildings and even some streets missing from Streetview.  Moyle Drive is one example, and your buyer agent can give you others.  But aside from those few missing pieces, there is really no better way to get to know any city from afar than by virtually walking its streets on Streetview.

Our goal is to make you experts on our city and our real estate market so that we can find you the home that best suits your needs.  If you’re ready to get the process underway, reach out to us at prospectrealty@century21.ca and we’ll connect you with a buyer agent.