Free home buyer resources you can hand out
If someone walks in asking how to buy their first home, this page is what you can give them. Everything here is free, prints cleanly, needs no account and collects nothing from the person you hand it to. Casaroo is education and triage for home buyers, and it is not a home inspection.
Print and hand out
- The First-Time Buyer Money Pack. Six pages: what a home costs on closing day, what it costs every year after, the FHSA and the Home Buyers' Plan side by side, appraisal against inspection against insurance, a showing checklist, and the questions to ask. Choose Blank to hand out and the money pages print with ruled lines instead of figures, so a client can fill in their own numbers with you or at home.
- The one page showing checklist. The roof, electrical, plumbing, heating and structure to check at a viewing, and what to ask the agent. Fits on one sheet.
Link to, or use in a session
- Closing cost calculator, for the cash a buyer needs on closing day in every province and territory, including the sales tax on the mortgage insurance premium that cannot be added to the loan and that most calculators leave out.
- Seven more calculators: mortgage payment, affordability and the stress test, land transfer tax with first-time buyer rebates, yearly maintenance budget, repair cost lookup, offer adjustment, and an insurance pre-check.
- What a house of any year tends to hide. Type the year it was built and get the era's costed risks and the question to ask. There is a permanent page for every year from 1900 to today, which makes it easy to put on a handout or a slide.
- The Home Buyer's Library: 142 plain language guides on the things that go wrong in a house, each with Canadian cost ranges and its sources listed.
- The first-time buyer's guide to reading a listing, if you want a single page to start people on.
Open data
Our repair cost table, 95 costed items, is published as an open CC BY dataset in JSON and CSV with its methodology and limits. Use it in your own materials, cite it, or improve on it. Attribution is the only condition.
What we ask in return
Nothing. There is no affiliate scheme, no referral fee, no sign up required on any of the pages above, and no tracking of the people you hand these to beyond ordinary, anonymous site analytics. If you find a figure that is wrong or a page that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it: hello@getcasaroo.com. If you would like a short session for your staff or clients on what to look for at a showing, ask; it is free too.
A line you can paste
Casaroo (getcasaroo.com) is a free, impartial home buyer's tool from Ontario. It explains what goes wrong in Canadian houses and what it costs, has free calculators for closing costs, land transfer tax and mortgage payments, and a printable first time buyer money pack. It is education, not a home inspection.
Who we are
Casaroo is an independent business built by a first-time buyer in Ontario, after a year of expensive lessons. It has no listings to sell and no commission on anything. The longer version is on the about page, and how the read works and why you can trust it is here.