People moving to the Greater Toronto Area from elsewhere almost always start in the same place, which is a list of neighbourhood names they have read about. It is a reasonable instinct and it produces poor decisions, because a name tells you nothing about whether a place will suit the way you actually live.

What follows is a filter rather than a recommendation. Six questions, in this order. Work through them before you look at a single listing, and the shortlist tends to build itself.

One. Where does your day physically begin and end?

Not where you work. Where you have to be, and at what time, and how often.

The GTA is large, and the difference between a commute you tolerate and one that erodes you is usually twenty minutes each way. Two people in the same household with destinations in opposite directions is a different problem from two people heading the same way, and it is worth naming out loud before you fall for a neighbourhood.

Test it properly. Travel the route at the time you would actually travel it, on a weekday, in both directions. A journey that takes twenty-five minutes on a Sunday afternoon is not the journey you will be making.

Two. Car, transit, or both?

This single answer eliminates more of the map than any other.

If you intend to live without a car, you are looking at a fundamentally different set of communities than if you will drive everywhere. If you will have two cars, parking and driveway space stop being details and become requirements. If you plan to use the GO network, proximity to a station and the frequency of service on that particular line matter far more than the general idea of being near transit.

Be honest about this one. People routinely tell themselves they will take transit and then buy a second car within a year.

Three. What has to be within a short walk?

Make the list specific and keep it short. A supermarket. A school. A park. A place to get a coffee. A pharmacy. Somewhere to run.

Three or four things, honestly chosen, will tell you more about neighbourhood fit than any amount of general description. A community that has everything except the one thing you use daily will disappoint you slowly.

Four. What stage are you at, and what stage are you moving into?

This is the question most newcomers skip. Buying for the household you have today, when you know it is about to change, is how people end up moving twice.

If children are likely, school catchments and the layout of the house matter more than they do now. If children are leaving, the maintenance burden of a large property and a large garden is about to become a live issue rather than a theoretical one. If you are moving toward retirement, being able to walk to things stops being a nice feature and becomes the difference between independence and dependence.

Ask what you will need in five years, and weight it about half as heavily as what you need today. Not zero, and not equal.

Five. What are you actually able to buy there?

Now, and only now, bring price into it.

The mistake is to look at a neighbourhood average and assume it describes what you would be buying. Averages across a municipality blend condominium apartments, townhouses, semi-detached and detached houses into one figure, and that figure describes no individual house. The number you want is the price of your home type, in your target area, in the last month or two.

Ask for that specifically. If the answer comes back as a single average for the whole municipality, ask again.

Six. Have you spent time there when nobody was selling you anything?

Go on a weekday morning. Go on a Saturday. Go after dark. Walk it rather than driving it.

You are checking for the things that never appear in a listing or a neighbourhood guide. Traffic noise at the hours you would be asleep. Whether the streets are used or empty. Where the light falls. What the parking is like when everybody is home. How far the nearest shop really is when you are carrying something.

Thirty minutes on foot at the wrong time of day has saved more people from the wrong purchase than any amount of research.

How to use the six

Answer all six in writing before you shortlist. Then take each community you are considering and score it honestly against your own answers rather than against its reputation.

What usually happens is that two or three areas nobody suggested to you rise to the top, and one or two that you had set your heart on drop out on question one or question two. That is the filter working. It is much cheaper to discover it now than after you have moved.

One thing to be careful of

Anyone can tell you a neighbourhood is lovely. Far fewer people will tell you which parts of it are not right for you, and those are the ones worth listening to.

If you are moving into the GTA, or out of it, and you want to work through these six questions with someone who knows the ground, call or text me on 416-560-4983.