In this video, Carter Banks walks through a house that is about to be redeveloped:
This is just a walkthrough of a structure that the current owner–a developer–wishes to tear down.
The house is at 2 Shady Oaks Crescent in North York, Ontario, Canada:
Fitting his pattern, Carter’s story at the beginning includes large scoops of fake news. The husband was a medical doctor, not in the “hockey business”. (Carter, you’re suggesting one builds wealth from owning “several [hockey] little league teams”? Seriously? 🤣) Rather than fading with age, this couple remains active in the local community, so I won’t get into their details.
The property has a listing video from 2015:
It was listed for CA$3.5 million
The current owner is G. C. Jain Investments Ltd., initially suggested in an envelope in the kitchen:
A search on G. C. Jain Investments connects it to several real-estate ventures. The ace in the hole is the company’s appeal to the North York Committee of Adjustment, where over 30 minutes was spent discussing the company’s proposed zoning change:
The investor wishes to tear down the house and build a larger structure that requires a zoning change. The committee rejected the proposal.
The investor may have appealed this rejection, as the North York North York Community Council discussed services of solicitor (lawyer) concerning that property:
Per its listing on housesigma.com, the house was listed 11 times starting May 2013, finally selling on August 9, 2021 for CA$4,275,700. It appears the house became unoccupied between its August 2015 and June 2018 listings. The 2015 photos and description are of a move-in-ready home. The June 2018 photos and description indicate a home with most belongings cleared out, described as suitable for an investor. That makes sense as the husband appears to have retired in July 2016.
What’s the true story? Likely, a wealthy, retired couple simply downsized not long after 2015. They sat on the property for a few years, hoping for a great sale price. The house finally sold to an investor in 2021.
There’s no abandonment, there’s no interesting back story. It’s just an investment, part of an ordinary course of events in the life of a normal family.
In this video, Carter Banks (BigBankz) “explores” a large house in Aurora, Ontario:
I found it. Once again Carter’s story is phony. More on his fakery below.
The video has some clues that this house is in a place like the USA but a little different.
The kitchen fuses are odd. In the USA, residential transition from circuit breakers started in the 1940s and was likely complete by the 1970s. To see fuses in a 1980s house was surprising:
Hmm, what country is like the USA but has a different, two-letter ending on its URLs? What country had a later transition from fuses to circuit breakers?
Canada!
Supporting Canada: The allegations of Chinese real-estate criminality at the video’s intro echoes true stories of Chinesecriminality in Canada. I think these are linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
An aside: Carter’s and his fellow actors’ standard process is to find a prop, concoct a phony story around that prop, and use the phony story as clickbait to sell the video. In this case, the actor saw some Chinese text (confirmed Chinese since his phone’s translation software appears to have semi-successfully translated the text from Chinese). This is nominal evidence of a connection to China He used this connection to concoct a story of criminality.
Back to uncovering fakery: A search on abandoned mansions near Toronto hit paydirt from Abandoned Urbex Canada:
The video gave different, helpful views of the neighborhood. The paydirt is a comment (source) that revealed this house is east of Vaughan, Canada, between Yonge Road and Ontario Highway 404, near Toronto.
After a little searching, I found an aerial fingerprint like what you see in Abandoned Urbex Canada’s video:
That’s it! The property isn’t abandoned. It’s simply awaiting demolition for repurposing of the land.
Here’s a drone flyby of the neighborhood by Talking Walls Photography. It shows the early phases of demolition:
Carter claims that 70 Archerhill Court is worth $4.5 million. Quite unlikely. It was on the market in 2018 for $2.68 million:
That real-estate video reveals something surprising: Carter’s drone video is of a different wrong house!
That becomes obvious in a few areas, where 70 Archerhill’s windows, viewed from the drone or from the real-estate video, do not line up with Carter’s interior shots.
For example, here’s the kitchen in the real-estate video:
Note the three windows and how they are on walls that have a little angle between them. A bathroom has a similar setup with windows:
On the drone video, we can see where these rooms probably are:
The kitchen in Carter’s video is different than what is in the real-state video, with one window and, beyond that, a window type that may not be present on 70 Archerhill:
Note the rich, green foliage right by the house? If you watch Carter’s drone shots at the beginning of his video, the foliage is stressed and thin, not that green. Also, watch the entire Talking Walls Photography video and the start of the Abandoned Urbex Canada video, both above. They show many more houses than Carter’s, so they are from a few weeks earlier than Carter’s video. Even that far back, all foliage has been cleared from around the houses!
And even if the set was 70 Archerhill Court, it didn’t have lush vegetation adjacent to the home even before the vegetation was cleared:
If that’s not enough, there are only three houses standing in the neighborhood when Carter was there:
None of them have adjacent, lush foliage. The house on right is likely 40 Archerhill Court, whose walkthrough video shows a different floorplan. The house on left is likely 15 Archerhill Court, which is not a good match to Carter’s video (but it is a good match to Ethan Minnie’s video; more later!).
The interior shots are not of the house he says he’s exploring. If they are even from the same neighborhood, they would have to be from many months earlier, likely no later than summer 2022. To that end, I think the interior shots are from a house in a different neighborhood more on that later.
Another point of intrigue: Why would an entire exurban neighborhood (cheap land?) and its 14 expensive, large homes in good apparent condition be bought up for a denser residential redevelopment? In what world does this makes sense?
Back to the video: Once again, viewers are being duped with Hollywood-style trickery. All we have is a video walkthrough of a house that is allegedly about to be demolished for mundane reasons.
Aside: Carter said his friend Ethan Minnie was with him. He was, and he toured 15 Archerhill Court, claiming it’s a Simpsons house (no, that’s in Las Vegas):
How do I know its address? The front profile matches the 15 Archerhill Court that shows up in Talking Walls Photography’s video (above). It’s the second house visible in that video.
To summarize, we have an exterior, drone video of 70 Archerhill Court. We have an interior video of 15 Archerhill Court by Carter’s friend. And we have Carter’s video, which is not of 70 Archerhill Court and, due to the presence of lush greenery, was not captured on the same trip where he got the drone video of 70 Archerhill.
So which house did Carter walk though? I think none. That is why I wrote “allegedly about to be demolished” above. We don’t know why the house where the interior shots came from is empty. It’s likely not in the same neighborhood!
The above screengrab of the back yard shows a round concrete structure with a tree adjacent to it, with the tree closer to the back edge of the concrete than to the house. It shows no pool discernable from back-bedroom windows. Just after 5:28, Carter says there is no pool. It finally shows lush vegetation starting not far from the house.
Let’s suppose Carter visited no later than the prior summer–when things could have been green and possibly before the vegetation was scraped. Reviewing Archerhill’s aerial photography for properties that 1. have a similar concrete patio, 2. have a tree adjacent to the patio, and 3. have no pool, the only houses that might work are addresses 55 and 20.
That leaves 20. If 20 was still up, you’d see it behind and a little to the left of 40 in the above drone-video capture. You don’t, because it was torn down already. In Abandoned Urbex Canada’s video, there are other clues that exclude 20, including irreconcilable differences in the window above the front door.
I sure wandered. Let me give a final summary. Fitting the pattern of these “urban explorers”, we just have a boring video of an empty house dressed up with a phony back-story. For the first time since I’ve been tracking this, the exterior shots are of a house in a different neighborhood than the interior shots.
In this video, Jeremy Abbott (Jeremy Xplores) walks through the castoffs of a deceased, elderly lady:
Geolocating this was simple:
The decedent’s name and city were revealed at 0:53 on a peach envelope:
It didn’t take much searching to get the property address and find other information that confirmed that Jeremy’s back story on her was mostly correct. She passed away at a hospital in September 2022.
But Jeremy made one claim that I suspect is way exaggerated, that Mary had a “hoarding addiction“.
Sure, the house had more “stuff” than optimal. It’s still playing a few divisions lower than “hoarder”. If you’re living independently at 101, I can forgive you for not being focused on keeping up with all your mail.
I also see what appears like evidence that people have ransacked the house or gone through her estate to salvage what is important. This is not unlikely countless other properties. That, too, is not evidence of hoarding.
To wrap up, the true story is likely simpler: We’re seeing what was likely once a reasonable house that has been picked through in the months since the resident’s death. “Hoarder” is used as an incentive to watch a 40 minute walkthrough of worthless debris.
In this video, Carter Banks “explores” an allegedly abandoned $2.5 million mansion:
It didn’t take long. A name was visible, which through a little searching helped me locate it:
Before I go into the false claims, let me be clear about something: The prior owners are living, so I will be cagey about details.
Now for the false claims:
False claim 1, “surrounded by other mansions”: Not really. The property’s back side is lined with a new residential development.
False claim 2, “built in 1973”: Off by one year. 1974 per county records.
False claim 3, “John, wife, two children, and mother”: Pseudonym, understandably, but children count is wrong. (I’ll give credit: A pseudonym may be smart.)
False claim 4, “John suffered a heart attack at the age of 54”: No, “John” appears to still be alive and thriving.
False claim 5, “$2.5 million”: County records say the property was sold in 2021 for $985,000.
False claim 6, “abandoned”: The likely story is that the house had collected so much deferred maintenance, the retiree owners decided it made more sense to downsize to a newer home. Rather than abandoned, the home was sold to a developer in 2021 and is waiting to be scraped.
(Likely) False claim 7, suggesting a foreclosure: I am rating this claim as unlikely. The story is that the tragic death caused financial instability, requiring a sale. No evidence of that is apparent. Also, the prior owners appear to have lived in it for almost 50 years and moved to another home. An ordinary sale for proper reasons is almost certain.
Seriously, if you’ve retired, would you want to renovate a ~7500 square foot home? Or would you prefer to downsize? It looks like some some minor renovations were started, but they changed minds and chose to cash out and downsize. Great choice!
It is true that the property was bought by a developer, Northpoint Realty Investments. Given other nearby, infill developments, it makes sense that the property is slated for scraping and redevelopment, as Carter suggested.
Once again, multiple false claims are suckering people into watching a 30-minute walkthrough of worthless, left-behind debris in a large but undistinguished house ready to be scraped.
Third, this is no secret. Right by Segonzac, France, it’s on Rue du Cheateau. In other words, Chateau Street, which is a commonly-enough traveled road that even Google Street View covers it, showing the front entrance to this chateau:
Jeremy got one thing right: This is just one of many poorly maintained manor houses that litter the French countryside. They reflect an obsolete model of governance repudiated by the French Revolution. They are enormously expensive to keep up, which I touched on in my prior article about a walk-through of another French manor house.
We can put on rose-colored glasses and concoct a dreamy narrative of some fiction-fueled past, but why? This place appears to have little historical significance, instead just reflecting extravagance of a dying model. Let’s face forward. There’s so much life in front of us.
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