Canadian real estate stats?

October 11, 2005 11:12 PM

How/where can one find average home-sale prices (and other related data) for regions or towns or neighbourhoods in cities, in Canada?

Is it even possible? Is there a free way to do so? And more importantly, could I do it from outside the country ('cause that's where I live)?

posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

www.mls.ca will list asking prices.

then, if you are looking for sales prices in specific cities, many local newspapers have a 'asked this, got that' features - look for newspapers in the Canwest family of papers (Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun, etc)

what city are you targeting? I might be able to help you with appropriate media that discusses recent home prices by neighborhood.
posted by seawallrunner at 11:29 PM on October 11, 2005

Response by poster: I'm looking more for aggregate data -- mls.ca is a great resource, of course, but I'm wanting to do some data-crunching of my own to try and look at trends.

I'm not targetting any city or region particularly, although I'm probably most interested in BC, Ontario and the East coast.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:33 PM on October 11, 2005

All Canadian real estate agents can give you this data. They won't charge you for it, but generally you have to have a relationship with one first... I could probably call up the agent I used when I moved last and she'd give me a complete list of transactions for any street in the city for the last two years. But, I know her and she's already made money off of me. I doubt I could do the same with any random agent.

Anyway, if you seriously want to move to somewhere up here, find an agent and they can give you lots of data. If they won't give you the data, find another agent. I believe the data is only available to registered real estate agents - they pay fees to access the MLS system and get data that's not available via MLS.ca - specifically, historical data, which is what you're looking for.

I searched a bit... here's someone with aggregate data for Toronto. Royal LePage has a reports available by quarter here, with a report specifically for Q2 2005, nationwide, broken down by major city neighbourhood. If that last report doesn't give you what you're looking for, you definitely need an agent.
posted by GuyZero at 6:24 AM on October 12, 2005

I don't know about other areas, but the Toronto Real Estate Board produces a monthly newsletter for its member agents that breaks down the transactions that occurred in the previous month. It includes, for each region and property type, the number of properties on the market, number of sales, and price information.

The site that GuyZero linked to above gives a small idea of what TREB produces for its agents.

It would surprise me if the other regional groups didn't produce this kind of data.
posted by lowlife at 6:45 AM on October 12, 2005

StatsCan publishes regular (monthly?) stats on housing prices. The most recent is here, but it's an index of new housing costs based on a 1997 baseline. In Calgary, whenever this is released, the media goes apeshit and released specific stats. If there are certain areas you're interested in, you might want to look at the local Chamber of Commerce, or even municipality.
posted by hamfisted at 8:26 AM on October 12, 2005

stav, I check the Vancouver Housing Market Blog with some regularity. It's focus is more on bubble watching (and potential bursting), but there are some good graphs of what is happening here.
posted by Salmonberry at 10:23 AM on October 12, 2005

Start with the real estate association for the region that interests you. For BC, I check RealtyLink.org.
posted by acoutu at 10:49 AM on October 12, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, all.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:15 PM on October 12, 2005