Editorial and data methodology

The short version

• Listings come from the CREA DDF® feed that REALTOR.ca publishes from, checked for changes every 15 minutes.
• Market figures come from the Calgary Real Estate Board’s monthly statistics, and every page that quotes one says which month it is from.
• Property Takes are my opinions of value on listed homes, dated the day they go out and never edited afterwards.
• Mistakes are corrected in the open, below what was published, with the date.

Where listing data comes from

Active listings come from the Canadian Real Estate Association’s Data Distribution Facility (CREA DDF®), the same feed REALTOR.ca publishes from. The site checks the feed for changes every 15 minutes and does a full refresh once a day. Each listing names the brokerage that listed it, and a listing that leaves the feed leaves the search.

Sold prices come from the Pillar 9™ board’s records. They are shown to registered users, and publicly only where the board’s rules allow: on Receipts, beside the listing brokerage, for the time the rules permit.

Where market statistics come from

• Benchmark prices, sales, new listings, inventory and months of supply: CREB®’s monthly statistics package, published early each month for the month before. The site reads it when it is released.
• Mortgage rates: the Bank of Canada’s published series (prime, posted rates, the five-year bond yield), refreshed every weekday.
• Rents and vacancy: CMHC’s Rental Market Survey (October each year) and Statistics Canada table 34-10-0133 (checked monthly).
• Property tax rates: each municipality’s published rate bylaw, checked each spring when the new rates are set.
• Schools and off-leash areas: Alberta Education’s school directory and the City of Calgary’s open data.

A figure is quoted with its source and its period, such as “CREB®, September 2026”. Months of supply is read with one rule everywhere on the site: under 2 months favours sellers, 2 to 4 leans to sellers, 4 to 6 leans to buyers, and over 6 favours buyers.

What updates by itself, and how often

What is my opinion, and what is data

A Property Take, a note on a building, and the line I add to the monthly Calgary Brief are my opinions, published under my name and my licence with KO Realty. Market figures, listing counts and prices are data from the sources above, dated. Emails that a model wrote in my voice were switched off on 26 September 2026.

An opinion of value on this site is not an appraisal or a CMA. It is what I would pay for a home, and why, on the day I wrote it.

How Property Takes work

1. I pick a listed home and write down what I would pay for it, the reasoning, and the risks. It is dated the day it goes out, on this site or first on Facebook and Instagram.
2. The published read is locked. A hash of its words and numbers is kept, and the site’s build fails if any of them change. The hashes are public in the Takes dataset, so anyone can check a page against it.
3. Corrections go below the read, dated, saying what changed and why. The read itself stays as it was.
4. Every day the site checks whether each Take’s home is still on the market and says so at the top of the Take.

All Property Takes

How outcomes are judged

When a Take’s home sells, the sale is matched to it by MLS® number, or by address when the home was relisted, against the board’s sold records. The rule is fixed in advance:

• Right: the home sold within 3% of my number.
• Right direction: it sold nearer my number than the asking price, but more than 3% away from my number.
• Missed: it sold nearer the asking price than my number, or above asking.

A home that leaves the market without selling is recorded as that. Every call stays up, right or wrong, on Receipts.

How building data works

For each condo building the site tracks, the numbers (units for sale, condo fees, price per square foot, days listed) are computed fresh every day from active listings and never typed in. Anything written about a building beyond those numbers is mine and dated.

How the site keeps numbers current

• If the listing feed stops refreshing for more than three hours, a daily health check alerts me.
• A page that quotes a CREB® figure the current monthly file does not contain fails the site’s build.
• A mortgage rate outside its sane range, or older than its limit, is refused rather than published.
• When a refresh fails, the last good data stays up with its date on it. It is never relabelled as current.

How AI is used

The Calgary Home Search (AI Powered) reads a plain-language question and turns it into a search. The results always come from the listing feed, not from the model. The chat assistant answers questions from the site’s own data. Neither gives legal, tax or financial advice.

Corrections

If something on this site is wrong, tell me: text 403-888-4268 or email [email protected]. Published opinions are corrected below the original with the date. Everything else is fixed in place, and the page’s “Updated” date moves only when what you can read on it changes.