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Home sellers and buyers, get ready for data collected by Realtor.ca this summer.
The real estate website will survey prospective buyers and sellers from August to November, monitoring an average of 800 properties over five weeks for what is considered the most typically anticipated time of year for buying a home.
In addition to that, there will be more than 40 local spots on the Realtor.ca data base where users can look up their neighbourhood on a map or scan the date, year and date they put in a request for a list of homes that interested them.
The tech company says it takes about one third of a day to collect all the data and “it is part of the process to keep the service updated with recent property data.”
Earlier this week, Realtor.ca launched two real estate conversations.
The first is aimed at sellers who may be worried about who will purchase their home once they are gone and the second at owners of condos who might need advice about how their neighbours might react when it is time to move on.
The website cites the research of the Leger Marketing Group which says condos are getting more attention than single-family homes from investors who are interested in using them as rental properties.
Greg French, president of Realtor.ca, says the site will expand its rental, buying and selling sections this summer and next.
He says the research is in response to a data point he learned from the home buyers he has worked with for more than two decades.
“The primary reason people buy or sell real estate is not based on what the listing price is,” he says. “It is based on what the neighbourhood is. For two years in a row, people told me it was more important to them to be close to an institution and amenities than to be close to where they lived in a previous home.”
This article first appeared in The Bay City Times.