Congratulations! You have a new client, Susan.
Susan wants to list her home at the same price her neighbour David’s home sold for 11 months ago.
Should you list Susan’s home for that price?
Well, price trends indicate Susan’s neighbourhood has changed over the past 11 months.
How can you show Susan that the list price of her home needs to be adjusted while validating your comparative market analysis?
The MLS® Home Price Index (HPI) is the most advanced and accurate tool to gauge a neighborhood’s home price levels and trends. The MLS® HPI includes more than 65 local markets and represents more than 80% of real estate activity across Canada.
Average or median prices can change a lot from one month to the next and don’t tell a complete story. They don’t consider how a home’s features, like the number of bedrooms or bathrooms, can affect its price—the MLS® HPI does.
Each month, the MLS® HPI uses more than 15 years of MLS® System data and sophisticated statistical models to define a “typical” home based on the features of homes that have been bought or sold. These benchmark homes are tracked across localized neighbourhoods and different types of houses. Changes in these prices are measured and tracked over time providing REALTORS® like you with valuable data.
Your expertise as a real estate professional, backed by the comprehensive data generated by the MLS® HPI, can help you make better informed pricing decisions and validate your pricing recommendations as part of your comparative market analysis. This helps your clients, like Susan, get the right price, regardless of whether they are buying or selling.
With the MLS® HPI you get access to:
- home price trends for a specific type of house in a given neighbourhood;
- data on how a home’s features, like the number of bedrooms or bathrooms, affect its price; and
- a more accurate comparison of home prices across the country.
All real estate is local and that applies as much to housing markets across Canada as it does to neighbourhoods within each market.
