Last week we had the pleasure of attending the Edmonton Housing Forecast that featured 3 economists (from CMHC, Alberta and the City of Edmonton) and the new chair of our board to gain a deeper understanding of what is happening in the economy overall and more specifically Edmonton. Surprisingly, all 3 economists shared similar views about Edmonton’s market for 2017. The best way to describe it would be “fairly steady” which is not a bad thing to hear considering all that has been occurring in Alberta over the last few years.

• Edmonton will outperform Alberta due to it’s relatively diverse economy.
• Unemployment in the Edmonton region will stabilize in the 7.5% range in early 2017.
• 2016 looked a lot like 2015 when it came to Real Estate – Strong prices, high inventory, dipping sales

What Was The Outcome For The Edmonton Real Estate Market In 2016?

What Are The Predictions For The Edmonton Real Estate Market In 2017?

So, what exactly does this mean? We are feeling optimistic about the market. It is a great time to invest in Edmonton real estate. That being said, remember, this only tells one aspect of the story, since this is only a general overview of the entire city. Each neighbourhood in the city will have it’s own story to tell. The good news, is that the TruHome team has a full time data scientist on our team to better evaluate the market to provide more in depth data and advice.

Interested in discussing your unique home buying and selling needs, be sure to connect with us today. 

How many violations does an Edmonton restaurant need to receive for you to stop going there, or do you even care?

In our province, Alberta Health Services is in charge of monitoring and regulating restaurants to ensure they comply with the public health legislation and standards in Alberta.

While each restaurants violations are tracked online at www.restaurantinspections.ca, it is unlikely that you as a consumer are visiting this website prior to go out to eat each time. More than likely, you probably have never even visited it.

At present time, we often do not consider the risks involved with eating out and that these risks may be far greater at certain establishments then others. How risky is eating out? Are certain restaurants worse or better? Or more so, do I even want to know? Perhaps, ignorance is bliss…until one day, your kneeling over the toilet bowl experiencing a terrible case of food poisoning.

According to a recent poll by Open Data Edmonton, 43% of people do want better access to the Restaurant Inspection data. This indicates that access to this type of data is important to the public.

At TruHome, we are all about enhancing our clients (and the people of YEG) lifestyle through more open and transparent data. We also, just happen to be curious folks who ask a lot questions…..which is why we couldn’t wait to get our hands on the restaurant inspection data.

Through Alberta Health Services, restaurants may encounter 4 different types of inspections:

• Initial / Approval – an inspection performed before a restaurant opens or if there is a new owner to determine if the facility will be able to prepare food safely and complies with applicable legislation.
• Monitoring / Routine – an inspection performed without notice to ensure food is being handled safely and complies with applicable legislation. Restaurants usually have 1 to 3 monitoring inspections per year.
• Risk Management / Re-inspection – an inspection performed to ensure that unsafe practices and violations noted in previous inspections have been corrected.
• Demand / Complaint – an inspection performed to follow up on complaints from the public or another agency alleging an unsafe condition or violation.

In our Edmonton Restaurant Inspection visualization, we felt that critical violations would be the most important measure for #yegfoodies, as this really touches on public safety concerns. Through our visualization, we soon discovered that while some Edmonton restaurants had virtually no violations, others obtained over 53 in the last 3 years alone (2014-2016).

According to the AHS:

Monitoring inspections are conducted unannounced and are considered “complete” inspections, meaning the inspection involves Environmental Health Officers observing and documenting compliance under fifteen categories:

1. General Sanitation/Structure
2. Water Supply – Public or private supply
3. Sewage System – Public or private
4. Food Handling Practices
5. Cold Food Storage/Display
6. Hot Food Storage/Display
7. Staff Hygiene
8. Equipment and Utensils (Condition/Storage/Display)
9. Dishwashing Equipment
10. Washroom (Public & Staff)
11. Dry Goods Storage
12. Pest Infestation/Control
13. Safe Food Certification
14. Sanitation Procedures/Pest Control Record
15. Valid Food Handlers Permit

It makes us wonder, will the knowledge of the number of violations a restaurant has received impact your decision to eat there? Or more importantly, is there a better way that the province or the city of Edmonton can communicate a restaurants track record more openly to the publicly?

The city of Toronto has taken significant steps to making their inspections more transparent. The Toronto DineSafe program grades each restaurant through a colour coded system:

• Green for Pass
• Yellow for Conditional Pass
• Red for Closed

These grades are required to be visibly posted at each restaurant. Since, implementing this program, Toronto went from 78.2% of restaurants passing to 92.4% by the end of 2012. According to the Food Service Packaging Institute: “In 2010 DineSafe won the Samuel J. Crumbine Consumer Protection Award for providing outstanding food protection services – the first time an organization outside the United States has won this prestigious award.”

Based on this, it does show a direct correlation of how accessible data has improved the quality of the restaurant industry in Toronto.

Can Alberta restaurants improve and reduce the number of violations? How can, we as a province move forward and be recognized as a leader in this capacity?

At TruHome, we believe in opening up the data, but, more specifically on the how the data is communicated to the public. How do you think Restaurant Inspection data should be displayed (online or off)?

Author: Trevor Prentice

It was always our intention to be involved in our community in some way once our family settled down.  In fact, an active community was one of the things we were looking for when deciding where in the city to live.  The neighbourhood we have since moved to has an official community league that manages a community hall, ice rink, sports, runs events throughout the year, and a number of other projects.  This, and a recent conversation with a co-worker who lives in a newer neighbourhood in the city, has led me to wonder which neighbourhoods in the city have official community leagues, and how new leagues are created.

The Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues website informed me that there are apparently 157 community leagues in Edmonton!  Given how many people are involved in keeping my league running relatively smoothly, it’s hard to imagine how many people are working (primarily as volunteers, in my understanding) all over the city to make our communities better places to live!

157 community leagues is pretty great, but the 2014 census showed 239 neighbourhoods in Edmonton with over 1000 people living in them.  Many people must live in areas without these great opportunities to get to know their neighbours, interface directly with city officials, and create and take advantage of extra facilities, at least in the capacity of a community league.

If you are in such a situation, where you live in a neighbourhood that has yet to establish an official community league, you may be interested to know that the city offers a $5000 Emerging Community League Grant to help get things started.  Additionally, on an annual basis, community leagues in Edmonton are eligible for an Operating Grant from the city, the amount of which is based partially on the size of the neighbourhood.

An even easier way to get started, to test the waters, and to generate some interest in a new community, is to plan and host a “block party”.  With the city’s permission, a street, park, or back alley can be closed off for you and your neighbours to have a BBQ or other event.  The City of Edmonton website has lots of information and advice on getting started.

So get involved and take some initiative; build or help grow a community, your neighbours may be cooler than you think!

Hello Edmonton Real Estate – What Is Going On? (A Recap From May)

• 1,771 properties were sold in the Edmonton Census Metropolitan Area (up 18% from April)
• 1,119 single family detached homes were sold in the Edmonton CMA (19% percent increase from April)
• 449 condos and 203 duplex/rowhouses sold (up 5% and 37% from April, respectively)
• $382,695 was the average all-residential price for May (up by over 1% from April)

“While new listings coming onto the market were down this May compared to 2015, inventory continues to remain strong with more than 8,000 residential properties on the market at month’s end,” REALTORS® Association of Edmonton Chair Steve Sedgwick said. “The fact that we haven’t seen a significant decline in prices is giving buyers more assurance. They are making purchases based on market stability and good selection.”

What Is Happening In Your Area – Stats Wise?

We are excited to annouce that we are now launching monthly stats based on region. Central Edmonton Dwellers (Downtown & Oliver)  – check out stats specific to this area below. Don’t live in the core? Contact us to get updated on what’s happening in your hood. 

Questions to think about when it comes to property assessment changes?

Buying a home is likely one of the biggest decisions of a person’s life from a financial perspective. For this reason, Home Tribe aims to help people use data and science to make better and more informed decisions related to buying a home. In addition to our Home Tribe Match function, which relies heavily on numerous datasets related to real estate, we will be expanding our blog to bring some of this data out from behind the scenes, and to showcase other cool information that is relevant or just plain awesome.

With property taxes in the news over this past month, we thought it would be a great time to release our latest data visualization map. Similar in appearance to the building age map we published in March, this map highlights the areas of the city of Edmonton where property assessment values have either increased or decreased in the last year. You can view our Edmonton property comparison visualization of 2015-2016 here.

You may have also come across the City of Edmonton’s amusing videos that attempt to illuminate the process the City uses to determine the value of every property in Edmonton on an annual basis. Even after watching the videos, I still had questions about how these assessment increases or decreases vary from place to place within Edmonton. Our Assessed Values map does a great job of illuminating how the assessed values changed in the past year, using open data from the City’s Open Data Catalogue.

One feature of this data that jumped out at me right away is the distinctive barrier in northern Edmonton, 137 ave. On the north side of this road property taxes almost all increased significantly (one notable exception being Londonderry Mall), on the south side they decreased. In fact, the neighbourhood in the city with the greatest decrease in assessment values, Athlone, is on the west side of this zone. Use the search bar in the top right of the map to pinpoint Athlone, or other

Another interesting pattern that I noticed is the tendency for houses on the edge of a neighbourhood to have the opposite trend as the houses on the inside of the same neighbourhood in some areas of the city, most notably in the south west. Is this effect partially due to nice river valley views, or, in the case of decreases, river valley land slide danger (such as along Whitemud Rd)? In the most expensive neighbourhood in town, Westbrook Estates, there is an interesting inner row of houses that decreased their assessed value in contrast to the rest of the neighbourhood. Is this due to the fact that they border onto the Derrick Golf Club, and there could be more stray golf ball danger now than last year?

As you can probably tell, more often than not, looking at data in this way can raise more questions than it answers. This certainly isn’t a bad thing though, without a great visualization of data like this, it’s hard to even determine what questions to ask!

Last month, the TruHome team was excited to launch our Edmonton Building Age Map in partnership with Beta City Yeg and help from many amazing Edmontonians including Wesley Andreas and Trevor Prentice. The launch of this interactive map in the end brought about much debate and excitement, largely due to the conversations being had city wide about Urban Sprawl and the impact it could have on future city budgets.

On March 18, 2016 – Don Iveson wrote his own blog about “Calculating Our Real Costs Of Our Growth” in which he advises about the future potential cost of new communities. According to their calculations, “when [the city of Edmonton considers] the full life cycle of this infrastructure and the delivery of city services to these growth areas, the model shows a revenue shortfall of $1.4 billion over the next 50 years.” To be fair to Don though, he is certainly not stating that growth of this kind is inherently bad, but is rather trying to provoke a deeper conversation about how growth can be paid for.

Based on his question, one has to ask the question as to whether higher density is the answer? Or, whose taxes should be higher – those in the urban regions of the city or those in the suburban regions? These are not easy answers, nor are we trying to advise on an answer. Our goal, is to present more thoughts and ideas to continue to this discussion as to how we can aspire to build better neighbourhoods no matter where they are built.

Yes, higher density needs to be part of the overall conversation, however, many people may not be aware that the newer communities that are being built are more dense then their neighbourhoods of the past (1950’s-1960’s). In fact, previously one hectre acre would say approx. 10 houses, while now you’ll see 20.

The Canadian Home Builders Association – Alberta is also being proactive in doing their own research on economic growth and how it impacts the city of Edmonton. This week, they are exploring Denver, a city similar to Edmonton, who has been proactively seeking alternative housing solutions to combat these very questions and issues. I had the pleasure of speaking with Paul Cashman, the Communication Manager last week about Urban Sprawl and their organization. From it came some very insightful and interesting dialogue.

Paul brought up some great points about Edmonton highlighting the importance of balance: “giving choices that people want”. We talked about the fact that Edmonton is unique in the sense that not all jobs are located around the core. Many Edmonton employees work in the suburban areas or even outside in Nisku or Leduc, making the southern most  Edmonton neighbours ideal for commutability and raising a family.

We also have discussed the concept that Edmonton is very much a “prairie” city in which many people have grown up and are used to having their own “land”, meaning that not everyone wants to live in a condo type setting. Times are changing though, and the different home ownership options in the Edmonton Real Estate market are definitely highlighting this fact.

Another big part of the equation comes down to affordability. At the end of the day, people are going to go where they can afford to buy the kind of Edmonton real estate they want.

What are your thoughts on Urban Sprawl, and the future of the city of Edmonton’s growth?

Want to learn more about TruHome’s Edmonton Building Age Map? Read more about it in these publications:

• Edmonton Examiner
• Maps Mania
• The Map Room
• Spacing Edmonton
• Canadian Geographic

Buying a home is likely one of the biggest decisions of a person’s life from a financial perspective. For this reason, Home Tribe aims to help people use data and science to make better and more informed decisions related to buying a home. In addition to our Home Tribe Match function, which relies heavily on numerous datasets related to real estate, we will be expanding our blog to bring some of this data out from behind the scenes, and to showcase other cool information that is relevant or just plain awesome. 

Through our participation with the vibrant community of data enthusiasts  in Edmonton, we recently came across a request to redeploy the open source Chicago Building Age Map for Edmonton. The Home Tribe team was excited to take on the challenge. View the visualization of the City of Edmonton’s Building Age Map. 

Creating a local version of this map required some pretty intense data, including one of my personal favourite datasets that has been released through the City of Edmonton’s Open Data Catalogue: the rooflines dataset. I love this set because of the sheer amount of info it contains, which is clearly evident when you load it as a map. Combining this with the more recently released data on the year each building in Edmonton was built, allowed our team to put together the crazy visualization that you see below.

To really give the map a local feel, we figured it would be important to customize the date ranges that allow for focusing on specific periods of Edmonton’s history. Edmonton’s Architectural Heritage website divides our history into five major periods including “Urban Settlement”, “Urban Growth”, “The War Years” and “The Post War Years”. This was a great place to start, but we thought it would also be worthwhile looking at how population changed in Edmonton, and of course when there were major construction booms. Neighbourhood planner and Spruce Avenue Neighbourhood Historian, Wesley Andreas, also helped confirm and refine our planned time periods. Combining much of this information, and balancing it with the actual number of buildings built in each time period from the dataset displayed, we were able to subtly improve the history lesson that goes along with this quite eye-catching display of two extremely intense city datasets.

Have some fun; try to find the answers to these questions:

• What did the city look like at the end of WWII?
• When was your house built and how does this align with nearby areas?
• In what areas has the city been expanding most in the last decade or so?

Discover HomeTribe.ca on the Apple TV

The future of home searching is now here. Larger and better than ever!!!

Looking for a better way to browse for your next Edmonton home? HomeTribe.ca has done it again, bringing innovation to the forefront with their recently launched app for the Apple TV. What could be better than sitting on your coach skimming all the great real estate finds Edmonton has to offer.

Key features include: Available on 4th Generation Apple TV

• View listings in our most popular neighbourhoods
• Easily search for the desired communities you want to live in
• View Full Images and details on all listings
• Easily connect with our team to book a showing or ask a question

HomeTribe.ca is all about empowering people by offering innovative technology solutions for the home buying and selling process. We are extremely excited about launching our own custom app! How to find it? Simply search “Edmonton Real Estate” in the apple tv app store.

Any questions, feel free to connect with our team.