Come explore Canadian housing prices on The Globe’s revamped real estate site

For years, The Globe has been one of the largest producers of real estate news and analysis in Canada — but you wouldn’t know it from looking at our site. Until recently, there was no one place to find it all: Some of our coverage appeared in the Business section, some in Life and some in Personal Finance.

To help our readers find our real estate content more easily (and make it easier for advertisers to sponsor it), we created a new Real Estate hub that brings all the content together:

The new section neatly organizes the content by both type and by city (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary & Edmonton) as well as cross-promoting other sections of interest to our visitors, such as “Design & Decor” and “Worksheets & Calculators.”

At the same time, we created a new home for our real estate videos, which had been mixed in with other Life videos previously:

New House Price Data Centre

The most exciting addition was our new House Price Data Centre, a one-stop interactive portal packed with exclusive house price data aimed at homeowners. Our research showed that while there are lots of online destinations for real estate listings (we’re talking about you, MLS) there aren’t many places where homeowners could find out how home prices are trending in their local city or neighbourhood.

To create one, we partnered up with Teranet and National Bank, which jointly produce the House Price Index — one of the most complete and trusted sources of housing data in the country. We built an interactive Data Centre for our new Real Estate hub, and they agreed to supply the monthly data that powers it.

At the top of the Data Centre, visitors will find a summary of how house prices are trending as of the latest data release. This ensures there’s always something new on the page:

Below that, we look at the national picture, with an interactive graph comparing the long-term price trend in each of Canada’s top 11 cities to the national trend:

Below that is a deeper dive into each of the six largest cities, where you can look up average house prices for your neighbourhood by entering the first three characters of your postal code:

You can even find out how prices have been trending in your local area versus the whole city or country:

The Data Centre works great on mobile too:

The results so far

Things are looking good. The launch has been a success with readers, who are spending a lot of time on the page, and also with advertisers.

We want to add even more features in the months to come — let us know what you like and don’t like so we can continue to improve the Data Centre. We can’t do anything about the fact that a dingy shack in Vancouver will set you back $2-million, though … We just report the prices, we don’t set them.

We’re always interested to hear what you think. Tell us in the comments.