The Habistat was co-founded by self-professed data and charts lover Daniel Foch, chief real estate officer at Vaughan, Ont.-based Valery.ca (and REM columnist), to make it easier to create charts and tables that he previously had to create manually.

“Originally, I did it to solve the problem—it was taking me too long to create these charts. I said, ‘There’s got to be a fix for this.’” 

“I’m probably one of the leading agents who makes charts as my source of content. That’s how I get clients and build trust,” says Foch.

Foch ended up meeting two data scientists on Twitter with whom he teamed up to develop The Habistat. The three “spent quite a bit of our own money” to develop The Habistat but Foch would not provide dollar figures.

“I’m probably one of the leading agents who makes charts as my source of content. That’s how I get clients and build trust,” Foch says. “But to do that would take me hundreds of hours of manual work. Now, I don’t have to do that work, which is a huge time saver for me.”

Foch says The Habistat enables Realtors to access data in an easier fashion than they could previously and to then communicate that data clearly to clients or on their social media.

Streamlined data access

The Habistat is available in a dashboard format that gives Realtors instant access to real-time data on what’s happening in the housing market.

“There is a need to give clients better advice,” and The Habistat enables Realtors to go into a lot more granular detail, getting as close as a neighbourhood level to provide information like sales price by location or sales volume by property type. 

Among other things, The Habistat can track market fluctuations, analyze property values, identify growing markets and access new methods of finding comparables and property history.

“Before, you kind of had access to the data, but to compile it manually and create charts is not something an agent would want to do.”

From the private sector to PropTx

Foch and his co-founders originally ran The Habistat as a private sector enterprise. They used publicly available CREA and TRREB data to provide precise information on what was going on in the housing market

However, TRREB did not take kindly to its data being used.

The Habistat “wasn’t compliant with TRREB’s data rules. That’s why we had to shut it down,” Foch says. “We worked over two or three years to become compliant with them and they basically licensed the product from us during that process.”

TRREB is now fully onboard. “The Habistat is a user-friendly tool helping Realtors navigate housing market data, providing value-added analyses and reports for buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants,” TRREB CEO John DiMichele said in a statement. 

The launch of The Habistat shows that the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) “continues to grow the lineup of technology tools available to Realtors using the PropTx MLS System,” DiMichele said.

Scaling for the future 

Among other things, DiMichele says The Habistat allows members to explore reports and dashboards for active and inactive listings, and easily produce comparisons based on different locations and home types. Customized map boundaries can be produced, and market activity reports can be created for individual condo buildings. 

DiMichele said the system will evolve and enhance market statistics, trends and overall property intelligence. 

PropTx, the wholly owned technology subsidiary of TRREB, now owns the global license for The Habistat, in a deal that was finalized by Foch’s two partners.  “I think the objective of PropTX is to scale it to other real estate boards,” Foch said. Most Ontario boards now subscribe to PropTx.

Training Realtors for data-driven success

While The Habistat does not currently produce real estate projections “that is something we’d like to include in the future,” Foch says

On the other hand, The Habistat does provide a clear picture of what’s happening now.  “Because it’s real-time data, whenever a data point is updated on TRREB, it’ll be reflected in the charts. You can spot a trend early if you’re trying to advise a client rather than having to wait for a monthly report to indicate that that trend exists.”

Although it will be easy to learn for people who are data-minded or analytical, “I think the average agent would probably require a little bit of training,” Foch adds. “I’m hoping to be doing some ongoing free training for the program in the new year.”