WHEN AN IDEA BECOMES AN OBSESSION – ISSUE 300

Here we are!

300 weeks ago, we started with a simple idea to let folks know what was happening in the Guelph real estate market by way of our weekly sales reports. These reports started out as simple PDFs – a single line report that showed the address, list price, sale price and days on market for each of the 18 neighbourhoods in the Guelph MLS® system. People could sign up and see what was selling in the city and their neighbourhood.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say it was well received.

The idea for this blog went back many years before the internet was even a thing. I’d often get clients asking me for back issues of our weekly MLS catalogue. They were highly prized and I had a rotating library system that saw the most recent back issue to go to the clients that were closer to looking and older issues shared with clients that often referred new clients to me. At times, it was a Solomon-like task to decide which client received a book on any given week. The challenge was that these catalogues were full of (past) active listings, and didn’t show any stats or sales data.

Our idea with this weekly blog was to provide clients with sales data and statistics, so they could see where the market was in their neighbourhood and the city. Our reports were prefaced with a short post on market conditions, or events in the real estate market that we thought would be relevant to our readers.

Over the years, as our ability to create reports and sort through the data evolved, we were able to provide more detailed reports to the point where clients could look at the listing details and photos to better understand why a particular home sold for what it did.

We had a lot of feedback. From our clients, the feedback was unanimously positive. From our competitors' perspective, there were many that signed up to see what we were up to and a few reached out to ask how we were doing it. We shared those details – we believe there is more than enough business to go around, and if we help our competitors better educate their clients, the industry and market as a whole is better off.

There were some of the old guard that thought what we were doing was sacrilege, and a few even filed formal complaints about it. Those complaints actually helped us deliver a better service, in that we then shifted our reports to the Realtor.ca-style platform it is today (soldinguelph.ca).

Our current site now lets you view photos and listing details as you would find on Realtor.ca, along with the sold data, plus searching by individual streets and data that goes back several years.

We keep all of this behind a registration and password protected site because that’s what the privacy act and the legislation governing the real estate industry requires.

(If you’re not familiar with soldinguelph.ca, check it out!)

So, what’s in store for the next 300 issues?

Great question.

We’ll continue to evolve our platform and add more features to it. We intend to engage more with you, so you can expect to see surveys and even some contests to show appreciation for the readers who help us improve and grow our site.

We won’t be afraid to dig into controversial issues in our efforts to keep you educated and informed – about not only the local, but provincial and national real estate markets. Over the past few years, there have been no shortage of topics and current events that affect the real estate market, and there’s no doubt we’ll run out of topics to cover in the coming years.

Thank you for your continued support over the past 300 weeks. I’m excited to continue the journey and see where this all goes!

THE PAST WEEK IN THE GUELPH REAL ESTATE MARKET

Take a look at the full key week comparison:

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