The Home Tribe Real Estate Blog

Buying an Edmonton home? Planning your wish list: number of bedrooms, bathrooms, style? Or maybe you are an Edmonton Real Estate Investor looking for the right property to build your next project. We recommend considering the homes lot size or dimensions. Depending on your Edmonton lots dimensions, it may yield more or less value. Edmonton Infill builders will especially find this true when they are sourcing out building sites as a 33 wide or a 50 wide or larger, will drastically change the possibilities of what can be built.

Take the Edmonton skinny home – which is typically a 17 wide home built on a 25 wide lot. These narrow homes are usually built on an existing 50 wide lot that is subdivided to make room for 2 homes. The benefit for home buyers of this is the further densification of more core neighbourhoods to accommodate more residents and offer newer or potentially more affordable alternatives.

At TruHome, we are often on the search for great Edmonton homes that offer further benefits for investors or buyers to consider so being able to track down the dimensions of a lot is extremely important. We also have always been and continue to be big advocates for making more data accessible and open, so when we launched a way to search for information on an Edmonton lots dimensions (Internal Tool – Not Fully Polished), it only made sense to not keep this as an internal tool, but rather open it up and make it accessible.

Try out our new tool here: https://www.yourtruhome.com/edmonton-land-size

We hope you enjoy this tool as much as we do. Be sure to share it, use it and let us know what you think and of course reach out and let us know how we can help you buy, sell or invest in Edmonton Real Estate.

We can get you where you want to be. Home. Did you know that TruHome has a native app available on for download on your iPhone? Packed full of great features, this app is sure to become a go to favourite when browsing for Edmonton Real Estate on the go. Edmonton’s best option for real estate apps, explore thousands of homes for sale in the Edmonton region. Our app offers various searching options, from latest listings, to gps enabled searching and by your desired community. The Your TruHome app is there to help you stay on top of what’s happening in the Edmonton real estate market.

Find a house you want to see – let us know and one of TruHome’s experienced real estate partners will be in touch. Our goal is to make the home buying process easier by helping you find the right home and connecting you to the right real estate experts.

The Your TruHome app has everything you want when it comes to finding your Edmonton home on the go.

Key Features:

• Browse all Edmonton homes for sale, including what is on the MLS® System.
• Explore every type of home, from single family, to condos, to townhouses and more.
• Search homes the way you like: Via map, communities or latest listings

Stay tuned, as we release more enhanced features. Ready to try out our app? Download our Edmonton Real Estate app here.

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)?

Earlier this month, the TruHome team was honoured to be included in discussing how entrepreneurship and job growth are paramount to the success of building up the Alberta economy. By the government funding organizations like TEC Edmonton, you will see greater mentorship and small business growth, which will in turn help propel our economy forward. 

As part of this celebration, our team was invited to speak about the work TEC Edmonton did with us and meet the Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Deron Bilous. It was a crazy week, as not only were we participating in this, but I (Elisse) personally, just celebrated the birth of my son, Harrison, who got to partake in this journey at 5 days old.

Entreprenur and TEC client Elisse Moreno said her experience with the incubator backs up the encouraging statistics in the report. She’s the founder of TruHome (formerly HomeTribe), a technology-based startup that uses data and analytics to help match homebuyers with suitable properties.

“We worked with other consulting companies and we felt like we were sometimes a number,” she said. “Here, we came in the first day and met with almost everyone in TEC Edmonton and they listened to our story. … They’re on board, so you build confidence and you feel better about everything.”

But Moreno said startups in Alberta still face major hurdles. “It’s funding and mentorship that are the two things that we’re facing.”

• read more at The Edmonton Journal

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!

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?