When people have accurate, accessible information about the places they live, work, and invest in, they make better choices. That's not just a business case — it's the reason we exist.
In Canadian real estate, the information gap between professionals and the public is wide, and it has consequences. A first-time buyer choosing between two otherwise similar homes doesn't know that one will cost $1,700 more per year to heat. A renter doesn't know that the neighbourhood they're considering has had forty permit applications in the past three years — a signal of a community investing in itself. A family relocating from Calgary to Halifax doesn't have access to the same school catchment, walkability, and demographic context that a seasoned local agent carries around in their head.
That gap isn't inevitable. The underlying data exists — in utility systems, in municipal permit offices, in federal census files, in provincial land registries. It's fragmented, inconsistently formatted, and locked inside systems that weren't designed for public use. Neighbourly's job is to change that. To turn those fragmented sources into a coherent, accessible layer that any product — a listing portal, a city planning tool, a community dashboard — can use to give people the context they deserve.
We build commercial products. We have customers and a business model. But the underlying conviction is that better location data, more widely accessible, produces better outcomes for Canadians — and that building the infrastructure to make that possible is work worth doing.
Every Canadian address exists within layers of context — demographic, environmental, historical, economic — that are relevant to the people who live there or are considering living there. That context should be attached to the address, not locked away.
Heating and cooling a Canadian home costs $2,000–$3,500 per year. That's material information for any buyer or renter. The fact that it doesn't routinely appear on listings isn't a technical problem — it's an institutional one. We're working to fix it.
Every permit filed with a municipality is a public record. Whether a roof was replaced, a foundation repaired, or a basement finished is information that exists — it just isn't easily accessible at the point of sale. We're building the layer that makes it accessible.
Neighbourhood demographic data from Statistics Canada is a tool for understanding communities — for planning services, evaluating transit catchments, and making informed location decisions. We take care that how we present it supports understanding and prohibits misuse.
Individual-level data stays individual. We aggregate, anonymize, and benchmark — so that useful insights reach the people who need them without exposing the household-level data of any individual Canadian. PIPEDA compliance and Quebec Law 25 are floors, not ceilings.
The location data of Canadian addresses and communities belongs in Canadian infrastructure, governed by Canadian law, operated by a company with skin in the game. We're incorporated here, hosted here, and building for the long term — not optimizing for a US acquisition.
Where you live shapes every part of your life. The information that helps you choose where to live should be available to everyone.
These aren't separate initiatives — they're the same work, applied across different parts of the same problem. Location intelligence that helps a PropTech team build a smarter listing page also helps a city planner understand what's changing in a neighbourhood. The data is the same. The impact multiplies.
Buying or renting a home is the largest financial decision most Canadians make. We're building the layer that makes listings tell the full story — neighbourhood context, energy costs, permit history, proximity to schools and services — in the standard formats that listing platforms and portals can use.
Canada has committed to net-zero by 2050. Residential buildings are responsible for roughly 17% of national greenhouse gas emissions. The single highest-leverage intervention at the property level is disclosure: when buyers and renters can see energy performance, they make different decisions — and the market rewards efficiency.
Canada has roughly 3,500 municipalities, each producing valuable data — permits, zoning, development applications — that is largely inaccessible in any structured form. We normalize, standardize, and republish this data in a way that planners, researchers, journalists, and community advocates can actually use.
Government agencies, non-profits, and researchers need the same location context that commercial products use — to plan transit routes, allocate services, understand displacement risk, and report on neighbourhood change. We support access to our data for public-interest uses because the infrastructure benefits everyone when it's used well.
Our coverage page is honest about where data exists and where it doesn't. We don't fabricate or interpolate data to fill gaps, and we clearly communicate confidence levels and update cadences to every consumer of our API. A known gap is better than a false positive.
Academic researchers, journalists, non-profit housing advocates, and municipal governments doing public-interest work can access Neighbourly data at reduced or no cost. We evaluate requests on merit and maintain a programme for public-interest data partnerships. If you're doing work that benefits Canadians, talk to us.
Our Terms of Service explicitly prohibit using Neighbourly data to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics under the Canadian Human Rights Act — including in housing, lending, and employment decisions. We enforce this and reserve the right to terminate access for violations.
We offset the emissions of our Canadian data infrastructure and report annually on our operational footprint. We're a small company, but we think the standard of building a sustainability practice early — before it's required — matters, especially for a company whose work touches the built environment.
Anyone who finds an error in our data can report it directly. We commit to investigating every report, updating affected records, and publishing a public changelog of material corrections. Data quality is a public trust issue when the data is used for significant decisions — we take that seriously.
The path from a Statistics Canada boundary file to a homebuyer understanding their neighbourhood involves a lot of infrastructure. Here's how we build it.
Federal, provincial, and municipal data sources — census files, permit databases, utility Green Button data, address registries — ingested on defined cadences with version tracking.
Addresses are standardized to a canonical form. Geographic hierarchies are reconciled. Permit taxonomies are mapped across jurisdictions. Demographic data is linked to the right geographic level.
Every record carries confidence scores, source attribution, and a last-refreshed timestamp. Gaps are flagged — never filled with synthetic data. Errors reported by users are reviewed and corrected with a public changelog.
Any product team can query enriched context by address, coordinate, or bounding box. The same data layer that powers a commercial listing portal can power a municipal planning dashboard or a researcher's housing analysis.
Whether you're building a commercial product, a public-interest tool, or researching the Canadian housing market — we'd like to talk.