Generic geocoding gives you a lat/lng. Neighbourly gives you 10 layers of structured context — built specifically for Canada, maintained by a team that knows the data, and delivered through a single consistent API.
If you're building a Canadian product that needs location context, the default path is painful: a geocoding call here, a Statistics Canada boundary lookup there, a permit database scrape somewhere else — each with its own schema, authentication, rate limit, and maintenance burden. You spend engineering time on plumbing instead of product.
Neighbourly replaces that stack with a single API. Every dataset we offer — demographics, boundaries, permits, energy, schools, businesses, environmental risk, livability — is queryable by the same coordinate or address, returns the same consistent structure, and is maintained and updated by us. You get one contract, one key, one schema, and a team you can actually talk to.
This isn't a list of features. It's a list of decisions we made — about what to build, how to maintain it, and who we're building it for.
We weren't built for the US market and later extended to Canada. Every schema, every boundary set, every neighbourhood taxonomy, every permit classification was designed for how Canada actually works — provincial land systems, dual-language support, Canadian address formats, Statistics Canada geographies.
Most data providers are a single-layer service. You get demographics from one vendor, permits from another, energy from a third — and you own the integration problem. Neighbourly covers all 10 layers in one API, one auth token, and one consistent response format. Integration takes hours, not weeks.
Every record we return carries a confidence score, source attribution, and last-refreshed timestamp. Our coverage page is honest about where data is dense and where it's sparse. We'd rather you know a gap exists than discover a false positive in production — and we maintain a public changelog for all material corrections.
Building energy performance and permit history for Canadian addresses are datasets we've invested heavily in sourcing and structuring. They don't exist anywhere else in a normalized, API-accessible form at Canada-wide scale. If these matter to your product — and for PropTech, insurance, and mortgage use cases they often do — Neighbourly is the only option.
Our infrastructure is hosted in Canada. We're incorporated in Canada. The data we hold about Canadian addresses and communities is governed by Canadian law — PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, and provincial privacy frameworks. For regulated industries like banking, insurance, and government, this isn't optional — and we don't treat it as such.
When you have a question about why a boundary looks the way it does, or why a specific permit was classified a certain way, you'll get an answer from someone who built the pipeline — not a support agent reading from a knowledge base. We're a specialized team that has spent years working with Canadian location data, and we're reachable.
Not every use case needs what we offer. But if you're building a Canadian product that requires deep location context, here's how the options stack up.
| Capability | Neighbourly | Generic geocoding APIs | Building it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canadian address coverage | ✓ 13M+ addresses | ⚑ Partial — US-optimized | ⚑ Depends on sources |
| Neighbourhood demographics | ✓ Census-aligned, normalized | ✗ Not available | ⚑ Manual StatsCan integration |
| Building permit history | ✓ 20+ cities, normalized | ✗ Not available | ⚑ City-by-city scraping required |
| Energy performance data | ✓ Canada-wide modelled + reported | ✗ Not available | ✗ No structured source exists |
| Environmental risk layers | ✓ Flood, wildfire, climate exposure | ✗ Not available | ⚑ Multiple sources, inconsistent schema |
| Schools catchment data | ✓ Boundary-matched, Canada-wide | ✗ Not available | ⚑ Provincial fragmentation |
| Consistent schema across layers | ✓ One response format, always | ⚑ Varies by endpoint | ✗ You own the normalization |
| Canadian data residency | ✓ Hosted in Canada | ✗ Usually US-hosted | ⚑ Depends on your infrastructure |
| Data quality transparency | ✓ Confidence scores, public changelog | ✗ Opaque | ⚑ You define your own QA |
| Time to first integration | ✓ Hours | ✓ Hours | ✗ Weeks to months |
We're not a fit for every use case. Here's where we consistently deliver the most value.
Enrich property listings with neighbourhood context, energy cost estimates, permit history, and school catchments — all from a single API call per address. Launch what would take a year to build in-house.
Learn more →Price risk accurately with environmental exposure, flood zone, building age, and permit history at the address level. Consistent data, Canadian residency, audit-ready provenance — built for regulated environments.
Learn more →Evaluate trade areas with foot-traffic context, demographic profiles, business density, and competitive landscape — queryable by bounding box so your site selection tools work the way your team thinks.
Learn more →Access normalized permit, boundary, and demographic data for analysis, reporting, and planning tools — without scraping your own systems or negotiating inter-departmental data agreements.
Learn more →Power resident portals and economic development sites, clean up disorganized property and address records, and publish stable location landing pages for every neighbourhood, ward, and BIA in your community.
Learn more →Give buyers, renters, and agents the neighbourhood context they need to make informed decisions — livability scores, commute data, walkability, school ratings, and environmental context at every address.
Learn more →Plan network deployment using precise boundary data, demographic density, building counts, and permit history — so coverage investments are calibrated against where Canadians actually live and move.
Learn more →If we don't have data for a location, the response tells you that clearly. We don't generate synthetic records, infill from averages, or present estimated values as observed data. Every gap in our coverage page is there because we chose honesty over completeness.
Every dataset in the Neighbourly API has a defined update cadence — and we honour it. Demographics refresh on census cycles. Permits refresh as municipalities publish. Energy data updates as new EnerGuide assessments are published. You're not consuming a stale snapshot from 2021.
If you find a record that's wrong, you can report it. We investigate every report, correct the record, and log it in a public changelog. Location data is used for significant decisions — getting it right when it's wrong matters, and we treat error correction as a first-class responsibility.
We don't penalize teams for growing. Our pricing tiers are designed so that a startup building their first integration and an enterprise running millions of queries per month can both work with us without negotiating a custom contract every 90 days. See everything on the pricing page — no hidden call-for-pricing.
"We evaluated three options for Canadian location enrichment. Neighbourly was the only one that had permit history and energy data in the same API — that was the decision."
"The thing that sold us was the coverage page. Every other vendor made vague claims. Neighbourly showed us exactly which cities had permit data and how fresh it was."
"Integration took less than a day. We went from evaluation to live data in our staging environment in four hours. That never happens with data vendors."
"We needed data hosted in Canada for our compliance team. That was non-negotiable. Neighbourly was the only API vendor that could actually confirm Canadian residency."
Talk to us about your use case. We'll show you the data that matters for your product — no sales deck required.