About this tool

Ryan McCann, REALTOR® · Maxwell Polaris

You should know who is behind a free home valuation tool, and what they want from it. That's the whole point of this page — no pitch, just a straight answer.

Why this exists

Most Edmonton homeowners have exactly two reference points for what their home is worth: the City's property tax assessment, and whatever a national website guesses from a postal code. Neither was built to answer the question people actually care about — what would a buyer pay for my home, right now?

Your City assessment is a mass-appraisal figure calculated for taxation across roughly 439,000 properties, based on a valuation date that's already more than a year old by the time you'd list. It's a reasonable number for dividing up a tax bill. It was never designed to price your specific house on your specific street this month.

So people end up guessing. And guessing is expensive in both directions: price too high and the listing goes stale, then sells for less than it should have; price too low and you leave money on the table before the first showing. Neither mistake is recoverable once it's made.

This tool exists to close that gap — to give you a defensible starting number, built from the same public records and market data a REALTOR® would use, before you talk to anyone at all.

How the number is produced

There's no black box here, and nothing you can't check yourself:

• City of Edmonton open data supplies your property record — year built, lot size, building area, zoning, garage, and ten years of assessed values.
• MLS® data via the CREA DDF® feed supplies the homes currently competing with yours, so the range reflects live conditions rather than last year's market.
• Recent comparable sales are refreshed weekly and adjusted to your home — floor area, age, bathrooms, lot, parking, basement — then weighted so the closest matches count most.
• The variables the City can't see — condition, renovations, basement finish, a legal suite — are the ones you confirm yourself, because they're routinely the difference between two otherwise identical houses.

The method is written out in full inside every report. If a number looks wrong to you, you should be able to trace exactly where it came from — and if you can't, tell me, because that's a bug worth fixing.

It's also worth being clear about the limits. What this produces is a competitive positioning range, not an appraisal, not a comparative market analysis, and not a formal opinion of value. Public data contains errors and omissions. No dataset can see how your home actually shows in person — the light, the layout, the smell of the basement, how the street feels on a Saturday. That's genuinely the part software can't do.

Who I am

I'm Ryan McCann, a REALTOR® licensed in Alberta with Maxwell Polaris. I've been selling Edmonton real estate for over twenty years and have been part of more than 2,100 home sales in this market.

In that time the pattern I've seen most often is a frustrating one: two comparable homes, a few streets apart, one sells quickly at a strong price and the other sits and sells under asking. It's rarely luck. It usually traces back to a pricing decision made early, on bad information, before anyone had a clear read on what the market would actually support.

That experience is also why I'm comfortable putting this tool in front of you without a salesperson attached to it. Reporters and industry platforms have asked me to comment on this market often enough that I've had to be right in public, on the record, where being wrong is expensive:

None of that makes a number on a screen correct — the data does that, and you can check it yourself. But if you're deciding whether to trust a read on the Edmonton market, you should know whose read it is and what it's built on.

I built this because sellers deserve better than a tax assessment and a guess — and because the homeowners who understand their own numbers are, without exception, the ones who make the best decisions about their own homes. That's true whether or not I'm the one who lists it.

What I want out of it

I'd rather say this plainly than have you wonder.

I'm a working REALTOR®. I hope that some of the people who use this tool, when they're ready to sell, will think of me first. That's the entire business model, and it's why the tool is free to build and free to use.

What that does not mean: your report isn't bait, and it isn't a partial number held back until you agree to something. It's the full analysis, it's yours to keep, and it's just as useful if you take it to a different agent or decide not to sell at all. Your information is never sold or shared. The optional monthly update is opt-in only and unsubscribes in one click, immediately, no confirmation step. If you'd like your data deleted, ask and it's deleted.

If the tool is only worth using when it comes with strings attached, it isn't worth building. So there aren't any.

When a person beats the data

Sometimes the honest answer is that a walkthrough will tell you more than any dataset can. If you're within a few months of listing, the pricing decision is worth getting right in person — someone standing in your kitchen can weigh things no public record contains.

That's available free and with no obligation, and it's a conversation, not a listing presentation. If the answer is "your timing is wrong, wait six months," I'll tell you that too.