Strata Comparables: Harnessing Data for Real Estate Search

0:00 – Introducing Adam Major and Zealty

0:00 Ryan Grant: So yes, next up it looks like we have Adam Major from Zealty Online Search. He runs the website zealty.ca. Hello Adam.

0:11 Adam Major: Hey Ryan, how are you doing today?

0:11 Ryan Grant: I'm great, how are you?

0:14 Adam Major: Oh, pretty good.

0:17 Ryan Grant: You're also on vacation today, aren't you?

0:20 Adam Major: Yeah, I'm in Revelstoke. If the blinds were open you could see the gondola and Revelstoke, but the glare is too much, you couldn't see my face.

0:29 Ryan Grant: Awesome. Yes, do you have some slides or anything? I'll let you introduce yourself first, and then you can go on to your presentation.

0:40 Adam Major: Yeah, I just was going to share my screen and walk through our website. But yeah, I'm Adam, I'm one of the co-founders of Zealty. If you're not familiar with it, Zealty is an online real estate search site. It was the first site in BC to display MLS sold data, so that came about in 2018. There was a fight between the Toronto Real Estate Board and the Competition Bureau, and eventually the Competition Bureau said sold data could be published.

1:15 So this is realtor real estate sold data, and we were the first ones in BC to do that. But I also am a strata manager, my day job. I have a property management company on the Sunshine Coast, and so part of the data we provide on Zealty is strata specific. So what I was going to do is just walk people through our website, give you the basics on how to use it, show you some of the unique features we have, and then I'll go into some of the strata specifics, and then talk about where we're going in the future.

2:00 Ryan Grant: Awesome, that sounds great. All right.

2:06 – Map Search: Actives, Solds and Expired

2:06 Adam Major: Yeah, so this is zealty.ca. Basically it's a free website that has search data. The biggest part of Zealty is probably our map search, so I'm just going to start with that. If you've never been to the site before, you click on map search when you go to zealty.ca. I was looking at some stuff downtown here, hang on a second. So basically, looking at an overview of Vancouver here.

2:49 If you first come to Zealty, the first thing you need to do to get sold data and more of the information we offer is create an account. So you'll just see a login button up here, enter your email and a password. We won't send you too much spam, but it is free for anybody who wants to use it. If you need any information or you have questions, we have a user guide here.

3:17 If you click on that, a user guide pops up. Oh, I see, it's stuck on my share this tab. Yeah, so you'll come to a user guide which will answer any of your questions. So going back to the map search, we have most of our data. I'll just zoom out here so I'll show you what we've got. So we do have active listings across Canada. These are just real estate listings, same as you could find on realtor.ca or any other site.

3:59 But we are realtors and members of the Vancouver Real Estate Board, so if you're looking in Vancouver we have a lot more information than you can find on realtor.ca. Those big items are solds. So if you want to see what's sold on the west side in the last week, and you want to see what it sold for, you can see that. You can also turn off solds, and if you want to see expired listings.

4:36 I'm just going to look at expired listings in the last 30 days. There's not very many, because things are selling again in Vancouver, but those are listings that have expired in Kitsilano in the last month. I'll turn on the actives again.

4:58 – Property Grid, Assessments and Street View

4:58 Adam Major: So what we have that not too many other people have figured out yet is a property grid for all of BC. So this is Point Grey Road. If you click up here in the top left corner and turn on satellite view, you can see this is Chip Wilson's house. That's his property outline, there's a swimming pool. When you click on this property, on the right hand side you get the address, and you also get the assessment history for the last 10 years for that property.

5:53 So in city of Vancouver, 10 years of assessment data is available on any property, including strata properties. We also have, if you just click on any property, I'll click on the one next door, and we've got 15 years of MLS data for any property in the Lower Mainland. So you can see that the property next door to Chip's property sold in 2013 for $11.65 million. You can see that the assessed value currently is $23 million.

6:38 Hopefully folks can see that okay, that's maybe a little bit small on your screens. So one of the other features we've got, because we use a Google Maps interface: if you're looking for a property for sale and you want to check out the neighbourhood, Google Street View. So I can see there's a… I'm just going to put this guy… Oh yeah, I'm going to go back and look at this active listing.

7:08 So here's West 3rd Avenue. I know there's a house for sale here. Oh, it's this one right here, where the little red dot is. So this is 3066 West 3rd. You can walk around, check out the neighbourhood without actually having to go and drive down the street. You can click on the listing, some information will appear on the sidebar, but if you click on that another window will pop up and you'll get all the detailed information on this property.

7:49 So you can see it's for sale for $3.499 million. You can also scroll down here, the assessed value is $2.6 million. So you can see that the asking price to assessed value ratio is 134 percent, so it's priced at 34 percent above assessed value. More information, if you… One thing I'll just show you that we do on Zealty is we also have full screen pictures of the house.

8:32 So this house looks kind of basic from the outside, but if you scroll down it's got some colourful paint on the interior, and the pink kitchen. So if there's any Realtors on the call, if you're ever posting your pictures on Paragon, which is the back end of MLS, it's always good to post high definition pictures, because then they show up as full screen images on our site and some other sites.

9:11 – MLS Price History and Provincial Coverage

9:11 Adam Major: And if you want more details, more information on this property, here's the MLS history of this property going back to 2003. So you can see February of this year it was listed for $3.5 million. Basically, 2003 it sold for $720,000. It sold in 2013 for $1.5 million. So in 10 years it doubled, and it looks like in the last 10 years it's more than doubled again. All right, I'm going to close this window.

9:48 So yeah, this is going out showing the property grid again, moving around the province. You have a little button in the corner. I'm going to show, because that's where my office is, and one of the cool features about this mapping program is it actually also works on your iPhone. So this is downtown Sechelt, and if you turn on satellite view, I'm going to turn off active listings for now.

10:39 What you've got here is essentially the property grid for the province, overlaid with an aerial view of all of BC.

11:00 – Property Boundaries on Your Phone

11:00 Adam Major: And if you're ever walking with an iPhone, or a smartphone that has a locator, it'll show your pin and your location on your phone. So these are actually strata properties that our company manages, and we had a complaint from the city that this strata, which is one of our clients, had a homeless encampment on it.

11:29 And the bylaw officer from the District of Sechelt wanted to meet there to confirm whether this homeless encampment was on a property that we managed, and in which case we were somewhat responsible for taking some action to prevent them from being on the property, including potentially fencing the undeveloped portion of this property. So what we're able to do with Zealty: if you just go on your iPhone…

12:02 I was walking along this path, and this was the homeless encampment in question, and I was able to tell that it wasn't actually on our property, because I was walking here, could see this little trail, and my phone was showing my location here and not on the property we managed. So if you're ever out and you're not sure where a property boundary is, our website will let you do it.

12:30 It's free to use. I don't think there's any other site available that will show you in real time location, and where you are on Google Maps, and where you are in relation to a property boundary. So places like West Vancouver, where you've got… just look at Caulfeild here, I'm zooming in. One little trick about Zealty is when you zoom in, in Vancouver, it switches to bird's eye view.

13:14 This is kind of this odd angled aerial view. But if you click this tilt map button on the side it'll resort to an overhead view. So if you're looking at purchasing this property, let's just find one that's for sale. Here's an interesting property on Vista Place, it looks like a $4.5 million dollar house in West Vancouver. But if you're curious what the property line looks like, here you are able to look at it.

13:53 If you have this on your phone you can essentially walk, and there'll be a little blue dot that'll show you where you are in relation to the boundary for that property. Just going to show you a couple more features about this, and then I'll move on to some other stuff.

14:15 – Agricultural Land Reserve Layer

14:15 Adam Major: I'm just going to zoom right out. So one cool feature we have is the agricultural land reserve for all of BC. So if you turn this on, you can see all these little green areas that have popped up. So I'm just going to zoom in and look at Richmond, because Richmond is an area that has quite a bit of ALR still. And you can see the shaded green area is in the agricultural land reserve.

14:56 And here you can see, looks like a fairly large property for sale in the ALR for about $17 million. And you know, one of the advantages to buying a large house in the ALR if it's already built: now there's restrictions on building these mega mansions. So properties like this one, I can see this is a 22,000 square foot house in Richmond, these can't be built anymore. And there's also some tax advantage, because you're living on five acres and part of that property is taxed at an agricultural rate.

15:46 So, information that's interesting to have if you're a potential buyer. And of course, one of the big things is just looking at what other properties are selling for in any of these neighbourhoods. And what you can do on Zealty at any time is you can turn on what's sold. Let's look at what's sold in the last three months. Not a lot selling. Some of these blue dots here, you can see these are strata properties, so there have been some sales.

16:23 But if you zoom in on the map you can click on any of these properties and see what the actual selling price was, over here on the right. If you click on the actual sold and then click on the property again, you'll get another window that pops up and shows you what the asking price was, what the price sold for was. So this property listed for $699,000, sold for $686,000.

16:55 It was on the market for quite a while, 145 days, but still shows you that things are selling relatively close to the asking price in Richmond.

17:22 – List Search and Ask-to-Assessed Ratio

17:22 Adam Major: I think that's enough for the map search. I'm going to move on to show you a couple other things we do on Zealty. So back at the home screen again. So you come to Zealty, we've got the map search, we've also got the list search. So if you click on this, this has my sort of most recent search criteria saved. Like any real estate search site, you can set the criteria.

17:58 I'm going to look at apartments, so we're looking at apartments for sale, city of Vancouver. I'm going to go for a max of $2 million. And one of the cool things we have is when you sort sold or asking prices, you can sort them by a whole bunch of categories. And one that I'd like to look at is, what is the asking price to the assessment price?

18:32 So the ask to assessed ratio. These are currently sorted by image, but you can sort these properties over here by clicking this button to a list search. And for the city of Vancouver these are the apartments under $2 million that have the lowest asking price to the assessed value. So this property on 5058 Joyce is priced at 73 percent of its assessed value, so 27 percent below assessed value.

19:09 Seems like a pretty good deal. Again, there's another one here on Cook Street, this is False Creek, two bedroom two bath, again 74 percent of assessed value. So if you want more information on this property you click the R number here, that's the MLS number. A new window pops open, and here's this building. So this is two bedroom two bath, asking price is $1.8 million but the assessed value is $2.4 million.

19:54 – Foreclosures, Statistics and Sales Reports

19:54 Adam Major: Another little cool search thing we have, I'm just going to zoom out, and this is probably the only place where you can easily find this information in terms of an online search site, and that is foreclosure properties. So what I just did there was at the top of our map search filters, and if you click on must be court ordered sale, and done. You can see I've only got listings in the Lower Mainland, so these are essentially listings that are part of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, Fraser Valley board, or the Chilliwack board.

20:45 Close this little side window, I'll try that again, sorry folks. So yes, zooming in, so I can see that there's 73 properties in view. So in all of the Lower Mainland there's only 73 foreclosures currently listed for sale. But if you're interested in foreclosure properties as an investment, I don't know that there's any good deals to be had anywhere currently, but these are the foreclosures. There's a $20 million foreclosure in Shaughnessy, they just reduced the price by 16 and a half percent.

21:38 It's still priced six percent above assessed value though, interesting. So basically, a lot of information on our site. I think probably I'm moving through that a little bit quickly for people to follow too easily, but it's free to use. I think you can go on the map, play with it, get used to it. I think it does take a bit of getting used to, because it is data heavy.

22:10 But I do think people who are used to it love it, and if you want to do the research yourself and get the data, I think it's very good in that regard. I will just go back here. Hang on one second, Ryan, I'm just going to do one more thing.

22:35 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

22:38 Adam Major: We also have cool statistics, daily statistics. We also have a statistics table, so if you want to see what has sold in the last month in a certain neighbourhood, if you click on a statistics table here. Oh no, that's not the one I wanted. I'm going to go to this one. No, I'm going to go to this, sales reports. So this is a sales report. So if you want to see what has sold in Southwest Marine in Vancouver in the month of March, how many properties have sold.

23:34 These tables are actually fully active links. So in Kerrisdale, we're looking at the month of March, these are detached houses, I want to see what has sold. Click on this little button, there's the two houses that sold in Kerrisdale last month, that's what they sold for. If you click on these links you can see what they sold for in relation to their assessment price, etc. So I'm going to go back to the main page.

24:11 – Strata Browser: Bylaws and Assessments

24:11 Adam Major: The other thing we have, and the reason I'm here, is our strata browser. So basically clicking on the strata browser link takes you to all the areas in the Lower Mainland for which we have strata properties. I'm going to look at Vancouver West, I'm going to go down, and I'm going to look at Shangri-La. So this is a page of information about Shangri-La strata corporation. I can see the strata number, I can see the management company, see when it was built, number of units, see the list of the… sorry.

25:03 Yep. So yeah, this is Shangri-La. So it gives you the management company's name, their phone number, also a summary of their bylaws. So how we do this is basically scraping data from Paragon. So if you're a realtor, again, it's very important that you upload the correct information, because what the maintenance fees include, what the amenities are in the building, that's where we get it from, is essentially scraping it from listing information.

25:40 We also have the assessed value for all of the units in the building. So if you're a strata owner and you want to know whether your unit is assessed fairly relative to your neighbours, go to the strata browser, go to your strata, and you should be able to compare easily, rather than doing it on BC Assessment. The assessed value for all the units in the building. Scroll down past this, you can see units for sale, then you can also look at units that sold in the last three years.

26:22 – Maintenance Fee Per Square Foot Comparisons

26:22 Adam Major: One of the other cool things we have is the maintenance fee per square foot of the strata. So if you're a strata manager, or you're a strata owner and you're curious about how your building's fees compare to neighbouring properties, an easy way to look at it is the maintenance fee per square foot. So in Zealty you can find that. Another thing you can do is, I'm looking at three years of solds in Shangri-La, and I can see that going back, the maintenance fee at one point was 93 cents a square foot, and then over here it's a dollar twelve a square foot.

27:12 So definitely the maintenance fees have gone up substantially, now $1.19 per square foot. And maintenance fees per square foot should be the same for all units, because it's done on unit entitlement, so everybody should be paying the same per square foot rate. So that's a good way to compare. Shangri-La, probably some of the most expensive maintenance fees per square foot out there, because it's an expensive building with a lot of amenities.

27:52 – Open Data Goals for Strata Corporations

27:52 Adam Major: I think going forward, where we are is, we are an open data provider and believer in open data. We would love to get more information on strata properties for potential purchasers to easily compare. Going back up to the top here, it would be great… I was listening to Sean talk previously about some of the data they have. I think if you could have a way to rate strata corporations, or find out how your contingency fund looks compared to your depreciation report, a way for purchasers to easily get that information, we would be open to displaying it in a way for buyers to get for free.

29:05 Right now strata corporations are in a way a bit of a box, in that it's hard to know. And even this data that we have on strata corporations, you need to verify it obviously, because we are getting it from listings in the property, and things can change and you don't necessarily know unless you've got the latest strata information. So if there's a new pet bylaw in Shangri-La that got voted in yesterday, we don't know it and we don't have it on here.

29:36 But I think for investors, purchasers, if you want to get a summary of a property, this table is a good place to do that. Yeah, other cool things about this: I mean, you can even, on these listings for strata properties, I'm going to go past all the assessments. You can look at these buildings and see, like here's a current listing in Shangri-La. I'm just going to scroll down, and you can look at the assessed value in these buildings and see how they relate to other properties in Vancouver, in the Lower Mainland.

30:29 I mean Shangri-La, you can see the assessed value is actually the same as it was in 2019. So according to BC Assessment this property hasn't gone up in value in four years. If you know something about Shangri-La, there's been some news. It was part of a class action lawsuit because of the windows exploding and potentially falling on people walking on the sidewalk. But that's just something… If you see a building where the strata fees are going up significantly, you might want to ask yourself, why is that?

31:20 And then Shangri-La, you can see that the fees have been going up upwards of 10 percent a year for the last three years, and maybe that's part of the reason why. So going back to where we sort of see our site going in the future: one of the things that we've done recently is we've partnered with a company called BCHome.ai.

31:43 – Zealty Assessment Powered by BCHome.ai

31:56 Adam Major: So on my Zealty page I have what we're calling here a Zealty Assessment, which is powered by BCHome.ai. So what we are doing is, we now have a market price for every property in the province, whether it's a strata or a detached home. We haven't released this publicly yet, it is going to be coming out soon. And basically using comparable sales as they happen, reported by the real estate boards every month, comparing assessed values and how other properties and neighbourhoods are selling vis-à-vis assessed values, and then providing a market price for that property.

32:47 So this is a property for sale close to Shaughnessy, listed for $14.8 million. We have market price at $12.25 million, and the assessed value of the property is $12.247 million. So in our opinion it's priced a little bit high. So basically what we would like to do is keep adding data to our site. Right now most of the information we have for sold prices, expired listings, is just in the Lower Mainland, because we are realtors and members of that real estate board.

33:37 But ultimately we'd like to expand that information across the province so we can include other strata properties, and keep giving free data for people, buyers, homeowners, to make it easily accessible to find out stuff that's important to find. I'll just show you here: so if you're on our site and you want to find, on a map, the information page, you can go to the strata browser, or you can click on a property and then you just click on this little building icon, and then a new tab opens up.

34:18 And here's The Residences on Georgia. Here's a summary of their bylaws, their amenities, units currently for sale, units that sold in the last six months. And then in a few seconds you're going to see a page pop up with all the assessments for all the properties in that building. Yeah, I think that's it for me, Ryan.

34:53 – Researching Your Own Building With Zealty

34:53 Ryan Grant: Awesome. I mean, it's loaded with features. I actually have used it for about four years now and it's been super helpful. I'm constantly looking and considering upgrading and moving different places, right, and as I grow my family we've been looking around the province, especially at those cheaper areas, to see what we could afford. And I really like the layout of Zealty compared to some of the other realtor websites, right, they don't offer as much data or they don't offer it in the same layout that you guys provided.

35:30 And I learned about maybe 30, 35 percent more new features today in what you showed that I didn't know about earlier, so that's really going to help, right? Like, before, it would have really helped me during my research times, try and figure out more strata comparables, for example. So for me, I actually am constantly monitoring my own building, as I said I've been trying to think about upgrading.

35:59 So that's where it comes in handy for myself, is just seeing what are the other units doing, how long are they on the market, and how's the overall sales, right? So I can get that quickly from Zealty, and I can compare it to the other buildings surrounding me, or anywhere else I can look up and do my research, right? And looking up specific stratas, I knew of that feature before, that was pretty cool.

36:27 So yeah, it's really loaded. For me I found it quite valuable, as just a consumer, right, trying to go shopping for real estate. And it's useful again as a strata owner, just to do research on comparing against the other buildings. Like, we don't do very much maintenance in my building, so how is that affecting us compared to the others, similar sized, right? And I can look at the other buildings and see what they're selling for.

37:00 Adam Major: Yeah, I think, you know, I was wearing my strata manager's hat, and you always want your stratas that you manage to be well funded. You want them…

37:11 Ryan Grant: Yes.

37:14 Adam Major: I mean, as a strata manager you don't like special levies, because when you have to have a special levy you have to collect it, right?

37:19 Ryan Grant: I mean, yeah.

37:19 Adam Major: But it's also tough if you're the strata manager who has to foreclose on an owner, potentially, who can't afford to pay a levy, right? So I think it would be great if there was publicly a way for stratas maybe to sign up to say, hey, look at our financials, we're fully funded, this is our depreciation report. I mean, I think stratas that are well-funded and that are doing their maintenance, they do promote that in their minutes.

37:50 But as a buyer, the public doesn't necessarily know it until they get to the point where they've made an offer on a property and they get the strata documents. So I don't know if it's possible. Privacy Act, other…

38:03 Ryan Grant: Yeah, maybe regulation or something.

38:06 Adam Major: Yeah, it might be tricky. But one thing I've thought about is, oh, can we give every building a score?

38:12 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

38:12 Adam Major: But that's, I mean, potentially it's tough to control.

38:17 Ryan Grant: Yeah, right. But hearing some of the other presenters, I think they have some of that information, right, they have specific building information. Would there be a time…?

38:29 Adam Major: I think there will be a time in the future where that data is open and available to people. I think for consumers it is good, because it's easier to get it and find out. I mean, ultimately, at least for strata owners, it's good to be transparent and provide the data as well, because then you're encouraged to be transparent and to make sure you are fully funded, and you are maintaining, you do have money put aside for your roof that needs to be replaced, right?

39:00 I mean, I think those things will ultimately be positive.

39:07 – Q&A: Data Updates and Foreclosure Scraping

39:07 Adam Major: But yeah, it's going to take some time to get there, I'm sure.

39:10 Ryan Grant: Yes. And we do have some other questions from the viewers there, if you can just look in the side panel. How often is data updated?

39:20 Adam Major: So we update multiple times a day. So during the week, sales are updated every few hours, same with new listings. So if you're looking at sales statistics, like we've already done the sales statistics for Vancouver for March, so probably Monday or Tuesday the real estate board will release their statistics. But if you go on our site you can get them now, right? We usually update them at midnight on the 31st.

39:51 Ryan Grant: Good tip.

39:51 Adam Major: Yeah. Yeah, one of the things, so foreclosures, some of the data that we get we have to scrape it, so we don't actually get a feed from the real estate board. So foreclosures we update weekly, so you kind of have to check those every week, because sometimes new listings, if they are foreclosures, they don't immediately show up as foreclosures. But that's one of the things we download the hard way.

40:12 Ryan Grant: Yes. Or people can contact their realtor, I guess, if they see something that they are interested in, and the realtor can then do a pull to see if it's new, like if it has any updates. Would that help?

40:28 Adam Major: So say that again?

40:28 Ryan Grant: Like, for the foreclosures on your site, right, that you said it takes about a week.

40:35 Adam Major: Well, it's just that it takes a bit, essentially, for us to find a foreclosure we have to search all the active listings for a certain data set, right? So we're looking for something that is a court ordered sale, so the seller's interest is a court ordered sale. So most of our data, all of our data, comes from the real estate board, but they only give us certain inputs.

41:02 Other inputs we have to go in and manually get. So the feed we get for foreclosures, we have to go in and manually download it.

41:13 Ryan Grant: Yes. But if somebody wanted to find out if a foreclosure was still available, they have to then contact their realtor, right, to get the updated, to find out?

41:23 Adam Major: Okay, good. Yeah, because a lot of times foreclosures, sometimes will have an accepted offer with a court date pending, right? So that information might have to come from a realtor.

41:34 Ryan Grant: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Is there more for investors, speculators, or can strata owners utilize this for some comparable strata info?

41:44 Adam Major: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think comparing other buildings with similar amenities is something that owners can use it for. Part of the reason we included the maintenance fee per square foot information is, in Sechelt where my company's located, I've been to AGMs where strata council was looking at a budget and they are saying, how do we compare with other properties, how are our strata fees?

42:13 Because I think part of maintaining your building is also marketing your building. So you want people to know that you're doing a good job, so you want to record that in your minutes. But I think you also don't want to get to a point where you're pricing yourself out of the market, right? So if your strata fees are $200 more per month than a similar unit, why is that, right?

42:37 You need to explain it. So if you're curious, it doesn't matter if it's a townhouse in Coquitlam or an apartment downtown, if you click on a property you can see what their strata fees are per square foot compared to yours. Just lets you know where you are in the market.

43:03 – Q&A: Supporting Zealty and Adding Boards

43:03 Ryan Grant: Somebody's asking, Zealty is such a great resource, how do we support you as a company?

43:08 Adam Major: So I mean, Zealty has advertising on it, so that's kind of how we pay some of the bills. I think our goal for Zealty right now is to just grow eyeballs at it. We did quite well as far as number of visitors per month. I think our goal, more to monetize it, is we're kind of trying to grow it, increase the usability, increase the traffic on the site.

43:41 Our goal is to add other real estate boards in BC, and then hopefully get more strata properties throughout BC. And we are kind of focused on BC, even though we have data across Canada. Really, in BC we've got the property grid for the province, we have good assessment data for most of the province, and so definitely we're BC focused. So I think just keep using the site, that's the best way to support us.

44:15 Ryan Grant: Another question: will Zealty one day include all BC registered stratas? Is there a way to know what a strata corporation is valued at, rather than just strata lots? That's interesting. Is there an accessible central source for a complete picture of all existing BC stratas?

44:34 Adam Major: Those are good questions. So yeah, I think if we can, our goal is to get other board data. So I think once we can do that and incorporate the rest of the province… It's becoming easier, because real estate boards are now sharing some data. So Vancouver, or sorry, Vancouver Island Real Estate Board has now partnered with the Victoria Real Estate Board. So getting data for all of Vancouver Island is not going to be too difficult, something we've been talking about for quite a while.

45:07 But I think we are going to add that, hopefully, the next few months. Similar with the interior. It used to be more segregated, but now the real estate boards North and South Okanagan and also the Kootenay board are sharing data and sharing the same server. So essentially by joining one of each of those boards we should be able to get 90 percent of the province.

45:34 Ryan Grant: Wow.

45:35 Adam Major: Yeah, so that's what we'd like to do.

45:35 Ryan Grant: Yeah, it costs money to join boards though, right? And it's a bit…

45:40 Adam Major: Yeah, it's a bit tricky, but that is what we would also like to do.

45:45 Ryan Grant: Is there a central source for all BC stratas?

45:48 Adam Major: I don't know that there is. I think BC Assessment has individual strata properties, so it has every property ID in the province. I think we've got sort of every property ID for the Lower Mainland. Yeah, I mean BC Assessment has data, but they also sell their data, so they don't want to give it out in bulk, which is what we want to do. So yes, we've kind of butted heads with them a few times trying to get access to some more of their data.

46:28 I mean, we would like to see one spot where you could go and get all this information, but I don't know what other resource there is out there to find it. I think some of the companies presenting here probably have a lot of data that would be great if it was publicly accessible, but I think it's still going to take time before that happens.

46:49 – Q&A: Realtor Data Errors and Assignments

46:54 Ryan Grant: Another question: if you see something that's incorrect…

46:55 Adam Major: Yes, send me an email. So yeah, one of the things, looking at our… because we're getting board data, if realtors enter information incorrectly, on our site, which happens quite frequently, we will have the wrong data. And that can actually… so if a strata changes management companies, we'll have the management company from the last listing. A lot of Realtors just go to the last listing and copy and paste the management company.

47:24 So making sure you have the right data is very important. It's also… I was looking at, there's that new oddly shaped building downtown, I always mess the name of it up. Kengo Kuma, or is that what it is? You know what it is, Ryan, you know the one.

47:47 Ryan Grant: No, I know the one you're talking about, but I don't know what it's called.

47:51 Adam Major: So I was looking at the listings in that building, and there's a lot of them, and they're all assignment of contracts sales, because nobody's taking possession yet, right? So there's about 40 units in there where people have pre-purchased a development condo. But if you look at the listings on Paragon, only about half of the agents have entered them correctly as assignment of contracts. So I think for agents it's important to make sure you do enter that data correctly, make sure you do have the updated bylaws for the strata corporation.

48:31 I mean, usually they're correct as far as what's the maintenance fee, what's the strata fee, so usually that number is fairly accurate. But it can also change, in that if somebody has an AGM and the strata fees go up 30 percent, does the listing agent update their listing? Not necessarily, right? So always, for our sake, definitely have to verify with a realtor and with the actual strata documents that the information is correct.

48:59 Ryan Grant: So, awesome. It looks like that's all the questions that came in for now, and that was a really great presentation. I learned a lot of new cool things I can take advantage of, to do my research and compare my building to others, which is really great. So we really love what you've done with Zealty, and hope you continue to keep growing it.

49:23 Adam Major: Yeah, I appreciate it, thanks very much Ryan.

49:27 Ryan Grant: Yes, and go enjoy the rest of your vacation.

49:30 Adam Major: Yeah, I'm going to go to the hot tub now.

49:32 Ryan Grant: Yeah. All right, take care Adam.

49:35 Adam Major: All right, thank you.