Honest Door Origin Story: Top Talent
Honest Door dot com, is a website that allows anyone to go and search for property information in Canada. We’ve started to create the largest real estate database in Canada, which means that we’re stitching and consolidating property points together in order to determine estimated values of properties.
For example, we’re standing here in this location in Garneau, Edmonton, in front of this lovely home. And I can tell you that this home was last transacted in 2001 and for approximately one hundred sixty four thousand dollars. And it is now worth according to Honest Door four hundred and eighteen thousand. We also have estimated beds, beds, baths, land size, year built, zoning, Airbnb nightly rate, long term rate for predictions, taxes, city assessment. So all of this data is information that we believe users, and really anyone in the real estate industry, should be able to see before they make a very big investment or before they even sell.
And so one of the things that makes us unique is that we have an Honest Door Price, and that makes us unique because many sites out there, they don’t, they don’t have an instant value of your property. They also don’t show everything. So you’d have to go to one site for permit data, one site for Lassalle data, one site for your assessment data. This platform allows you to go to one site, look at one property and get a whole complete picture. Honest Door is a website that anybody can use. It can be a private homeowner, or can be a real estate agent who doesn’t want to go searching for all property information on one specific property.
So homeowners are able to see everything consolidated in one view on their property.
Being new to Edmonton, what I love about the city is that everyone gets outdoors. I’m from Toronto where wintertime people stay indoors, and I really love that Edmonton has embraced all seasons. And all seasons you find tons of people in the River Valley or the Mill Creek Ravine. So I’m, I’m really fascinated by that outdoor culture that is here in Edmonton.
I am also surprised, pleasantly, by how diverse the city is coming from Toronto, which is probably arguably one of the most diverse cities in the entire world. I was really surprised that Edmonton is so diverse not only in ethnicity, but also in education. And that has been a really great feature of the city.
The original co-founders, Dan Belostotsky and Macgyver Ussher, they met at the University of Alberta while they were studying in undergrad, and they have since remained friends and then started Honest Door in 2018, 2019. University of Alberta is a really special institution, especially in this city, it’s probably one of the world’s leading AI institutions. You have an amazing computer science department that has attracted spectacular talent, not only talent in computer science, but talent in many different departments. So marketing and business and engineering, these are all roles that are going to be instrumental to us at Honest Door as we’re headquartered in Edmonton. But it’s also instrumental to other companies that are in this startup ecosystem. And that’s powerful because having an institution like this is really fostering both domestic talent and international.
WAYFINDING: Ever wonder who makes sure that children with disabilities get the care and attention they need? Never fear, our next entrepreneurs are on the case! Continue to head west along 85th, then south along 112th. Safely cross the street and head west along 83rd Ave, then north on 114th St until you reach the Stollery Children’s Hospital entrance (the one with the giant teddy bear!).
About Honest Door
Honest Door provides an instant estimate of your property value using AI and Machine Learning.
Imagine if you could only ever find out the price of your investments at the time you wanted to sell them. That is what buying and selling real estate is like. And while Automatic Valuation Models (AVMs) like Zillow’s Zestimate have become more common in the real estate industry, they have been predominately used for behind-the-scenes (by lenders, insurance providers, and brokers). In Canada, very few companies tell consumers what their home values are worth for free. The HonestDoor Price is calculated using AI and ML methods and is updated every month for a more accurate value of a property’s value. We produce it for over 4M properties with a median error rate of just 1.8%. This high accuracy rate means that 50% of the on-market properties have a HonestDoor Price within 1.8% of the actual sale price.
Find out what houses in your neighbourhood are going for today!