Start with the question

“What is the market doing?” can mean several different things: what homes are available, what sellers are asking, how quickly listings are moving, or what buyers are actually paying. A responsible market page makes that distinction visible before showing a chart.

Inventory

How many relevant homes are listed right now, and where are they concentrated?

Asking price

What sellers are requesting, which can change before a home sells or is withdrawn.

Days listed

How long visible listings have been active, with care around relists and stale records.

Sold price

The final transaction outcome, which requires a separate source and a different dataset.

What listing data does well

A live listing feed is good at showing the shape of the current market. It can reveal how much choice buyers have, which price bands are crowded, where new inventory is appearing and which homes have been sitting longer than expected.

  • Supply: the count of active homes by type, price band and area.
  • Movement: new listings, price changes and homes leaving the visible market.
  • Context: neighbourhood-level differences that disappear in a single regional average.

Where the boundary is

A listing that disappears is not automatically a sold home. It may have expired, been withdrawn, been relisted, or gone conditional. That is why I label market figures as asking figures and keep sold data as a separate question rather than blending the two.

The same care applies to price per square foot. It can be a useful comparison within a similar set of homes, but it should not be treated as a valuation model. The quality of the underlying floor-area data and the mix of homes in the sample matter more than the precision of the displayed number.

Small samples need a warning

A neighbourhood with three active listings can produce a very dramatic median. That does not make the number meaningless; it makes the confidence narrower. I prefer to show the sample size, set a minimum threshold for rankings and let small groups remain visible without presenting them as definitive.

Good market design is mostly labelling: say what the number measures, say how current it is, and say what it cannot tell you.