We are proud to share that Homicity has been awarded a $100,000 grant through the National Research Council of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Program, better known as IRAP. The funding supports our work to build one of Canada's first AI-powered property search engines, designed from the ground up to help everyday buyers and sellers make more confident real estate decisions. For a small team based in Canada and focused on the consumer, this milestone is both a validation and a responsibility.
Why AI Property Search Matters
Searching for a home in Canada today often means jumping between listing portals, spreadsheets and half-remembered advice. Prices are high, information is fragmented, and the buyer is frequently the least informed person in the transaction. We started Homicity in 2015 because we believed technology could rebalance that. AI property search is not about replacing human judgement. It is about surfacing the right data at the right moment so that people can ask better questions and avoid expensive mistakes.
What the Grant Funds
The IRAP grant lets us invest in the core research behind our search technology. That means better ways to organize property and neighbourhood data, smarter matching between what a buyer wants and what the market offers, and models that can learn from how Canadians actually search. Practical, careful engineering rather than hype. We want the product to feel simple even as the intelligence underneath grows more capable.
Built for Canadian Buyers
Canada's housing markets are distinct. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa each behave differently, shaped by local supply, policy and affordability pressures. National averages hide more than they reveal. Our aim is to build search that respects those differences and gives people locally relevant context, whether they are weighing a downtown condo or a family home in the suburbs.
Grounded in Better Data
Good decisions start with good data. We are focused on making property information more accessible, more comparable and easier to understand for people who are not real estate professionals. We are not promising to predict the market or to price any single home to the dollar. We are promising to keep the consumer informed, and to be transparent about what our tools can and cannot do.
Thank You
We are grateful to the NRC and to the IRAP advisors who backed this vision. Support like this makes it possible for a Canadian startup to take on hard, meaningful problems close to home. It reflects a broader confidence in the country's technology sector and in the idea that real estate can be smarter and fairer.
What Comes Next
Over the second half of 2019 we will keep building, testing with real users and sharing what we learn about Canadian housing along the way. Expect regular market analysis and neighbourhood insights on this blog, all in service of the same goal, which is to give buyers and sellers the intelligence they deserve. The work is just beginning, and we are excited to build it with you.
This analysis is built on Neighbourly.io — the real estate data API for Canada. Standardized addresses, boundaries, demographics, permits and market signals through a single interface.
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