HoodQ's Full Suite of Free Neighbourhood Tools

Home is about more than the house. Every neighbourhood is a bit different, and picking the right one matters. It's easy to look at listings and dream about how you'll decorate each house, but it's also important to think about what you want your daily life to be like living in that location.

While the best way to see if you like a neighbourhood is to visit it, making a list of your must-haves and your nice-to-haves can help you narrow down where to look. It can also help you avoid being swept off your feet by a great house - only to realize later that there are no nearby parks for your kids to play in.

Do you want to live in a busy city centre neighbourhood where everything is walking distance away, or on a quiet street where your kids can play? Are you willing to commute 10 minutes further for a better school? Do you want to be near an off-leash dog park, or would living near several parks for on-leash walking be fine? 

Everyone has different priorities! Knowing yours (and the priorities of everyone in your household) is the first step towards finding a great fit.

HoodQ Neighbourhood Guides are built on our massive database of local places and local demographic information. Choose your city, then explore the Neighbourhood Guides to find out all about the people, community places like schools and parks, and homes in each neighbourhood. Neighbourhood Guides allow you to take a deep dive into each neighbourhood and see what each of your possible options has to offer.

Need to find a balance between all your different needs? No idea what neighbourhoods to consider? HoodQMatch™ is an interactive tool that takes your total wishlist -- locations you want to be near, school preferences, park facility preferences, and home criteria -- and recommends the neighbourhoods that best match your needs. It's especially useful when no neighbourhood has absolutely everything you want within your affordability, since it lets you compare neighbourhoods based on which of your criteria they have and don't have. It can point out which neighbourhoods give you and your partner the same length of commute, whether you'd need to go with a townhouse or condo to get into a neighbourhood that matches all your other criteria, and which neighbourhoods you could get into if you could increase your budget a little.

Once you have some listings you're considering, take a look at the HoodQ Reports for those addresses. It's a quick and easy way to see the schools assigned for that home, the closest parks and recreation facilities, how far you'd be from the train or subway, and more. These reports are hyper-local for that specific address, rather than the neighbourhood overall, so they're great to check out before you tour a home.

Some things you can't know unless you're really familiar with an area, in real life, not in a database. Your real estate agent can give you the inside scoop on neighbourhoods - from local favourite coffee shops, to whether buyer trends are shifting towards families or investors, to rumours of major street construction coming up soon. If you're not local, it's especially important that your agent understands the "feel" of your ideal neighbourhood, and can tell you how the neighbourhoods you're considering compare.