How First Access Signals works
First Access Signals tells you when to act on a home, not just what a home is worth. The Service combines three things into one app:
1.
A Signal, a 0 to 100 score for any GTA home that estimates the probability the home would sell within 30 days at a competitive price, and the verdict on whether now is a good moment to list.
2.
An estimate of the home's likely sale price, shown as a range, so you can see where a sale is most likely to land.
3.
A Buy Signal for neighbourhoods, which ranks active listings by timing, value, and lifestyle fit so a buyer can focus on the homes most likely to be a good move right now.
First Access Signals is licensed under the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) Virtual Office Website (VOW) Datafeed Agreement and is operated by Keith Godding under THE AGENCY brokerage.
What the Signal score means
The Signal is a forecast, not a guarantee. Read it the way you read a weather forecast. A high score means a strong chance the home sells at or near its asking price within 30 days; a low score means a weak chance. The score is calibrated, which means the percentages are honest: when the Signal says about 6 in 10, about 6 in 10 homes actually sell at the asking price.
The 0 to 100 score falls into one of three bands. The rates below are measured on a held-out set of about 44,000 closed listings the model never saw, where success means selling within 30 days at or near the asking price (within about 5 percent of asking).
Green (70 to 100)
About 45 percent of these homes sell at or near the asking price within 30 days. A strong moment to list.
Amber (50 to 69)
About 22 percent do. Pricing decides the outcome.
Red (0 to 49)
About 3 percent do. The other 97 percent need a price adjustment or more time. For a buyer, that is room to negotiate.
A green Signal at about 45 percent is not an error rate. It is how often homes in that band sell at the asking price. Across every band, the rate we forecast stays within a few percentage points of what actually happens, the reliability standard described below.
What the market read means
Next to a home's Signal, each listing shows a market read: a buyer's, balanced, or seller's market. The two answer different questions. The Signal is about this home and how much demand it is drawing. The market read is about the neighbourhood around it and which side conditions favour right now.
The market read is graded from the recent balance of supply and demand for that community and property type: how close homes are selling to their asking prices, how many months of inventory sit on the market, and where interest rates are. We read the home's own community first, then fall back to its postal area and the wider GTA when a community has too few recent sales to stand on its own.
The two reads can point different ways, and that is by design. A home in strong demand can sit in a buyer's-market neighbourhood, and a quiet home can sit in a seller's one. Read together, the Signal tells you how this home is doing and the market read tells you which way the neighbourhood is leaning.
Data sources
First Access Signals uses the TRREB VOW data feed, which provides a 24-month rolling history of every listing in the GTA, including final sale prices on closed deals. The Service combines the listing data with leading-indicator macroeconomic and neighbourhood data:
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Bank of Canada policy rate.
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Statistics Canada housing-starts and building-permits data at the Census Metropolitan Area level.
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Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) Home Price Index for the GTA.
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Toronto building-permits and crime data at the neighbourhood level.
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TTC and GO Transit schedule data for commute distance calculations.
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Statistics Canada 2021 Census demographics at the forward sortation area (FSA) level.
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Fraser Institute school ratings.
First Access Signals does not buy data from credit bureaus. The Service does not use any data it is not authorized to use under the VOW Datafeed Agreement.
How we measure accuracy
This is the part that makes First Access Signals different from other Canadian home-value tools.
For the Signal (a probability)
First Access Signals measures accuracy with the Brier score and the Brier Skill Score (BSS).
In plain English:
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The Brier score measures how far off the model's percentage predictions are on average. Lower is better. A perfect score is 0.0; a score of 0.25 is the score of a model that always says "50 percent."
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The Brier Skill Score (BSS) is the percentage of prediction noise the model removes compared to a model that always says "yes" (the base rate of selling). A BSS of 0 percent means the model is no better than the base rate; a BSS of 100 percent means perfect predictions. The published floor is 12 percent.
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First Access Signals also publishes reliability, which checks that when the model says "60 to 70 percent chance of selling," the actual rate falls in that band. The target is a maximum deviation of 10 percentage points across all probability bands.
Current published values (30-day Signal):
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Brier score: 0.098 (HEALTHY threshold ≤ 0.20).
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Brier Skill Score and reliability max-deviation: refreshed after each retrain.
For the predicted sale price (a dollar value)
First Access Signals measures accuracy with the median absolute percentage gap: the middle of how far our predicted sale price sits from the real selling price, across closed sales the model was not built on. Lower is better. A 2.4 percent gap means half of our predictions were within 2.4 percent of the actual sale price.
Current published values:
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Median gap: 2.40%, on homes we predicted before they sold.
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About 7 in 10 within 5 percent of the actual sale price.
We record every prediction before the home sells, so these figures are measured against what actually happened, not fitted after the fact.
Where the model performs well, and where it performs less well
First Access Signals publishes both ends of the accuracy distribution by neighbourhood. Honesty about weakness is part of the competitive moat. The lists refresh each time the model is retrained.
PENDING NEXT RETRAIN
Top 10 best-performing FSAs and bottom 10 worst-performing FSAs publish on this page after the next retrain export wires through. If your home is in a segment where the model underperforms, the app displays a low-confidence badge on the result. The recommendation is to treat the estimate as a starting point for a conversation with Keith rather than a precise number.
How the model remains honest over time
A real estate model that was built on 2024 data and never re-checked would drift further from reality every month. First Access Signals employs a five-layer drift management strategy:
1.
Leading-indicator nowcasts. First Access Signals uses Bank of Canada and Statistics Canada releases to anticipate market shifts before they show up in closed sales.
2.
HPI-deflated targets. Where it improves accuracy, sale prices are deflated by the CREA Home Price Index so the model learns the property-specific signal, not the macro tide.
3.
Time-decay sample weighting. Recent listings get more weight in training than older ones.
4.
Change-point residual detection. If the model's residuals shift systematically week over week, the system flags it for retraining.
5.
Regular refreshes. The model is rebuilt on the latest 24-month window on a reviewed cadence. Between refreshes, predictions for active listings refresh several times a day against the most recent model and freshly-aggregated neighbourhood and building data, so the numbers track the current market.
If published accuracy values fall below the HEALTHY thresholds in two consecutive retrains, First Access Signals publishes a notice on this page describing what changed and what actions are being taken.
VOW compliance and the bona-fide-consumer commitment
To use the parts of First Access Signals that show specific listing details, you must be a registered user, which means you have signed in with Apple, Google, or email and acknowledged the following statement, required verbatim by the TRREB VOW Datafeed Agreement §6.3(k):
The information provided herein must only be used by consumers that have a bona fide interest in the purchase, sale, or lease of real estate and may not be used for any commercial purpose or any other purpose.
If you are not a bona-fide consumer (for example, you are a researcher building a competing data product), please do not register.
The brokerage of record is THE AGENCY, and the designated REALTOR® for First Access Signals is Keith Godding.
Plain-English glossary
Brier score
How far off the model's percentage predictions are on average. Lower is better.
Brier Skill Score (BSS)
The percentage of prediction noise the model removes compared with a model that always says yes. The published floor is 12 percent.
Reliability max-deviation
When we say 60 to 70 percent chance of selling, the actual rate falls within 10 percentage points of that band.
Median absolute percentage gap
The middle of how far our predicted sale price sits from the actual sale price. Lower is better.
Walk-forward backtest
Predicting each calendar quarter using only data from before that quarter. If our error grows quarter over quarter, we know the model is going stale and we retrain.
Drift detector
If the model's accuracy is drifting more than five percent per quarter, we retrain.
Bona-fide consumer
A real person looking to buy, sell, or lease a home, not a researcher or a competitor scraping data.
VOW (Virtual Office Website)
TRREB's data-feed program that lets registered REALTORS® and their clients see listing details.
MLS attribution
Every listing card on our app shows the listing brokerage's name and the MLS source.
Market read
Whether a home's neighbourhood is a buyer's, balanced, or seller's market, graded from how close homes sell to asking and how much inventory is on the market. Separate from the home's own Signal.
FSA
Forward sortation area. The first three characters of a Canadian postal code (for example, M5V).
Contact
This page is the canonical methodology disclosure for First Access Signals. It is updated quarterly or when the model changes materially.