Data · Methodology v1.0
MARA Live Market
How the Premium market terminal retrieves, labels and calculates market information.
Live Market is a Premium-only feature. Access is verified on the server for every request, so the data cannot be reached by calling the API directly on a lower plan.
What is live today
MARA currently serves Live Market from the City of Montréal open-data assessment roll and from the property details you import or enter. Area-wide listing and sold feeds (MLS/CREA DDF, Centris, licensed transaction databases) are licensed products; MARA hides those sections entirely until a valid licence is connected rather than showing empty or invented figures.
Where the data comes from
| Source | What it provides | How MARA connects |
|---|---|---|
| MLS / CREA DDF | Active listings and sold data from Québec boards. | Optional integration. Requires a signed CREA/board data licence and credentials; not connected today, and MARA never scrapes realtor.ca. |
| Centris | Greater Montréal listings, characteristics and status changes. | Optional integration. Requires a Centris/QPAREB data-distribution agreement and credentials; not connected today, and Centris pages are never scraped. |
| City of Montréal property assessment roll | Address, lot and building area, year of construction, use category and matricule. | Official open data (donnees.montreal.ca), queried directly. No credentials required. Valuation amounts are not published in this dataset, so MARA leaves them unavailable rather than estimating them. |
| Historical transactions | Property-level previous sale prices and dates. | Licensed transaction provider. Not available from open data in Québec, so this stays unavailable until a licence is connected. |
| Comparable sales | Closed transactions used to identify comparables. | Licensed transaction provider or authorized board feed. |
MARA never invents market data
If a provider is not connected, is failing, or returns nothing for a query, the panel says so and names the requirement. No listing, sale price, comparable, assessment value or statistic is ever generated, simulated or filled in.
Provider states
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Connected | MARA authenticated with the provider and retrieved data successfully. |
| Not configured | The integration is built, but no endpoint or credentials have been supplied yet. |
| Connection error | The provider was reached but the request failed. The error and time are recorded in the admin console. |
| Rate limited | The provider is throttling requests. MARA backs off and retries later. |
| No matching data | The provider is connected and answered, but has no records for this query. |
| Disabled | An administrator switched the provider off. |
| Sandbox | A provider's test environment. Anything returned is labelled as development data and never presented as real market information. |
Every panel names its source
Each dataset shows the provider it came from, when MARA retrieved it, and when the provider itself last synchronized. MARA only uses the word 'live' when the provider actually supplies near-real-time updates; otherwise it says 'last synchronized'.
The four provenance labels
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Verified data | Retrieved from an authorized provider and shown as received. |
| MARA calculation | Computed by application code from retrieved data — medians, price per square foot, appreciation. |
| MARA interpretation | An AI reading of the retrieved facts. It can be wrong. |
| Estimate | An approximation, not a measured value. |
Comparable relevance score
Comparable relevance is calculated in application code, never by the AI. Each comparable is scored from 0 to 100 across eight weighted factors. Factors with data missing on either side are skipped and the remaining weights are renormalized, so a sparse record lowers the data-quality indicator rather than the score.
| Factor | Weight | Full marks | Zero marks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distance | 25 | Within 500 m | Beyond 5 km |
| Sale recency | 20 | Within 90 days | Beyond 24 months |
| Property type | 15 | Exact match | Unrelated type |
| Living area | 15 | Within 5% | Beyond 40% |
| Bedrooms | 10 | Same count | Halved per bedroom of difference |
| Bathrooms | 5 | Same count | Halved per bathroom of difference |
| Lot size | 5 | Within 15% | Beyond 100% |
| Year built | 5 | Within 5 years | Beyond 40 years |
- 90-100: highly comparable
- 75-89: good comparable
- 60-74: moderate comparable
- Below 60: weak comparable
What MARA calculates itself
- Median and average sale price of the comparable set.
- Median price per square foot, and the subject's price per square foot.
- The difference between the asking price and the comparable median, in percent.
- Total and annualized appreciation from historical transactions.
Caching and limits
Responses are cached for a short period per dataset — minutes for listings, longer for assessment-roll records — to control provider cost and respect rate limits. Cached results are labelled as such. Premium accounts have configurable daily quotas, and expensive report operations may consume credits; the cost is always shown before you run one.
Availability is not guaranteed
Market information depends on the availability, accuracy, licensing and update frequency of the underlying providers. Live Market is not an appraisal and does not guarantee a valuation.