Our data & methodology
Signalhood is an independent guide to Greater Toronto Area neighbourhoods. Everything we publish is built on real, current data — here is exactly where it comes from, how we define it, and how often we refresh it.
What we cover
We currently track 386 neighbourhoods across 8 GTA municipalities — Brampton, Burlington, Markham, Milton, Mississauga, Oakville, Toronto and Vaughan. Our neighbourhood boundaries follow official municipal planning areas (for example, the City of Toronto's 158 planning neighbourhoods), supplemented by well-known informal districts that residents and agents actually use — like the Distillery District or Harbourfront. We add areas as we expand; we don't publish a neighbourhood until we have real data for it.
Where our data comes from
- Listings & sold prices
Active and recently-sold residential listings, refreshed regularly. From these we compute median and average list and sold prices, price per square foot, days on market, and the sale-to-list ratio. We rank price on sold prices — what homes actually trade for — not aspirational asking prices.
- Walkability
Walk, transit, and bike scores describing how easily you can get around on foot or by transit from the heart of each neighbourhood.
- Schools
School locations and published academic ratings, used to describe the education picture in each area.
- Safety
Safety scores are derived from official police open data — Toronto, York, Peel and Halton Regional Police — as reported-crime rates per 100,000 residents (latest complete year per service; population from the 2021 Census). We weight serious violent crime most heavily and score every neighbourhood on one comparable GTA-wide scale. We only ever show a score where we have real sourced data; a neighbourhood with no sourced data shows no safety score at all, never a placeholder. Two honest caveats: coverage isn’t complete (a neighbourhood we can’t confidently map to the crime data shows nothing), and Halton’s public feed is property-crime-focused, so its scores lean high.
- Local life & amenities
Restaurants, cafés, groceries, parks, and other everyday places, sourced from mapping and points-of-interest data to describe what daily life is actually like.
- Neighbourhood boundaries
Official municipal / planning neighbourhood definitions, plus recognised informal districts.
Where we make a factual claim about a place — a commute time, a school, a landmark — we aim to tie it to a verifiable source rather than assert it.
How we define our numbers
- Median sold price
The middle sale price of recently-sold homes in the area — more robust to outliers than an average, and more honest than asking prices.
- Best value vs. most prestigious
Both are ranked on median sold price — ascending for value, descending for prestige. When an area has too few sales to be reliable, we fall back to asking prices only if there's a real sample, and we label it clearly.
- Most walkable
Ranked directly on Walk Score.
- Lifestyle themes
Editorial groupings (waterfront, family, urban, prestige, value) based on the data above — a way to explore by the life you want, not a scientific score.
How often we update
Listing and price data is refreshed on a rolling basis so the figures you see reflect the current market. Walkability, schools, and amenity data change slowly and are refreshed periodically. Every neighbourhood page and ranking reflects the most recent data we hold; editorial articles show the month their underlying data was current.
Our editorial principle
How we stay free — and independent
Our guides, comparisons, and rankings are free to read, and no neighbourhood can pay to be described more favourably. Signalhood sustains itself by connecting people who are genuinely ready to buy, sell, or rent with vetted local real-estate professionals. That's a separate, opt-in step — it never changes what our data says or how a neighbourhood is portrayed.
Spotted something off?
Data is never perfect, and neighbourhoods change. If a figure looks wrong or a description feels dated, tell us and we'll review it — accuracy is the whole point. Get in touch.
Published by the Signalhood editorial & research team. Coverage and figures on this page are generated live from our current dataset.