Methodology
Most home-value tools hand you a single number from a black box. We don't. Every Victoria Real Estate estimate triangulates several independent signals — drawn from real Vancouver Island sales — and shows you all of them, so you can judge for yourself.
Signal 01
The most direct signal of what a home is worth is what similar homes recently sold for. We pull recent transactions of comparable properties across Vancouver Island — Victoria, Saanich, Oak Bay, Langford, the Westshore, Sidney, Sooke, and up-Island — same type, similar size, similar age — and weigh each by how close it is in both space and time. Older sales count for less. Sales further away count for less. The closer and more recent, the more weight.
Signal 02
The most local signal possible. For detached homes, we look at recent sales on your street. For condos and townhomes, we look at recent sales in your building. On Vancouver Island, what one Cordova Bay rancher or one James Bay character home sells for tells you a great deal about the next — these street-level comps remove most of the variance that comes from neighbourhood-to-neighbourhood differences.
Signal 03
Sold prices tell you where the market was. Active listings tell you where the market is right now. We look at what comparable Vancouver Island homes are currently listed for — and how long they've been sitting — to capture present-day pricing pressure that hasn't yet shown up in sold data.
Signal 04
The province publishes an annual assessed value for every property on Vancouver Island. Assessments lag the market — they're based on values as of July 1 of the prior year — but they're a transparent, publicly available anchor every estimate should reconcile with. We use the assessment as one independent check on our other signals, and show you the gap rather than hiding it.
Signal 05
We maintain a monthly price index for each pocket of Vancouver Island — Fernwood, Gordon Head, Brentwood Bay, Colwood, Sooke — going back roughly a decade. It shows how values in your specific neighbourhood have moved over time, and lets us adjust older sales forward to today's market. A Saanich house that sold for $1.2M in 2018 isn't worth $1.2M today — the index tells us what that same house is likely worth now.
Signal 06
For newer builds — homes from the last few years — comparable sales are often scarce or unreliable. For these properties, we use replacement cost: the value of the land plus what it would cost to rebuild the structure today at current Vancouver Island construction prices. This acts as a floor on value where market comps are thin.
Putting it together
Every Victoria Real Estate estimate triangulates these signals into a single value. We don't weigh them equally — each one is weighted by how reliable it is for your specific property. A detached home in an active corner of Saanich or Oak Bay gets weighted toward recent sales. A new build in the Westshore with thin comps gets weighted toward replacement cost. A rural Sooke or up-Island property where assessments track closely to market gets weighted toward the assessment.
Every estimate also comes with a confidence range — the gap between the lowest and highest signal. When the signals agree, the range is tight and our confidence is high. When they disagree, the range widens and we say so. We never hide that.
The number you see isn't a guess. It's the product of independent signals, each weighted by reliability, shown to you so you can judge for yourself.
Where the data comes from
Victoria Real Estate is built on every property across Vancouver Island, drawn from the millions of records in the provincial dataset — BC Assessment data, recent sales, active listings, and historical transactions, all the way from the Saanich Peninsula and the Westshore through to Sooke and up-Island. The data is refreshed continuously so your estimate reflects the most current Island market conditions we have.
No data is sold. No address is shared.
See it for your home
See every signal for your specific Vancouver Island property — from downtown Victoria to the Westshore, Sidney, and Sooke.
Or head back to the home-value landing.