Recency
Three months is a sensible default in a normal market. Six months is usable with care. Beyond that you are describing a different market and the numbers need adjusting rather than accepting.
How much recency matters depends on how quickly conditions are moving. In a flat market a five-month-old sale is still informative. In a rapidly changing one, a sale from two months ago may already be misleading. Current conditions →
How many, and the tension
Three genuinely comparable sales is a reasonable minimum. One is an anecdote. The tension is that tightening recency and similarity at the same time can leave you with nothing — particularly for an unusual property or a thin segment.
When that happens, widen deliberately and say which dimension you widened: comparable homes slightly further away, or slightly older sales, or slightly different sizes. Widening on one axis and adjusting for it is defensible. Quietly widening on all three is how people talk themselves into a number.
When older sales still help
- The same property. What this home sold for previously, and what has changed since, is genuinely informative regardless of age.
- Establishing a pattern — whether a particular street or building consistently trades above or below its community.
- Unusual properties where recent comparables simply do not exist, and older ones adjusted for market movement are the only evidence available.
Sold prices and property history require a free registered account under Alberta's rules for MLS® data — a licensing requirement rather than a paywall. Once you have one, you can check comparables yourself.
Working through comparables before you write an offer
Recency and count get you a shortlist. Turning that shortlist into a number is a separate job, and it runs in one direction: start from the closest match and adjust away from it, rather than averaging everything and calling the result a value.
- Match the property type first. A detached home, a semi-detached and a townhouse in the same community are three different markets. Never blend them, and be careful with any per-square-foot shortcut that quietly does. Why price per square foot misleads.
- Then above-grade size and bedroom count. Below-grade space is not valued like above-grade space, and listing measurements are not always consistent — the square footage on a Calgary listing is worth verifying rather than trusting.
- Then adjust one variable at a time. In Calgary the adjustments that actually move a number are garage, lot position, basement development and whether it was permitted, and the remaining life in the roof, furnace and windows.
- Read the sale, not just the price. How long it sat, whether it sold after a reduction, and whether it was competitive all tell you where that price came from and whether it repeats.
Sold prices and listing history sit behind a free sign-in on our site — a licensing requirement for MLS® data rather than a paywall. How to find Calgary sold prices, what the record shows a REALTOR®, and how we price an offer once the comparables are on the table.