What you can see yourself
Active listings are public. Photos, description, price, size, bedrooms, taxes and community are all available to anyone on any portal, including this site.
Sold prices and property history require a free registered account — that is a licensing rule for MLS® data in Alberta rather than a paywall. Once registered you can see what homes actually sold for, which is the single most useful thing for judging whether a listing is priced sensibly.
What a REALTOR® can see
- The full listing history of a property — every previous listing, each list price, the dates, and how long each ran. Including listings that were cancelled and relisted, which is how a relist "reset" becomes visible anyway.
- When a listing went conditional and when it came back, which reveals a collapsed deal even where nobody advertises it.
- Agent remarks — notes from the listing agent intended for other agents, covering access, possession flexibility, offer instructions and similar practical detail.
- Detailed sold comparables, including terms and conditions on the sale rather than just the final number.
- Days on market across previous listings, not only the current one.
None of this is confidential information about the seller. It is the transaction record, and it is the context that turns a price into a judgement.
Why it changes your offer
Two homes listed at $749,000 can be completely different propositions. One listed three weeks ago at that price. The other listed at $815,000 in April, reduced twice, went conditional in June, came back in July, and is now on its third agent.
Those two sellers will respond very differently to the same offer, and the second home may or may not have a problem — but you would want to know before writing, and the public listing shows you none of it.
This is the least glamorous and most valuable thing a buyer's agent does. Not opening doors — reading the history before you commit six figures on the basis of twenty photographs.
What to ask for
Before you write on any property, ask your REALTOR® for: the full listing history, whether it has been listed previously at another price, whether any deal has collapsed and why, and the sold comparables with their terms. Any agent should provide that without hesitation.
If you are not working with anyone yet, you can still create a free account to see sold prices and history yourself — and ask us about any specific property, whether or not you have decided who to work with.
What buyers can see about your listing
Sellers ask the mirror-image version of this question, and the honest answer is: more than you would like, and more than most listing presentations admit.
- Your previous list price. Every prior listing of your property, with its price and its dates, sits in the transaction record. A buyer’s agent pulls it in seconds.
- How long it has really been for sale. The days-on-market figure attached to the current listing is not the whole story. Previous listings, cancellations and relists all show, so the total time your home has been on and off the market is visible even when the current number looks fresh.
- The gaps. A listing that went conditional and came back, an expired term, a change of brokerage — all of it is in the history.
The practical consequence: cancelling and relisting to reset the clock does not work on anyone who is represented. It resets a number on a public portal, not the record. What it does instead is add another line to the history, which is the thing that makes a buyer’s agent look harder at why.
None of this is a reason for despair — it is a reason to price properly at the start, when your listing has the attention it will never have again. If your home has already been out for a while, how buyers read a home that came back on the market is worth understanding before you decide what to do next. And if you are setting a price now, start with what your Calgary home is actually worth rather than with what you need to net. More at our Calgary seller FAQ.