The Economics Microsite is a platform to launch economics-related content and analytics to members, the public, and the media.

This site is entirely created and maintained by the Greater Vancouver REALTORS® (GVR) Economics team, and it is meant to be an iterative product that will evolve and improve over time in response to your comments and feedback.

We created the new site based on feedback from members, the public, and the media who were having trouble finding all of our economics-related content in one spot. In the past, our economics-related content was available in many different formats across a few different platforms and areas of our main site. The new site consolidates all of this content in a one-stop shop.

It’s important to note that the microsite is publicly accessible and isn't restricted to members only. As a publicly accessible site, the data we’re providing is limited to what we already produce for non-member audiences. If potential buyers and sellers are interested in getting more detailed information, we want them to come to our members directly for that information.

As local experts, GVR members are best positioned to guide buyers and sellers in their respective regions – our goal isn’t to duplicate data that is already available to members-only, such as StatsCentre (password required).

The technology behind the Economics Microsite is different from our other websites, allowing us more flexibility to build new features, add unique tools, and more. All of this is being developed in-house by our Economics team, and we presently don't rely on third-party vendors to manage, maintain or modify the site.

The allows the microsite to be a very lean, nimble, cost-effective platform, that can evolve without affecting our other sites. This gives us the ability to develop new tools and services without affecting the functionality and reliability of our other sites, and we can do all of this at virtually zero-cost to members.

We created ChartBook based on member requests for high-level stats that are easy to add to reports, presentations, and other marketing materials. That’s why we designed ChartBook as a document available in PDF and PowerPoint formats, which are easy to clip into other materials.

ChartBook is designed to be a simple, no-frills book of aggregate-level statistics, provided in a clean, presentable, GVR-branded format, that anyone can use free of charge.

As a bonus, it also adds a seasonally adjusted trend component to the raw data, which exhibits seasonality. This is new information that you won’t find in StatsCentre or anywhere else – it's exclusively provided to you by the GVR Economics team.

For those who prefer to use their own formatting, we also provide the raw data behind these charts and dashboards in a downloadable format. 

While viewable on mobile, the microsite currently performs best on desktop browsers. We know from our main site analytics that most users of our sites access our statistics and other information from a desktop browser.

In response to the feedback we’ve received on the microsite to date, we're actively looking at modifying components of the microsite and products contained on the site, such as ChartBook, to be much more mobile-friendly. Stay tuned for an update on this in the future. 

We’ve heard from our commercial members that GVR has historically offered limited information and statistics on the commercial market.

In response to this feedback, the GVR Economics team is actively developing new statistics and information for our commercial members.

As a starting point, the GVR Economics team is building new reports that will increase the amount of coverage of the commercial market, and we are also actively creating new analytics, recorded presentations, and forecasts as well.

We’ve also built a simple tool to visualize the broad commercial market trends on the microsite and have made these statistics available for download for those who wish to use the data in other ways than what we've provided on the site.

On top of these efforts, we’re working on major improvements to existing products, including our quarterly Commercial Edge reports.

Stay tuned for more information and updates as this work progresses.