Most pre-construction information online is copied, not verified. Prices get scraped once and then sit there for months while the builder moves on. Here are five checks you can run yourself on any listing — including ours — in about ten minutes.
We ran these checks on listings for communities we hold builder price lists for. On two of them the published starting price differed from the builder’s own list by a six-figure amount — and neither page showed a pricing basis or a date, so there was no way for a reader to tell whether that gap was staleness, a different phase, or simply the same home quoted a different way.
A new home price in Ontario can be quoted three ways: after the HST rebate, plus HST, or HST included. The same home, quoted three ways, can appear to differ by more than six figures. A listing that gives you a number with no basis attached has given you nothing you can compare.
Look for the words. “After Rebate”, “Excluding HST” and “H.S.T. Included” are the three phrases, and one of them is always on the builder’s own price list. If the listing you are reading does not carry it across, assume it does not know. The long version is here.
There are two dates that matter and they are not the same. There is the date the listing was updated, and the date the builder’s price list was issued. A page can be “updated today” and still be quoting a price list from last spring.
Ask which one you are being shown. On this site we publish both: every project page says when we last checked it and, where the figure came from a specific builder price list, what that list was dated. Where something is stale we say so on the page rather than quietly leaving the old number up.
Every builder and vendor selling a new home in Ontario must be licensed by the Home Construction Regulatory Authority. The HCRA publishes the Ontario Builder Directory, a free public register of more than 7,000 licensed builders.
It is worth more than a licence check. The directory shows how long the builder has been operating, how many homes they have completed, and any regulatory action taken against them — including charges and convictions. Condominium cancellations are listed separately, with the reasons. Five minutes there tells you more than any brochure.
One detail people miss: the entity that signs your agreement is often a numbered company set up for that one project, not the brand on the sign. Check the name on the agreement, not the name on the billboard.
Pre-construction projects get delayed, re-phased, renamed and cancelled. A listing page does not automatically disappear when that happens — it simply stops being true. Phases sell out and the remaining product is nothing like the one advertised; a community relaunches at a different price point under a different name.
The check is simple: find the builder’s own page for the community and see whether it still exists, still carries that name, and still shows that product type. If the only pages describing a project are third-party listing pages, treat it as unconfirmed.
A great deal of pre-construction content is published by lead-generation sites rather than by brokerages. That is not improper in itself, and some of them are owned by or affiliated with a registered brokerage. But it changes what you are reading and what happens to your details.
Look for a brokerage name and a named registrant in the footer. In Ontario, RECO requires advertising to identify the brokerage. If a site collects your phone number but will not tell you which brokerage stands behind it, that is worth knowing before you type it in, because your enquiry is usually being sold or routed to whoever is paying for leads that week.
While building this site we compared the starting prices published on several widely-read listing pages against the builders’ own current price lists for the same communities. For two of them the published figure differed from the builder’s list by a six-figure amount.
Here is the part that matters, and it is not that someone got a number wrong. None of those pages stated a pricing basis, and none carried a date. So there was no way for a reader to tell whether the gap was a stale price, a different phase, a different home type, or simply the same home quoted plus HST instead of after the rebate. Any one of those explanations is innocent. Without a basis and a date you cannot tell which one applies — and that is the failure, not the number itself.
A buyer using one of those figures to decide what they could afford might have ruled out a community that was comfortably inside their budget, or walked into a sales office expecting a price that was never on offer.
Run these checks on us too
We publish the pricing basis beside every price, the date we last checked each project, and the date of the builder price list it came from. Where we have not been able to re-confirm something, the page says so instead of going quiet. That is the standard we are asking you to hold other sources to, so it is the one we have to meet first.
The comparison above was made on 3 October 2026 against builder price lists we hold on file. We have deliberately not named the sites, and we are not suggesting any of them acted improperly — a price can differ for several innocent reasons, which is precisely why the basis and the date need to be on the page. Listing sites update independently and may since have changed. This is general information, not tax or legal advice. E.&O.E.
Send us any listing you are looking at — ours or anyone else's — and we'll tell you what the builder's current price list actually says, and the date on it.