In 2009, I started a real estate brokerage called Realosophy because it was almost impossible to find out anything real about a house or a neighbourhood.
Want to know what the place down the street sold for? Ask an agent. Want to know how a neighbourhood was actually changing? Good luck.
Our first website had no listings and no sold prices. We weren't allowed to publish them. So we did the next best thing: we analyzed the data we could get and built a site around what it told you about neighbourhoods.
Then we decided to fight to change the rules.
In 2011, I testified for the Competition Bureau against my own real estate board in its case over the rules preventing the publication of sold prices online. The case ran seven years. TREB lost at the Tribunal, lost again at the Federal Court of Appeal, and in 2018 the Supreme Court declined to hear it.
If you can look up what a house sold for today, that fight is part of the reason.
And winning it is what eventually made the original idea obsolete. The data that once had to be fought for was now everywhere.
But something did come into focus: more information hasn't necessarily made buying a home easier.
Today, a listing can tell you a lot about a property - photos, floor plan, price history, comparable sales, how long it's been sitting. What it still doesn’t tell you is what might cause you to change your mind.
What's not in the listing
A house sold two years ago and is now back on the market for a lot more? Walls removed, a new kitchen, and new floors. There's no record of a building permit, which means somebody is about to pay a premium for work the city never inspected.
Or the backyard is quiet and gets sun all afternoon, but there's a condo tower proposed for the lot behind it. No application has been filed yet, so there's no sign on the fence and nothing to notice if you walk the block. You have no way of knowing it's coming.
Or you're buying a condo, and the listing describes the unit in detail yet tells you nothing about the building — how much of it is owner-occupied rather than rented, whether the fees are out of line with comparable buildings, whether a unit sold last month for well under what the rest of the building trades for.
That information is buried in public records, old listings and data that nobody has pieced together for you.
What's new
Every listing on our site now includes Move Smartly Insights. It pulls together municipal records, previous listings and our own data on the property and the building, then tells you what's worth a second look before you commit.
Condos. We're launching with data on virtually every condo building in Toronto: how a unit is priced against the rest of its own building rather than the market at large, how the building compares to its neighbourhood, whether fees are out of line, how much of it is owner-occupied, and how many units are run as short-term rentals. Suburban condos follow in the next few months.
Houses. Building permits, proposed developments, affordable housing and heritage designations, covering every municipality in the Greater Toronto Area that publishes the data.
Why the name changed
Realosophy was the right name for a company whose purpose was to unlock data. In 2026, the data is no longer the hard part. What matters is what the data tells you about the particular home you’re standing in.
I haven't lost interest in the numbers — the same monthly market analysis is coming out on the same schedule.
So we're starting fresh, from the ground up, as Move Smartly Realty.
Same team. Same instinct to go looking for what nobody's telling you. A sharper set of tools.
Go look up a home or condo you've been keeping an eye on.
We'll tell you what's not in the listing.
John Pasalis
Broker of Record, Move Smartly Realty
P.S. — The site now lives at movesmartly.com, Old Realosophy links will redirect, and your usual contact reaches the same person at a new address. We've also moved offices, to 507 King St E, Toronto ON M5A 1M3, so update it if you have the old one saved. How we work and who you work with are unchanged.
