About Us
Our History and Visions
The Online Open Data Centre for Alberta Urban Real Estate begins with a grant from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation’s 30th Anniversary Legacy Grants program. It is hosted at the Department of Economics, University of Alberta. Its objective is to promote and facilitate local research in Alberta urban areas. It does so by
- providing free and one-place access to large volumes of data on Alberta urban neighbourhoods and communities,
- developing the data collection in collaboration with Alberta real estate industry to meet the industry’s needs, with the potential to complement the industry’s own databases, and
- helping to train the next generation of real estate industry leaders by hosting student research competition/incentives using data from the centre.
Research Team
Project lead: Dr. Haifang Huang, Professor, Dept of Economics, University of Alberta Email: haifang.huang@ualberta.ca
Assistant project manager: Dr. Liang Ma (postdoctoral fellow), Dept of Economics, University of Alberta
Current and past researchers: Yu Su, Bret Allinott, and Marco Noel Paderanga
Acknowledgement of Data Sources
The Data Centre is primarily a data aggregator that tries to integrate many different data sources, and to derive statistics at appropriate levels. Our work is made possible in part by the large volume of administrative data that are made public via the many open-data initiatives by multiple levels of governments, especially the Edmonton Open Data Portal and Open Calgary. Our work also benefits greatly from the organizations that generously provided us their internal/proprietary data to generate or to help generate publishable statistics, including Realtors Associations of Edmonton, Alberta Land Titles, City of Edmonton, Edmonton Public School Board, and AltaLIS. Here we acknowledge their contributions. The Data Centre is responsible for potential errors in the integration, aggregation, and presentation process of the data.
Other Acknowledgement
The Data Centre benefits from collaborations with faculty members in the Department of Economics, including Dr. Max Sties. We acknowledge logistical and other support from the Economics Department, especially Dr. Rick Szostak and Dr. Valentina Galvani, as well as Information Services and Technology (IST) and the library system at the University of Alberta.
Have Questions?
Please email us at rewebadm@ualberta.ca or click the “Contact Us” button on the right.