Rent comps

Similar rentals nearby, recorded against a home — what's on the market when deciding what to charge.

What it is — competing rental units observed on the market, recorded against a home, at /app/homes/…/comps. Comps answer the top-down half of “what should I ask for this unit?”; the bottom-up half — what the rent must cover — lives in Finances as the rent floors.

RenovAI reports the market; it never recommends a rent. The judgement stays yours (or your AI assistant’s).

Two different numbers

  • The spread — the range over this home’s own comps: the units you decided are comparable, with the numbers behind them.
  • The market baseline — the city-wide StatCan asking-rent figure for the home’s metro area and bedroom count, with its source and reference period.

They answer different questions and are deliberately never blended into one number.

Recording comps

  • Add by hand — enter the facts (rent, beds/baths, area, address) yourself.
  • Add from a URL — paste a listing link and RenovAI scrapes the facts and photos.
  • Search — search RentFaster around the home (Calgary v1), review the candidates, and keep the ones that genuinely compare.

Photos are mirrored into your own storage, so a comp survives the original listing going down.

Comp lifecycle

A comp is active while it’s on the market, then rented or archived. A rented comp’s price stays the last asking price — what it actually went for is unknowable, and the data never pretends otherwise. Prefer archiving to deleting; the history is the value.

Ask your assistant

Comps are built for MCP — an assistant can gather, curate, and interpret them in one conversation:

  • “Search for comps near the Harebell unit and add the three closest two-bedrooms.”
  • “Add this RentFaster listing as a comp: <url>.”
  • “What’s the spread on my Calgary house, and how does it sit against the city baseline?”
  • “Mark the Cranston comp as rented and archive anything older than six months.”