What your rent could buy, and how we work it out

Why we lead with a monthly payment

A list price is a number almost nobody has an instinct for. You know what $449,800 is, but you don't feel it. You do feel $1,800 a month, because you've been paying something close to it for years. Putting a monthly payment on the card turns an abstract price into a number you can compare against a bill you already pay.

The median active listing in Greater Edmonton right now is about $449,800, which works out to roughly $2,214 a month in principal and interest. That's the honest middle of this market — but more than 1,000 homes come in under $1,000 a month, and those are the ones worth knowing about if you're paying rent in that range today.

What's in the number

The estimate on every card uses one consistent set of assumptions:

• 10% down on the list price
• 4.34% fixed interest
• 25-year amortization
• Principal and interest only

Those assumptions are applied identically to every listing, which is the point — it makes homes comparable to each other. It does not make the number a quote.

What's deliberately left out

This matters more than the part we include, so it's worth being blunt: the monthly figure on a Padster card is not your all-in cost of ownership. It excludes property tax, condo fees, home insurance, utilities, and CMHC mortgage default insurance — which applies to most buyers putting less than 20% down.

On a condo with $450/month in fees, the real gap between the card and your bank statement is substantial. Before you make an offer on anything, get an actual rate hold and a real payment breakdown from a mortgage broker or your bank.

Where the rent comparison breaks down

Rent and a mortgage payment are genuinely comparable in one narrow sense — both are money leaving your account every month for somewhere to live. They differ everywhere else. A mortgage payment builds equity; rent doesn't. But rent also has no down payment, no closing costs, no maintenance, no property tax, and no exposure if the market drops.

The comparison is most useful when it surprises you — when you learn the payment on a real home is close to what you're already handing a landlord. It's least useful as a decision on its own. Everything else (how long you'll stay, the down payment you have, your job stability) matters at least as much.

Where the listings come from

Every home on Padster comes from the CREA Data Distribution Facility (DDF®) feed, covering active listings across Edmonton and surrounding communities. The feed is refreshed on a schedule rather than scraped, so homes that sell drop off instead of lingering as phantom results — a common frustration on portals that don't refresh aggressively.

Photos, remarks, bedroom and bathroom counts, and square footage all come from that same feed, which means what you see here is what the listing REALTOR® published.

What Padster is, and isn't

Padster is not a brokerage. It's owned by Ryan McCann with MaxWell Polaris, and it costs you nothing to use. Browsing and saving homes require no account at all — an account only matters if you want favourites synced across devices, price-drop alerts, or to book a showing on a specific home.