farmPogo 
When agents first hear that farmPogo scores every home in their neighbourhood for how likely it is to sell, a fair number assume we’re doing something clever with MLS data. We’re not. There is no MLS or CREA data anywhere in the product. Not in the scores, not in the signals, not in the reports.
That’s not a gap we’re working around. It’s a decision we made early and have never regretted.
What we build from instead
Everything in farmPogo comes from public records:
- Property assessment open data. The assessment roll for every property, published by the provincial or municipal assessor. It’s what the government itself uses to value a home.
- Registered deed transfers. The record of who sold what and for how much, filed when a sale closes. The same records your client’s lawyer works from.
- Building permits. Pulled on homes in your neighbourhood, on public file with the municipality.
- Planning applications. Filed near the homes you farm, also public file.
- Publicly posted for-sale-by-owner ads. Homes their owners have put up for sale themselves, in public, without an agent.
That’s the whole list. It turns out to be more than enough. Assessment histories and registered sales tell you how a home and its street have actually behaved over twenty years. Permits and planning applications tell you what’s changing right now. None of it needs a listing feed.
Why this matters for you
Here’s the part that matters at your brokerage.
MLS data comes with licence terms. Board data policies differ, they change, and what one board permits another restricts. Any tool built on a listing feed inherits all of that, and so does every agent who uses it. If your board tightens its data-use rules next year, a listing-fed tool can become a compliance question overnight.
Public records carry none of that. Nothing farmPogo puts in front of you has someone else’s licence terms attached. Whether you can use it doesn’t depend on your board’s data policy, your brokerage’s feed agreement, or anyone’s interpretation of either. When your broker asks where the data comes from, the answer is one sentence: public records, the same ones anyone can go and read.
We wrote that answer down properly, in a one-page summary you can hand to your broker or compliance officer. It’s at farmpogo.com/broker-summary.
The honest trade-off
Does skipping MLS data cost us anything? Less than you’d think, and we’d rather be straight about it.
A listing feed tells you what’s on the market today. But by the time a home is listed, the farming opportunity is gone. The whole point of farming is to be the agent a homeowner already knows before they decide to sell. For that job, what predicts the decision is the property itself and its history: how long since it last traded, what’s been renovated, how the street around it has been turning over. All of that is in the public record.
So the trade is this: we give up data about homes that have already made their decision, and in exchange every agent in every market can use the product without a licensing question attached. We’ll take that trade every time.
One more thing we don’t do
While we’re being clear about boundaries: farmPogo never contacts homeowners. No calls, no mail, no automated outreach of any kind. We score, we alert, we generate reports with your branding on them. Every conversation with a homeowner is yours, under your own name and licence.
That’s the product. Public records in, your judgement out front.
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