Teranet operates Ontario's electronic land registration system and sells registry-derived property products to lenders and governments. When someone searches for an alternative, they usually mean one of several different jobs, and the useful answer depends on which job it is — no single source, this site's included, does all of them.
Registry-derived data is authoritative for what has legally happened to a property: ownership, transfers, legal descriptions and registered mortgages. If the question is who owns a parcel and what is registered against it, the land registry is the record, and in Ontario that record runs on Teranet's infrastructure — including OnLand, the province's public land registry portal, which Teranet also operates for one-off searches.
Buyers look past registry products for a handful of reasons. They need to see what happens to a property between registrations — listings, price changes, relists, failed sales. They need data types outside a registry product's core strength, such as rentals or commercial leasing activity. They need national coverage on one schema rather than a single province. Or they need delivery into a modern stack — a data warehouse, an API, an AI agent — rather than a lender-facing platform.
| If the job is | Sources to evaluate | Built from |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership and registered interests, Ontario | OnLand (the public registry portal, Teranet-operated) for one-off searches; registry data products for volume work | The Ontario land registration record itself |
| Ownership and transactions, Quebec | JLR (an Equifax company) | Quebec land register and related property records |
| Assessment values, Ontario | MPAC licensed datasets | Assessed values maintained for property taxation |
| Commercial transactions and analytics | Altus Group, CoStar | Researched commercial transaction and leasing databases |
| Developer API access to property records | Houski | Aggregated Canadian property data behind an API |
| Listing lifecycle, sold events and market activity, national | BrightCat Data | Weekly capture of 5,978,973 residential properties since 2014 and 314,884 commercial properties, every listing event on a persistent property identity, confirmed sold prices in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta |
Where BrightCat fits has limits worth naming. It is not a land registry source: it carries no title, lien or registered-mortgage data, and it does not establish legal ownership. What it carries is the market activity registry data cannot see — when a property lists, how its asking price moves, when it relists, withdraws or sells — updated weekly and delivered through Snowflake Marketplace, Secure Data Share, an MCP connector or structured files, with published schemas.
In practice the strongest setups pair the two kinds of source: registry data for legal state, listing-derived data for current market behaviour. A sample evaluation against a known set of addresses is the quickest way to find out whether the listing side adds what a workflow is missing.
Real Canadian property data, delivered through Snowflake, MCP, or flat file.