About Better Dwelling
Better Dwelling is Canada’s largest independent housing news outlet, a distinction we’ve acquired in a very short time. We provide a balanced, data-driven perspective to help millennials understand complex issues surrounding housing — a topic that impacts all of us. Although we’re fairly young, our readership has grown quickly, proving that there’s a need for data driven journalism in Canada.
Housing Is Boring, Why Do You Write About it?
We focus on housing because, collectively, our team feels that it is too important (i.e. the biggest purchase most people ever make) to be confusing. Housing isn’t a topic millennials seem to understand, and we think that’s because housing topics are usually written for people with lots of money (read, not someone who has the same issues as most millennials). We’d like to change that. We crunch numbers, pore over spreadsheets and build interactive maps and charts to help tell stories for millennials by millennials. If we can decode some of the confusion surrounding real estate, we will have done our job.
Who Works Here?
We’re a small group of nerds data scientists, writers, analysts, and programmers working together to tell stories with data. Some of us have day jobs that give us insight into the topics we’re writing about, and others focus solely on Better Dwelling, but all of us have the same end goal: To explain Canadian housing clearly using facts and data.
Why Do You Write Like Kids?
We write our articles just like we’d talk to you in a bar. We don’t need, or want, to use fancy language to make our work seem highbrow. After all, we aren’t trying to impress other writers, we’re trying to communicate with you effectively. We think direct, every day language helps us do that.
Not satisfied with that answer? The technical reason is our editors take highly complex issues, and explain them in a way that maintains a high Flesch-Kincaid score. While the language seems relatively simple, you’d be surprised who else wrote like this. Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, and Hunter S. Thompson all wrote with the language complexity of a grade 4 student, but the clarity of information allowed them to communicate with more impact.
A newspaper like the National Post in contrast, tends to average around a grade 12 level of language complexity. There’s nothing wrong with either way of writing, one method just focuses on the clarity of ideas being communicated, over prolixity for the sake of journalistic art. See? We can write fancy too.
Why Should I Care?
At Better Dwelling our goal is to examine all sides of a story, speak with experts in the field, and explore concepts and stats that have been mostly ignored by larger media outlets. We want to start an honest discussion about real estate, and we hope you’ll spend some time with us, and get in on the discussion.
Not convinced why you should care about what we have to say? Our stories, analysis, and data has appeared in hundreds of articles in local, national, and international news. Here’s a few of our favorite stories.
Tweet us, follow us on Facebook, hit us on Instagram, send us an email, comment on our articles, or send us a tip. Even if you don’t agree with us, we still want to hear what you think.
Looking to contact someone more specific on our team? Our masthead is a good place to get started.
We Don’t Like To Brag, But…
Our stories, authors, and data have been featured in: