About
A renovation price should not be a secret
Kildrin publishes what Toronto homeowners actually paid for major renovation work, taken from the city's own building permit records.
Why this exists
Search for the cost of any renovation job and you get the same shape of answer every time: a range so wide it tells you nothing, published by a company that makes money introducing you to a contractor. Nobody shows their working, because there usually isn't any.
Meanwhile the City of Toronto has published a detailed record of over 200,000 building permits, including what each applicant declared their project would cost. It has sat there in a data portal, in a format nobody outside city planning was going to open.
That gap is the whole reason for this site. The numbers already existed. They just needed someone to match the work types, strip the typos, and draw the distribution.
How we make money, stated plainly
Two ways, and you should know both before you trust a number here.
- Contractor introductions. If you ask for quotes, we pass your details to one vetted contractor and they pay us a flat fee for the introduction. Not three, not five. You will not be buried in calls. The fee is flat and identical across contractors, so no one can pay for a better position.
- Display advertising. Standard ad slots on some pages.
No contractor can pay to appear in our data, to change a figure, or to have a competitor's cost page altered. The permit dataset is public, our methodology is published in full, and anyone can reproduce our numbers from the raw file. That is the point: if we ever fudged one, you could catch us.
What we cover, and what we don't
We only publish jobs that require a building permit, because that is the only work that leaves a record we can verify. That means underpinning, additions, decks, porches and garden suites.
It also means we will never cover furnace or water heater replacement, appliance repair, or painting. Toronto does not require a permit for a like-for-like mechanical swap, so there is no data. We would rather tell you we don't know than guess.
Coverage
Toronto only, for now. Each new city requires its own permit dataset, its own column mapping and its own quality check, so we are adding them one at a time rather than claiming national coverage we cannot back.