Widen the lens before you guess — the market, the property type and the professional next door all give you more to work with.
Short answer
Broaden your search — radius, timeframe, similar-enough property types — before defaulting to a rough number, adjust anything you do find against a market trend rather than presenting it at face value, and for a genuinely unique property, recognize that this may be the point where a designated appraisal, not a CMA, is the right tool.
When direct comparables are not there, look past the immediate street or subdivision and lean on trend data rather than a raw dollar figure from somewhere else. CMHC’s own housing market data and research hub for professionals — including its annual Rental Market Report and its Housing Market Outlook — gives broader supply-and-demand context for situations where resale comparables are genuinely thin: new construction, rental conversions, or unusual inventory types.
The Appraisal Institute of Canada describes its designated members as providing independent appraisal services across residential, commercial and industrial property, including “appraisal review, consulting, reserve fund planning, machinery and equipment valuation, or mass appraisal services” — a toolkit built for exactly the properties a standard CMA cannot handle. If a property is unique enough that you cannot build a defensible CMA, telling the client that plainly is the honest answer — not a number stretched past what your comparables can actually support.
Before defaulting to an appraisal referral, widen the comparison honestly: a new-build townhome with no resale history in its own phase can often be priced off the closest comparable phase or a neighbouring project, adjusted for the differences and flagged clearly as a proxy rather than a direct match. That is still a CMA, just a more heavily caveated one — the failure mode is presenting a proxy comparable as if it were a direct one, not using a proxy at all.
See also: how old a comparable can be before you adjust it and what a designated appraiser does differently.
A 30-minute call is enough to see where your own pricing and client-facing process would hold up under a closer look.
