About Payotte
One verified expert per sector. Always free. Always independent.
Our mission
Payotte started from a simple observation: finding a good broker, inspector or notary in a specific neighbourhood is a real ordeal. Existing platforms list hundreds of professionals with no clear hierarchy, often funded by paid listings or advertising.
Payotte does the opposite. For every geographic sector and every profession, we select a single expert — the one with the highest score on our 100-point grid. One result per search. Not a hundred.
The scoring system
Each expert is assessed on 5 criteria for a total of 100 points:
Average rating and review volume on Google Maps. Both matter: a 4.9-star rating from 3 reviews counts for less than a 4.7 from 200 reviews. It carries the most weight because it is the hardest public signal to manipulate.
Years actively practising the profession. A strong reliability signal, measured from the date the licence was obtained.
The licence is presumed active at selection (15 pts) and can be confirmed on the regulator's official register (OACIQ, RECO, RECA, BCFSA, AMF, AIC, etc.) — each profile links to that register. A withdrawn or inactive licence excludes the expert; when a check is still pending, we say so clearly.
Does the expert genuinely operate in this sector — declared specialty, local presence and activity — rather than across the whole city?
Media presence, professional awards, video presence or other verifiable distinctions.
The three publication states
The expert meets all our criteria with a score of 70/100 or more. Their profile is complete.
The expert is the best available in this sector, but some data is missing. We publish the profile with two explanation blocks: what is missing, and why they are still recommended.
No expert clears the minimum threshold. The page shows an unavailability message. We keep searching.
Independence and funding
Payotte is independently funded. No expert pays to appear. No advertiser funds the ranking. No commission is taken on transactions made with the listed experts.
The only selection criterion is the Payotte score. If an expert with a lower score contacts us to appear, the answer is no.
Who is behind Payotte
Payotte is published independently by Gregory Payotte, a Canadian citizen — not a broker, not a player in the real estate industry. And that is a deliberate choice: Payotte draws its value not from industry connections or insider opinions, but from a transparent, verifiable method with no conflict of interest whatsoever.
The idea is simple: use modern tools — including artificial intelligence — to aggregate and structure public data at scale (Google reviews, official licence registers, real estate board market data), then make that research available free to all Canadians.
Our absolute rule: no invented data. Every published figure comes from a public source that we cite. AI is used to organize information, never to fabricate facts — and when a piece of data remains to be confirmed, we say so clearly rather than asserting it.
A question, a correction, a report? Write to me directly at gregory@payotte.com — I read every message.
Our bet: rigour wins the AI era
More and more, answers no longer come from a results page but from an artificial intelligence that reads the web and synthesizes. In this new landscape, sloppy content — figures with no date, claims with no source, mass-generated text — is multiplying faster than ever. That is the ambient noise.
We are making the opposite bet. When a machine has to choose what to cite, it favours — and will increasingly favour — what can be verified: dated figures, named sources, a published method, open data. Payotte has been built that way from day one: every statistic carries its date and its source, our scoring grid is public, our datasets are freely downloadable, and the rule "no invented data" has no exception.
This bet is no longer theoretical: as of summer 2026, AI assistants already cite Payotte's pages and send us more readers than traditional Google search. The sites that come out of the noise ahead will not be the loudest — they will be the most verifiable. On the AI shift, we explain what this changes for the professionals themselves.
Current coverage
Payotte covers 10 provinces, 74 Canadian cities and 148 geographic sectors, across 5 real estate professions — that is 737 evaluated expert profiles, 684 of them published. The rest show "unavailable" until an expert clears the threshold.
Each city is covered in its primary language: French for Quebec cities (Montreal, Quebec City, Laval, Gatineau, Longueuil, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières), English for the others.