What is a Zone? | Real Estate Definition

Disambiguation: This term is about Real Estate Zones (Areas of a City). Were you looking for zoning regulation and permitted land use?

What is a (Real Estate) Zone?

In real estate, neighbourhoods are often grouped into zones to make searching for properties easier. There may be many neighbourhoods (or communities) grouped into zones. Zones are numbered, not named.

Real Estate Agent Explains Zones

Because neighbourhood names are long and there may be so many to search through, it is often easier to refer to a zone number when searching for property information in a more than a few communities.

As of 2024, there are about 400 neighbourhoods currently grouped into 46 primarily residential zones in Edmonton, and the number grows along with the city. This includes four purely industrial zones in Edmonton. St Albert, Fort Saskatchewan, Sherwood Park, Spruce Grove and Stony Plains are each their own zones.

Portions of the river valley in Edmonton are also assigned zone numbers, even though all the real estate in those areas is owned by the city.

Here is an example of some Edmonton real estate zones:

In the above zone map, we can see, for instance, that there is a real estate zone 15. Zone 15 includes 11 communities: Allendale, Belgravia, Empire Park, Grandview Heights, Landsdowne, Lendrum Place, Malmo Plains, McKernan, Queen Alexandra, Parkallen and Pleasantview. If you were interested in real estate in those areas of Edmonton, it would be much easier to check all of zone 15, rather than listing all those neighbourhood names.

Why Does It Matter?

Location is the most important factor affecting real estate, however it is usually better to search in a larger area than in a smaller one to make sure all options are visible. Real estate zones make these kinds of searches easier and help homebuyers zero in on the best Edmonton neighbourhood for them. Also, when selling real estate, zones can provide a larger area to pull comparable market information from if there are too few comparable properties in the subject property’s specific neighbourhood.