A Coquitlam, B.C. resident who believes there are at least 22 empty homes in her neighbourhood and says she'd like to take her information to city councillors.

Christine Boehringer has no official data or statistical analysis, and hasn't contacted the homeowners, but says she draws her conclusions based on regular walks and bike rides.

"If I go by [the house] once a week and nothing has changed — there's still no garbage out, the window blinds are still down, the lawn hasn't been cut, nothing about the house has changed over a period of time — to me, that illustrates that it's an empty home," she told CBC News.

Boehringer recently started a website to track single-family houses that locals believe are unoccupied.

The resident said she wants to eventually take the unofficial data to municipal governments, with hopes of seeing levies similar to Vancouver's vacancy tax "applied across B.C."

Christine Boehringer says she created a website for homes that appear to be empty in her neighbourhood. (CBC)

Currently, the city of Coquitlam doesn't have any plans for a vacancy tax.

Even if it did, City Councillor Craig Hodge said it would be wary of using data from Boehringer's site.

"I don't know that having residents doing street-by-street polling is the way I'd want to gather my information," he said.

"In this case, my initial response would be to ask if this is a statistically valid representative before I use this information to make any policy decision."

Raises questions about private property

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson has said his city's tax will partly rely on random audits and complaints from neighbours to catch those trying to skirt around the one per cent levy.​

"I don't think that you can just go down the street and say, 'I haven't seen anybody go in and out this door and the blinds are down,' then say that the house is vacant," he said.

"There are tell-tale signs that maybe a house isn't being kept up as much as others in the neighbourhood, but that doesn't necessarily mean the house isn't being lived in."

The other issue, Hodge said, is how neighbourhood reporting would affect relationships.

"I don't think it's part of the way I want to build a community ... I think it causes friction," the councillor said.

"It raises a lot of other philosophical questions about private ownership and people's rights to use their homes for what they want," he added.

Still, Boehringer said she's determined to take the information to council.

"This is not the 'final' information source that is going to draw taxation. This is an additional, complementary information source," she said. "We're not asking people to go to extreme measures to figure out if a home is empty or not ... I'm hoping people will take a reasonable effort to protect people's privacy."

​Hodge said the city will watch how Vancouver implements its empty home tax in coming months.

In July 2016, the province cleared the way for Vancouver to implement its levy by amending the city's unique charter after council requested the change.

At the time, Finance Minister Mike De Jong said the province would consider similar requests from other municipalities.