Last week, I took a buyer client to see two condo townhouses for sale in the same complex.

One was listed at $799,900.

The other was listed at $1,110,000.

Were they completely different offerings, given they were priced over $300,000 apart?  Nope.  Just different listing and pricing strategies.

The first condo was listed at $799,900 with an “offer date.”

The second condo was listed at $1,110,000 with “offers any time.”

My client much preferred the second condo, as did I.  It was a far better layout, and although it was only marginally larger in terms of square footage, that layout made the unit feel superior in every way, and it was more functional and much more conducive to his lifestyle.

But had he not preferred the second unit more, he would have thought twice about offering on the first unit.  Listed at $799,900 with an offer date, it meant that the seller and the listing agent were setting up for multiple offers, and in a balanced market like ours, many buyers don’t want to play that “game.”

The unit listed for $1,110,000 had a comparable sale from earlier this year at $1,250,000.  And by “comparable” I mean that it was an identical model.

We ended up buying this unit for $1,090,000, which is $160,000 less than the identical model sold for this past spring.

My client was happy, his parents were happy, and I was over the moon – not just in terms of the price we paid, but in terms of which of the two units we bought.

The other unit – the one listed for $799,900, received eight offers on their scheduled “offer night.”

So how much did it sell for?

Trick question, because the unit didn’t sell.

The seller rejected all eight offers and the next day, the listing agent emailed all the buyer agents who had shown the property to say “The unit is still available to show.”

However, and this is a big however, the listing was not updated.  It still shows as $799,900 with offers on September 21st.  The seller and the agent clearly don’t want to show their hand in re-listing for their desired price, but in the meantime, the listing is in limbo.

The results through the first three weeks of the fall market have been mixed, to say the least.

Here’s a colleague sent me the other day:

That’s not a typo.

That’s forty-eight offers registered on a house in Scarborough, and my colleague says there were over sixty offers when all was said and done.

It should come as no surprise that the sale of this house represents the highest “sale-to-list ratio” so far this fall:

That’s not a typo either.

162% of the list price, wow.

But what was this house “worth?”

I think it’s fair to assume that it wasn’t worth anywhere near $629,900.  I also think it’s fair to assume that of the sixty offers, thirty or forty of them were $700,000 or less.

More buyers out there are saying, “Let’s give this a try,” but when there’s sixty offers, you have to know that your conditional offer of $629,900 likely isn’t going to fly.

Another sale that really impressed me was this one:

Impressed because it sold for 138% of the list price?

Impressed because it sold for $610,000 over the list price?

No.

Impressed because there were only two offers.

This house isn’t worth $2,210,000, trust me.  The fact that there were only two offers has to tell you that the market for this property was thin.  But if things like this are happening, then the market must be “back,” right?

To be fair, if we look at the bottom end of the sale-to-list ratios for freehold sales this fall, we find this:

When was the last time you saw a house sell for 69.7% of the list price?

That’s crazy.

On Saturday, I sat down to go through this fall’s sales data.

I looked only at sales from Tuesday, September 6th onward, since that was the true “start” of the fall market.

First, I looked at the sale-to-list ratio of freehold properties:

I think the fact that 35.6% of all freehold sales so far this fall have sold over the list price might surprise some people.

This was supposed to be a buyer’s market, right?

And yet more than a third of all listings are selling for over the list price?

When it comes to 416 condos, the data skews more toward a balanced market:

Nevertheless, 103 out of 585 sales going over the list price shows you that there’s still competition for condos and that, just maybe, the “list-low, hold-back” strategy can work in this market.

But what are we missing here, folks?  With respect to this data, I can’t help but feel that it’s not telling us the full story.

Here’s a thought: a property listed for sale in July that sells in September is more likely to sell under the list price, right?

More to the point, if we really wanted to take stock of the fall market, we should only be looking at properties listed from September 6th onward, right?

So let’s re-run the above data but instead of looking at sales from September 6th through September 23rd, we’ll look at properties both listed and sold this fall:

The percentage of properties selling over the list price increases from 35.6% to 42.2%.

This makes sense.

Although to be honest, I thought it would be more of an increase.  Nevertheless, 42.2% of all freehold properties that were listed from September 6th onwards ended up selling over the list price and I think that’s significant.

Here’s the same data for condos:

The percentage of properties selling over the list price increases from 17.6% to 30.6%.

This is a larger increase than we saw for freehold, although the overall percentage is still lower.

I think that a lot more sellers and listing agents decided to try the “list-low, hold-back” strategy this fall than those who listed in the summer, and the data reflects that.

But where you can really start to see the difference in how properties are being listed and sold is with respect to price.

Simply put, the lower-priced properties are selling over-asking at a significantly higher rate, and that’s true of both freehold and condominium.

Let’s divide the freehold sales by list price.

We’ll look at those priced $999,999 and below, those priced between $1 Million and $2 Million, and those priced at $2 Million and up:

This is exactly what we should have expected.

68.4% of freehold properties, listed and sold this fall, have sold in excess of the list price.

Comparatively, only 42.5% of properties priced between $1M – $2M have sold over asking.

I’m sure there’s a “sweet spot” where we could divide this further, such as $1.3M or $1.4M.  The more demand there is for a product – in this case, “entry-level” houses, the higher the sale prices in the end.  In February, that “entry-level” was somewhere below $1.4M.  Today, it’s probably $1.2M as there are a lot more houses selling at prices we haven’t seen since 2021.

I’m actually quite shocked that 32.6% of properties listed above $2 Million are selling above the asking price, but that’s absolutely, positively a result of the lack of supply.  I currently have six buyers looking between $2 Million – $6 Million and there’s almost nothing to show them.  I’ve only taken two of those six buyers out to look so far this fall.

That is how thin our market is right now and I do believe that the September TRREB data, with respect to “new listings,” will back this up.

When it comes to condos, there are far fewer properties selling over the list price:

I’m using $600,000 as the cut-off for “low-end” condos, and while there’s a big difference between $601,000 and $999,999, we have to draw the line somewhere.

The $600K – $1M range shows us that 13.1% of properties are selling over the list price, but the $1M – $1.5M range shows us a 13.6% figure.  Perhaps we could group this entire range together to simply say that twice the number of condos, below $600,000, are selling over the list price compared to those $600K – $1.5M.

Even still, only 26.9% of condos listed at $599,999 or below are selling over asking.

And when I look at the highest sale-to-list ratios for condominiums, I see fair number of C01.

Here’s an example:

How many people lined up to “bid” on this unit?

And what did they expect to buy it for?

So long as we’re seeing sales like this, it’s not a “buyer’s market” and it never will be.

In the next price threshold, we’re still seeing sales well in excess of the list price:

This unit happened to directly face the water, so maybe it’s not fair to show this as any sort of market indicator.

But if we were in a buyer’s market, this wouldn’t happen.

–

The above data refers solely to the 416, but perhaps a further discussion about the 905 is warranted.

Bottom line: the results are mixed thus far.

Nobody can say, with any level of certainty, that it’s a buyer’s market or a seller’s market.  And even if somebody wanted to say it’s a balanced market, I’d probably ask, “Are you sure about that?”