On or off market?

Most homes sold in Toronto, the GTA and Ontario as a whole are listed on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system. They are advertised publicly, buyers arrange showings, offers are submitted and the eventual sale becomes part of the market data used by agents, appraisers, lenders, buyers and sellers.

Not every property is sold this way though, and some owners find buyers privately, while others are approached by neighbours, friends or agents with interested clients. The property may never be advertised, photographed or opened to the public.

These are commonly called “off market” sales and while the term sounds exclusive and potentially lucrative, particularly to buyers hoping to purchase a home before anyone else hears about it, that isn’t always the case.  Sometimes that opportunity is real and other times, it simply means a seller accepted an offer without finding out what the broader market might have paid.

So, are we on or off?

An on market property is listed on MLS and made available to the agents and buyers using that system, while an off market sale takes place without that public exposure.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that no real estate agents were involved in the deal. An agent may approach an owner on behalf of a buyer, market a property quietly within their network or help negotiate a deal after the seller has already found someone. The buyer and seller could also handle the transaction privately through their lawyers.

The important distinction isn’t whether someone earned a commission but whether the property was exposed to the broader market.  If it was, then it was on market; if not, then it was off market.

Why stay off the MLS?

Selling a home can involve repairs, painting, decluttering, staging, photography, showings and open houses, so there are sellers who are quite happy to skip the process if a buyer is willing to purchase the property as-is, offer a convenient closing date and let them leave behind whatever they don’t want.

Privacy can also matter because a public listing announces that the owner is selling, places photographs of the home online and makes the eventual sale relatively easy to find. Other sellers are attracted by the possibility of avoiding commission, although saving on the cost of selling doesn’t help much if the property also sells for substantially less than it could have.

There can be perfectly reasonable reasons to sell off market, but the convenience needs to be weighed against what the seller may be giving up.

Wait, what would I be giving up?

MLS is an advertising system, but it is also a price discovery system because buyers see the property, compare it with the alternatives and decide what they are prepared to pay. If several buyers are interested, they may compete with one another and if nobody is interested, the seller receives a fairly direct message about the price.

An off market seller doesn’t get the same test and while they may receive an excellent offer, perhaps even more than the property would have sold for publicly, they can’t know with much confidence whether another buyer would have paid more.

The seller is trading competition for some combination of privacy, convenience and certainty. That may be worthwhile, but it should be a conscious decision rather than an assumption that a private offer must be a good one.

Off market also doesn’t automatically mean below market. A private property can sell for less than market value, more than market value or somewhere in between, but without public exposure we have less evidence of what the rest of the market might have done.

At the end of the day, if a seller has a price in mind they consider fair, an off market sale that achieves that price may still be considered a success by that seller.

Pick an area, any area.

In order to see how many off market deals are taking place in a given area, we look at what has taken place on the MLS system as well as what is showing up on the Land Registry. If there were no off market deals, then the two would match perfectly. If we see more sales on the Land Registry than show up on MLS, we know that some deals took place off market and won’t show up in any of the “official” market data from TRREB.

We’ve chosen the Kingsway South MLS Community in west Toronto. Broadly speaking, this neighbourhood is bounded by Bloor Street West at the south, Montgomery Road to the west, Dundas Street West to the north and the Kingsway and Kingsway Crescent to the east.

Know your limits.

While we can see information in the Land Registry, it is more limited than what we see in the MLS system. This is due both to the nature of the transactions as well as by design.

Deals can be registered through lawyers to mask the actual sale price, while some transfers are recorded for $0 or $2 because the property is moving between spouses, family members, estates, corporations or related parties rather than being sold conventionally. Properties can also have more than one parcel identification number, or PIN, which can cause one transaction to appear more than once.

Land Registry information, which Realtors commonly access through Teranet’s GeoWarehouse platform, also tell us much less about the property and the transaction because we don’t see the listing history, photographs, room details, condition, days on market or offer process. We may see an address, registration date and amount of consideration, but not much of the story behind them.

There can also be a delay before a completed transaction appears in GeoWarehouse, so we can’t count every row as a separate arm’s-length sale and declare everything without an immediate MLS match to be off market. It would give us a nice clean answer, but it wouldn’t be a particularly accurate one.

Eighty-two versus eighty-two.

Our MLS search produced 82 sales, with an average sale price of $2,685,780 and a median of $2,515,500.

GeoWarehouse also returned 82 records, which looked like a perfect match until we compared the actual properties and found that only 44 appeared in both searches. There were 38 properties found only in the MLS results and 36 found only in GeoWarehouse.

The GeoWarehouse list included 11 transfers registered for either $0 or $2, along with duplicate or related entries. One property on Queen Marys Drive appeared first as a $0 transfer and then two days later as a $3.8-million transfer under the same PIN, while a property on Kingsway Crescent appeared twice at $4 million because two PINs were involved.

Once we removed the nominal transfers and accounted for the duplicate records, GeoWarehouse contained approximately 70 unique properties with meaningful reported consideration. Both searches may have started with 82 rows, but they were clearly not describing the same 82 transactions.

Sold and closed aren’t the same thing.

MLS normally records when a deal becomes firm, while the Land Registry records when ownership is transferred, usually on closing, and those dates can be separated by weeks or months.

A house on The Kingsway was reported sold on MLS in April 2026 for $1.65 million, with the transfer appearing in May. A property on Willingdon Boulevard sold in March for $2.51 million, but the transfer wasn’t registered until June, while a house on Strath Avenue sold in October 2025 for $5.75 million and didn’t appear in the Land Registry until March 2026.

That difference matters when we look at any specific period because a property can sell through MLS before the beginning of our search and close after the period begins, causing it to appear only in GeoWarehouse. At the other end, a property may sell through MLS near the end of the period but not yet have closed, so it won’t appear in GeoWarehouse at all.

Several of the MLS-only properties sold in June and July 2026, so the most likely explanation is not that GeoWarehouse missed a completed sale but that those deals hadn’t closed when we pulled the report.

Even the reported prices didn’t always match. A house on Shand Avenue was reported sold on MLS for $3.45 million, while GeoWarehouse showed $3.4 million, and a house on King Georges Road sold on MLS for $4.15 million compared with registered consideration of $4.12 million.

Matching the two systems therefore requires more than looking for the same price in the same month.

So, how many were off market?

After removing nominal transfers, duplicate records and unusual transactions, we were left with approximately two dozen residential properties that appeared in GeoWarehouse but not in our original one-year MLS search.

Those are possible off market sales, not two dozen confirmed private deals. Some may have sold through MLS before the beginning of our search period and closed afterward, while others may have address variations or registration details that make the match less obvious.

If every remaining candidate had sold off market, they would account for roughly 23% of the combined conventional sales identified through the two searches. That is the highest plausible figure rather than the final answer, and it will fall as earlier MLS sales are matched to later Land Registry transfers.

What the comparison does show is that MLS captures the large majority of ordinary residential sales in Kingsway South, while a smaller but still meaningful number of properties appear to change hands privately. It also shows why claims about large numbers of hidden sales need to be treated cautiously because Land Registry records include genuine private deals, but they also include delayed closings, family transfers, nominal transactions and properties with more than one PIN.

What disappears from the market statistics?

A genuine off market sale won’t appear in TRREB’s sales volume, average price, median price, sale-to-list ratio or days-on-market figures, so the published statistics don’t include every conventional property sale.

That doesn’t make the data unreliable though, as the MLS still captures most normal transactions and provides considerably more information about each one. It simply means we need to understand what is included before deciding what the numbers are telling us.

Should you be on or off?

For most sellers trying to achieve the highest possible price, public MLS exposure remains the sensible starting point because it puts the property in front of the largest pool of buyers and gives those buyers an opportunity to compete.

An off market sale may still make sense when a seller values privacy, certainty or convenience more than testing the full market. For buyers, it can provide access to a property with less competition, but “off market” is not another way of saying “bargain.”

Convenience has value and so does competition, which means both sides should understand what they may be giving up before choosing one over the other.

If you’re considering selling a home and aren’t sure which approach works best for you, then we’d be happy to look at what’s happening in your market (both publicly and privately) and give you our thoughts.  Similarly, if you’ve been looking for a home and wonder if there are options you just aren’t seeing, talk to us about how we track down opportunities like that for our buyer clients.  In either case, get in touch with us to arrange a time to chat!