Have you ever had someone try to tell you something old is new?

We’re not talking about when something comes back into fashion, or when someone says it’s used, but new to you. We mean when someone shows you something you’ve seen a number of times before and announces, “Look at this new thing I just got!”

It doesn’t happen often because it doesn’t really make much sense. If you were walking down a street of retail stores you’ve walked down many times and you saw a store you’ve been in dozen of times with a sign in the window that said “New Store!” you’d probably be pretty confused. Did they mean new stock? Maybe new owners? If you went inside to discover the exact same products for sale at the same price as last time you were there, with the same owner greeting you, I bet you’d be pretty confused.

Unfortunately, when it comes to real estate and how they’re listed on the MLS system, this is exactly what happens on a very regular basis. If you’ve ever been looking for a home to buy, you are probably very familiar with receiving a notification that says you have X number of new listings that fit your criteria, only to check out the results and see that while some may be new, others are very much properties you’ve already seen and dismissed.

For some reason, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) allows agents to list a property, terminate that property and then relist it as a “new” listing. In some cases, it makes sense, such as when a seller takes some time to renovate or make changes to the property. The property is in fact different than it was before and while certain attributes are the same, it is new in some impactful aspect.

In the majority of cases, however, such relisted properties are exactly the same. Same photos, same attributes, same listing agent. All that changes is the MLS listing number and the days on market. It is even pretty common to see the same price as the prior listing. In essence, all the agent is trying to do is “refresh” the listing in the eyes of the market. The theory is something along the lines of “Well, perhaps you didn’t notice this place for sale for the last two months, so I’m gonna see if pretending it’s newly on the market makes you jump at it.”

We don’t think it is an effective tactic and in our work with buyers, when we see a property that has been relisted multiple times in the recent past, it tells us that the listing agent is grasping at straws and hoping for a miracle.

Every month, TRREB releases a report called a Re-List Share Comparison and It is a great source of information about where this practice is prevalent and how many of the so-called new listings are in fact relists of prior listings. The latest data for May 2024 shows that almost one in four of new listings in the TRREB boundaries is in fact not new, but a relisting. That’s right, 24.1% of all “new” listings last month were not new at all. Keep this in mind whenever you see headlines about how many listings took place in a given area!

We thought we’d share the latest Re-List Share Comparison report and some key take-aways from the data. Let’s get into it.

Straight from the horse’s mouth

The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board releases their Re-List Share Comparison each month and while it is publicly available, it can be hard to track down if you’re not a real estate agent. Here is a link to the one page PDF if you want to check out what percentage of “new” listings are actual re-listings in the various markets around the GTA. It covers both the most recent month of full data (May 2024) as well as the YTD data for 2024.

Data is almost always useful, but let’s review the big take-aways.

What are you new, Markham?

In May 2024, the city with the lowest percentage of relists in the GTA was Markham, with just 15.8% of the new listings being comprised of relists. The City of Toronto came in at 23.8% and the area with the largest percentage of not-actually-new-listings was Pickering, with a whopping 31.9% of listings being relists. That’s almost a third and if you were looking to buy in Pickering last month it meant that of the 307 new listings, 98 were actually properties that were on the market before.

One in four ain’t actually new.

If you want a big picture take-away that you can mention at parties to impress people with your insider knowledge of real estate, the average relist share in Toronto and the GTA is 24.1% in May. That basically means that one in four of the so-called new listings is actually a relist. Whenever you read commentary on the number of new listings in a media story, remember that it would be a lot more accurate if they compared the actual new listings from the month against the actual new listings from last month or a year ago.

The YTD data shows us things aren’t getting better.

If we look at the YTD data (January to May 2024) there are some differences compared to how May looks. The big picture for the year is that we had fewer relists taking place earlier in the year compared to now. Our YTD percentage for Toronto and the GTA is 20.8%, so about one in five new listings being relists. That’s better than May’s one in four percentage, which tells us that things are getting worse, with more properties failing to sell and relisting than was typical earlier in the year.

Markham is still near the low end of the scale for the YTD, with 15.2% of their listings this far being relists. They are second, after Adjala-Tosorontio, a mostly rural area in Simcoe County.

The city of Toronto has one fifth of their listings actually being relists so far this year and there is a two-way tie for the least honest new listing stat this year, with both Innisfil and Essa having 25.6% of their reported new listings actually being relists.

If you’re interested in selling and want to avoid being one of these new, but not really new, listings, then we’d love to go over how we make sure our sellers get sold the first time around, for the most amount of money. Get in touch with us to arrange a time to talk!

We spend a lot of time thinking about pricing and valuing real estate.  Whether our clients are trying to buy or sell real estate, it always boils down to one question – what’s a fair price for this property?

The word “fair” is the critical part of that question and to be clear, we’re not using it in any moralistic sense.  It’s not about whether the price is equitable or justifiable from some external objective perspective, it’s about what number will make a deal happen between a buyer and seller.

That number needs to be in a range that both parties to the sale agree is the value of the home.  If the gap between what the seller thinks is the value of the property and what the buyer thinks is the value is too big, then a deal doesn’t happen.

When a real estate agent lists a home for sale, they do all they can to present the home in as appealing a fashion as possible.  Cleaning, decluttering, updates, staging, professional photos – they are all done to increase the value of the home in the minds of a buyer.

Whenever a home doesn’t have the work done to present well and it is listed for sale “as is”, that simply means that the seller has decided they are comfortable with prospective buyers seeing less appeal and value in the home.  The seller likely doesn’t want to take a lower price, but they nonetheless aren’t doing anything to make a buyer value it higher.  Such listings can still result in a deal where a “fair” price was agreed upon, but make no mistake, that means the seller lowered their value rather than the buyer increasing their value.

In a shifting market like we’re experiencing, pricing real estate is tremendously difficult there are lots of properties where the agent is getting it wrong.  Whether they are telling their clients to list the home for too much money, or the seller has valued the home at too high a price for the current market, we’re seeing lots of properties not sell and then relisting at lower prices.

In July 2022, there were about 12,000 listings that came on the market within Toronto and the GTA.  More than 3,300 of those “new” listings were in fact re-listings of properties that failed to sell initially and are now trying again with a different price.  In July, 27.7% of all listings were re-listings, and that clearly means sellers are having a hard time agreeing on the value for their home with buyers.

One of those re-listings is a property that clearly illustrates what happens when buyers disagree with a seller about the value for their home.  It’s a property that we saw with clients a number of months ago and we’ve been watching the agent struggle to get it sold.  It finally sold, and the sale price is a staggering 35% below what they originally wanted.

Let’s review what happened and the lessons that come from such a story.

Stage 1 – Wishful Thinking

The sellers had built a pair of brand new, custom luxury semi-detached houses just steps from Lakeshore Road West in Oakville.  While it wasn’t smack dab in the middle of the best part of Old Oakville, it was not too far a walk to cross over Sixteen Mile Creek and then into the wonderful shopping and restaurants of Old Oakville.  The home we’ll focus on here was the left side of the semi-detached pair.

With three bedrooms, five bathrooms and over 3,000 sf of finished living space, including an elevator and oversized garage, the sellers were right to think they would have a valuable asset when it was completed.  The real question of course, is how valuable?

The property was listed for sale in October 2021 for $2,700,000.  It was a bit of a premature listing, as the home was still under construction, but you can’t fault the sellers for wanting to get going on finding a buyer.

The listing was with a brokerage that was providing what is called a “mere” listing.  It was put on MLS for a flat fee and while technically there was an agent who had his name on the listing, many of the things that you associate with having an agent were not being done.

There are three crucial tasks that Realtors should do in order to earn their commission on a listing.

1. Price the home properly
2. Market the home effectively
3. Negotiate the sale aggressively

With a mere listing on MLS, the sellers decided on the list price themselves without advice from an agent with market knowledge and experience.  The marketing consisted of the MLS listing and two photos.  No negotiating took place as far as we can tell, because after 53 days on the market, the listing was terminated.

Stage 2 – Call In The Pro

In January 2022, the property was relisted on MLS, this time with an experienced and respected local agent who specializes in high end listings.  Listed at $2,399,000 this time, the sellers had obviously received the benefit of their agent’s market knowledge.

The dropping of the list price by $300,000 to this $2.399M was likely painful to the sellers, but given their previous experience listing for a couple of months with no sale, they were starting to see that the value buyers were attaching to the home was not what the sellers thought.

With their new agent came new marketing and the support of the agent in co-ordinating showings and putting the word out about the home.  Construction had continued over the winter and the home was nearing completion.

January and February were the high points of the 2022 real estate market and would have been their best opportunity to sell the home before the market began shifting to a more balanced market in March and April.

We showed the listing with clients in early March and while lots of aspects of the home appealed, there were a couple of curious layout choices that meant it ultimately wasn’t suitable for our clients.  We discussed the price and agreed that while the home was nice, it was still an aggressive ask at $2.399M for the property.  Put another way, the seller had lowered the value they placed on the home by $300K, but in the eyes of our buyers, the home had a significantly lower value.

The market as a whole agreed, as after 84 days on market, the listing was terminated without a sale.

Stage 3 – Keep Tweaking!

In mid-April, right after they terminated the $2.399M listing, the home was back on the market for $200,000 less, now listed at $2,199,000.  The home almost completely finished at this point, with virtual staging added to the photos online, open houses most weekends and efforts being made by the listing agent to make sure the market knew about the lowered price.

The biggest change in this listing was the price, and while we’re sure the seller was hopeful that the new price was more in keeping with the value that buyers saw in the home, that hope would have been dashed over the next month and a half.

44 days after this 3^rd listing attempt went up, it was terminated with no sale.

Stage 4 – Motivate Buyers By Motivating Their Agent

On June 1^st, the 4^th kick at the can took place, with the property relisted at $1,999,000.  Along with this lower price came an increase in the commission offered to the buying agent, up from 2.5% of purchase price to 3%.

While we can’t know exactly why this decision was made, it does speak to the seller being determined to get the home sold.  The normal commission in the area and this price point is 2.5%, so it wasn’t as if the home was being hurt by an attempt to save money on the commission.  Increasing the pay out to the buyer agent can be effective at pushing buyer agents to go back to their clients to see if they’re interested in the home.

At the same time as the sellers made it more attractive to buyer agents, they also made it more attractive to buyers by lowering the price by $200,000.  Dropping the price below $2M would have been a difficult decision.  It is always psychologically hard to go below major thresholds and given their initial hopes for a sale price of $2.7M, seeing a list price that starts with a one would have been hard.

While we don’t know whether the lower price and higher commission resulted in a flurry of showings, we do know that it only took 8 days before this listing was terminated.

Stage 5 – This Better Work

The final listing for this home came out on June 9^th.

Despite having just dropped $200K a week and a half ago, the sellers dropped the list price another $100K, and came to market at $1,899,000.  That is about $800,000 lower than what they originally hoped for the home.  They had been trying to sell the home with this second agent since the start of 2022 and were approaching the mid-point of the year with no sale yet.

The higher buyer agent commission approach was tweaked to say if a firm sale happened by June 22^nd, they would pay the 3% commission.  It clearly didn’t work as intended, because the commission was dropped back down to the 2.5% it has been for most of the listings on July 4^th.

20 days into this listing, they dropped the price another $100K, putting the list price down to $1,799,000.  A week after they did that, a buyer agreed with the seller that that value seemed fair and the property was sold conditionally.  On July 7^th that conditional deal fell through and the listing was once again available.

It took another three weeks before another offer submitted and the home was sold conditionally again.  The deal fell through again and the home was back on the market again.  Five days later, on August 8th, the home finally sold firm.  We can’t know if it was to one of the earlier buyers who had bought it conditionally or a new buyer, but with three offers in about a month, the list price of $1,799,000 was clearing in keeping with the value that buyers thought the property possessed.

With an initial listing of $2.7M in October 2021, and a final sale of $1,760,000 in August, 2022, it took 311 days and dropping the price by $940,000 before this home sold.  That works out to about $3,022 a day that the sellers lost in hoped for value of the home.  It took a long time for the seller to adjust their valuation of the home to the level that the market was using.  Given the shifting market during this time, it seems apparent that the seller was unfortunately lagging just a bit behind the market as a whole.  Every time they agreed to a lower value, the market had dropped while they came to that conclusion.

It can seem obvious that for a home to sell, you need to have a buyer and a seller agree on the value of the property.  Despite that, with different aspects of a property having different value to different people, it can be quite hard to come to an agreement if one party has value expectations that are out of line.

While we’ve focused on the seller side in this example, you can of course find lots of buyer side examples as well.  Any buyer who has been looking for a property for months or years has likely valued homes in a different way than other buyers.  If a buyer places less value on things that many buyers place value on, they will constantly see homes sell for more money that they think they were worth.

If you’re considering buying or selling, then you need to work with agents who understand pricing and what is necessary to find a match with the other party to the transaction in regards to the value of the property.  If that makes sense to you, then get in touch with us!

The way real estate is transacted in Ontario is not exactly clear if you aren’t an insider.  In fact, it can be quite difficult for the general public to tell what is happening with a listing on the market.

• Is it holding back on offers until a set date or is it willing to review offers at any time?
• Is the list price reflective of what the sellers want or is it below market value?
• Is the home still available or has it sold and just not been updated?
• Is this the first time it’s been listed or is it a relist?

Given the above questions can’t be answered by anyone but a real estate agent, it isn’t surprising that we often have our buyer clients ask us what’s happening with a particular listing.

As the market in the GTA has shifted in the past few months, the last question on the list above has become much more pressing – did the home fail to sell in prior listings?  It also brings up other questions like, what were they originally hoping to get as a sale price, and how long have they been trying to sell the home?  These are important questions as it gives us insight into how the seller might be feeling, what they might be willing to accept and how we could best proceed with an offer.

In a market where we are going from a seller’s market to a balanced market, or even a buyer’s market, we see more homes fail to sell the first time around.  Whether it is simply a matter of more competition resulting in the home being overlooked, or sellers (and agents) who haven’t adjusted to the new market conditions, higher number of properties are relisted after an unsuccessful initial attempt.

The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board released a research brief at the start of June that looked at how many homes are actually failing to sell now and what is the typical rate in more “normal” market conditions.

In May 2022 the average percentage of homes that hit the market that were relists was a whopping 26.4%.  More than a quarter of the listings that came on the market in the GTA in May were listings that had failed to sell, terminated the listing, and relisted again.

In the ten-year period from 2011 to 2021, the average monthly re-list percentage was about 16%, which means we saw it go up by 10% in May 2022.  Put another way, we typically see 16 out of 100 homes fail to sell and relist, whereas now we’re seeing 26 out of 100 homes that don’t get sold on the first listing.

That 26% is the average across all of the GTA including Toronto, but there is considerable variation in different communities.  The highest rate of resales in the GTA is 35.5% and the lowest rate is 17.7%.  Here is the breakdown of where sellers are having the hardest time selling homes and need to adjust their approach in a second or third attempt.

As we look at these stats, a number of things pop out.

Durham Region sellers are having a tough time.

The average relist share in Durham Region is the highest within the GTA, at just over 31%.  This number is actually a little understated, as low-volume communities like Scugog and Uxbridge are pulling down the average for the region as a whole.

When we remove those two communities, we have close to a third of all listings in Durham that are failing to sell the first time around.  Whether they priced too high and had to adjust their price down, or tried to hold back offers for a set date and didn’t get the offers they wanted, one out of every three sellers have had some unhappy conversations with their agent.

Toronto sellers are still doing OK.

The average relist share in the City of Toronto is just over 22%, making it the best place to sell a home the first time around in the GTA.  It’s pretty consistent across all of the city, so we aren’t seeing the core continue to do well but the outlying areas run into issues.

While Toronto may be doing well compared to the rest of the GTA, it has to be a rude awakening for those 22 out of ever 100 listings that didn’t get the sale price they wanted the first time they listed the home.  It can seem like Toronto is immune to market forces that push down prices, but the reality is that the city is still being impacted to a certain extent by this shifting market.

Georgina sellers are definitely not happy.

The dubious honour of the highest relist share percentage in the GTA belongs to Georgina, the northernmost municipality in York Region.  In May 2022, almost 4 out of every 10 listings on the market was in fact a relisting.  81 of the 212 listings that hit the market that month in the township were another attempt by those sellers to get their properties sold.

Georgina’s 38.2% relist share definitely contributed to the 29.1% relist share in York Region, and that overall average was enough to secure York as the 2^nd highest relist share area in the GTA.  Markham did the best in York that month, with “only” about 25% of the listings being relisted properties.

In real numbers, there were about 18,500 listings that came on the market in the GTA in May 2022, and almost 5,000 of those were in fact relisted properties.  In a more typical market, only about 2,800 of those would have been properties that failed to sell the first time around, so we are definitely seeing a strong increase in the number of unhappy sellers who saw their first attempt fail.

It seems quite likely that June will see even higher numbers of relisted properties and if the market continues to shift towards a buyer’s market as predicted, then July and beyond will see the trend continue.  If you’re thinking about buying or selling real estate, you owe it to yourself to work with agents who understand what is happening and can get the job done.  If that sounds appealing, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.