If you’ve been reading Toronto real estate headlines lately or been involved in Transactions whatsoever, you’d be forgiven for thinking two things are simultaneously true: the market is collapsing, and bidding wars are back. Scroll any feed or walk into any open house and you’ll catch both narratives in the same breath; sometimes even from the same source.
The data says otherwise. Both of those stories are wrong.
Between February 1 and April 30, 2026, we analyzed 1,297 Toronto properties that took a very specific journey on the MLS: they listed, failed to sell, got cancelled or expired, were relisted at a new price, and subsequently closed. What emerged is the clearest picture of the current Toronto market we’ve seen in years. And it’s neither doom nor euphoria. It’s something far more useful: a market finding its floor.
The “Days on Market” Illusion
Before we get to the numbers, let’s deal with a piece of jargon that matters more than almost anyone realizes. When you see a listing that “sold in six days, over asking,” you’re looking at Listing Days on Market (LDOM). This specific counter starts ticking the day that specific listing goes live and ends when the listing is sold or terminated. The same property listed multiple times will have multiple MLS Numbers, each with its own unique DOM.
What a listing does not inherently show is Property Days on Market, or PDOM.
PDOM is the cumulative time that home has actually been trying to sell. The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board began tracking PDOM recently to show exactly how long it takes a property to sell, not just a listing. In Toronto, as of March 2026, the average LDOM is 31, but the average PDOM is 47 (Source: Trreb)
In our dataset, the median time from cancellation to relist was a single day. More than half of all relists happened the same day the original listing came down. That means over a thousand homes that “came on the market” in February, March, and April were not, in any meaningful sense, new. They were already-for-sale homes wearing new price tags and a freshly reset DOM counter.
So when one of those homes sells in a week for 2% over its (reduced) asking price, the headline writes itself: “Bidding wars are back!” The reality is that the home had been on the market for 45 days, the seller cut their price by 7%, and the eventual buyer still negotiated them down from the original number. This is the single most important thing to understand about the 2026 Toronto market.
“Listing DOM tells you a story. Property DOM tells you the truth.” said Spencer Grimes, Sales Representative at Alloway Property Group.
“A lot of my clients keep the ‘blinders’ on to their price bracket. Relisting a property for lower makes it seem like there’s a magical brand new listing that checks all their boxes. Given the soft market conditions, their discount calculations are skewed without receiving the full picture.”
Where Sellers Actually Landed
Here’s what 1,297 transactions look like in aggregate:
- Average original ask: $1,035,000
- Average relist price: $965,000 (-6.2%)
- Average sale price: $937,000 (another -2.4%)
- Total gap from expectation to reality: 8.7%
The average seller in this group received roughly $97,000 less than they initially expected. For freehold sellers, the median gap was $105,000. For condo sellers, $50,000.
And that’s just the average outcome. The distribution is even more telling. After the price cut to relist, 78.1% of sellers still received less than that reduced number at closing. Nearly one in three sold for more than 5% below their relist. Only 8.4% of all 1,297 sellers ultimately beat their original ask.
So when you hear ‘sold over asking’ as a marketing jargon from a real estate agent…its important to ask WHICH ask.
Treating a Re-List as a Price Change & The Price of Delay
53.6% of condo relists and 59.4% of freehold relists happened the same day as the cancellation. Roughly two-thirds of all sellers were back on the market within 48 hours. When you account for the time it takes for traditional brokerage bureaucracy to get a property re-listed, the story is clear: these properties were a price change dressed up as a brand new listing.
Here’s one of the quietly remarkable findings in the data. Sellers who proactively cancelled their listings and reset lost an average of 7.8% from their original ask. Sellers who let their listings expire and subsequently re-listed lost 9.2%.
That 1.4-percentage-point gap might not sound like much, but on the average Toronto property in our dataset it works out to roughly $14,000 to $22,000 in additional losses for sellers who waited for the listing to run out instead of taking action. Hope isn’t a strategy. Sitting still has a price, and that price is now quantified.
These statistics highlight the importance of working with a real estate agent or broker that is quick to adapt, amenable to changes, and won’t hold you to the terms of the original listing agreement especially to your detriment.
Forward Price Guidance
Looking at the monthly trend:
- February 2026: 336 closings, -8.0% average total discount
- March 2026: 439 closings, -8.5% average total discount
- April 2026: 522 closings, -8.0% average total discount
Activity is increasing. April alone represented 40% of all closings in the three-month window. And the discount sellers are accepting has stabilized. If this were a ‘market crash’, we’d expect discounts to widen month over month as confidence eroded. Instead, February and April are effectively tied at -8.0%, with a mild dip in March.
This is what a floor looks like. A market that has priced in the bad news, found its level, and is now transacting at that level in rising volumes.
“People keep waiting for some massive correction to arrive as a Headline” said Baron Alloway, Broker of Record
“The only issue is, the correction didn’t arrive as a headline. It arrived as a trend line.”
Where the Strength Is…and Where It Isn’t
Not every segment is soft. A few pockets stood out:
- Entry-level freehold (under $800K): Just a -2.6% total discount, with the small cohort of 34 properties actually seeing relist increases on average. Demand at the accessible end of the freehold market is alive and well.
- Danforth Village-East York freehold: Sellers averaged a +0.5% gain over their original ask the only neighbourhood in the dataset to come out ahead as a group.
- South Riverdale, Newtonbrook West, Wexford-Maryvale, West Hill: All freehold discounts between -1.0% and -4.7%; well shallower than the market average.
- High Park-Swansea, Trinity-Bellwoods, Long Branch condos: All held up relatively well, with total discounts under 5%.
The pressure sits almost entirely at the top. Luxury took the deepest cuts of any tier. Properties over $2M averaged a 12% total discount. Bridle Path sellers who listed at an average of $5.6M closed at $4.9M. Rosedale-Moore Park averaged 14.3% off. Yonge-St. Clair, 13.6%. The higher you go, the thinner the buyer pool, and the more leverage those buyers currently have.
“There are real pockets of strength in this city that are getting lost in the overall narrative. Danforth Village, South Riverdale, entry-level freehold under $800K. These neighbourhoods are telling a completely different story than Bridle Path or Rosedale. Toronto is not one market. It’s twenty markets. The data makes that very clear.” said Graham F. Alloway, Broker and President of Alloway Property Group.
The Strategy Shift: When Underlisting Actually Worked
There’s a second story inside the data, and it belongs to a minority. A subset of sellers appear to have abandoned moderate price corrections entirely and opted for dramatic underlisting. These sellers are relisting well below where comparable homes were trading, betting that an aggressive price would ignite competitive bidding and pull the final number back up, sometimes beyond the original ask.
Once a seller relisted at their reduced price, here’s what actually happened at the negotiating table:
- 78.1% of sellers sold below their already-reduced relist price — the market came back and asked for even more off
- 9.8% sold within 1% of their relist — essentially got what they asked for the second time around
- 3.6% sold 1–5% above their relist — a modest win, but still below their original ask
- 8.4% sold more than 5% above their relist — the true bidding war group, and the only sellers who ultimately beat their original asking price
That last number is the one worth sitting with. Only 8.4% of sellers (109 out of 1,297) walked away with more than they originally hoped for. Everyone else, regardless of how the relist went, finished below their original expectation.
So when you see a headline that says a property “sold over asking,” it almost certainly means it sold over a reduced relist price, not over the number the seller started with. Those are two very different things, and conflating them is how a buyer’s market gets reported as a seller’s market.
Those sellers priced to meet the market; the market met them, then asked for more. The underlisters inverted the dynamic and made buyers compete on their terms. The catch is that the strategy is essentially binary: it either triggers a bidding war or it produces a sale at the already-discounted relist, with very little middle ground, and the data can’t tell us how many sellers attempted the approach and failed to ignite competition. But the lesson for anyone still pricing to hope is clear. In 2026 Toronto, buyers are responsive to pricing, not to patience. Modest cuts produced modest further losses. Aggressive cuts, in the right hands, produced the only outright wins in the entire dataset.
What This Means For You
If you’re selling, the data has a simple message: price it right the first time. The sellers in our dataset who priced to the current market moved. The sellers who priced to last year’s market cut twice, sat longer, and ended up worse off by more than a full percentage point.
If you’re buying, you have more leverage than the headlines suggest. The “bidding war” you’re reading about was almost certainly over a relist price, not an original price. The seller you’re negotiating with has, statistically, already lost $97,000 of mental-anchor money. They’re more motivated than their list price implies.
If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for a crash, the data suggests you may be waiting for something that has already happened quietly, one cancellation and relist at a time, to the tune of 1,297 transactions in ninety days.
The Toronto market isn’t euphoric. It isn’t collapsing. It’s clearing at a new price, and clearing in increasing volumes. That’s the definition of a soft landing.
Data sourced from Proptx and remains the sole property of the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board and its members. Covers Toronto properties with Cancelled, Expired, or Withdrawn status that were subsequently relisted and closed between February 1 – April 30, 2026. Analysis by Alloway Property Group. E&OE.