Pricing a home is a different exercise depending on who holds the leverage. In a market where buyers are competing, a slightly low asking price does work for the seller, because competition corrects it. In a market where buyers have choice, nothing corrects an asking price except time, and time is the one thing that costs a seller real money.
The Greater Toronto Area is currently in the second kind of market. This is what the numbers actually say, and what they mean for how a home should be priced.
What a Buyer’s Market Looks Like in the Data
TRREB’s August 2026 figures show 5,057 sales across the GTA against 12,075 new listings, with 24,482 active listings on the market. That works out to a sales-to-new-listings ratio of 37.5% and roughly 4.6 months of inventory. The average selling price was $993,410, down 2.7% from a year earlier.
Those two ratios are the ones worth learning. A sales-to-new-listings ratio in the high 30s means that for every three homes coming to market, roughly one is selling. Months of inventory answers a related question: at the current pace of sales, how long would it take to sell every home currently listed? Under about four months usually favours sellers; above five usually favours buyers.
But here is the part most sellers are surprised by: homes that sold in August still achieved 97% of their asking price. A buyer’s market in 2026 is not a market where buyers are grinding sellers down on price. It is a market where correctly priced homes sell close to asking and incorrectly priced homes do not sell at all.
The Number Almost No One Shows Sellers
TRREB publishes two different days-on-market figures, and the gap between them is the most useful pricing information in the entire report.
LDOM counts days on the current listing. PDOM counts the full property days on market, including earlier listings of the same home that were terminated and relisted. Across the GTA in August, LDOM averaged 35 days and PDOM averaged 51 days.
That 16-day spread is the cost of getting the price wrong the first time, measured across thousands of transactions. And it is not evenly distributed:
- Richmond Hill: 37 days on the listing, 61 days on the property. A 24-day gap, the widest of the four markets I work in.
- Markham: 33 and 51. An 18-day gap.
- Vaughan: 33 and 50. A 17-day gap.
Relisting resets the clock that buyers see, but it does not reset the clock that matters. A Richmond Hill seller who starts too high and relists is, on the August averages, adding the better part of a month to their sale. If a carrying cost, a closing date on a purchase, or a rate hold is sitting on the other side of that sale, those weeks are expensive.
Why the Average Price Is the Wrong Anchor
Richmond Hill in August averaged $1,205,777 with a median of $1,068,888. That is a gap of roughly $137,000 between the two, and it exists because a relatively small number of high-priced detached sales pull the average up while the middle of the market sits considerably lower.
A seller who anchors to the citywide average when their home is a townhouse or a condo is not pricing optimistically. They are pricing a different property. The comparables that matter are sales of genuinely similar homes, in the same price band, in the same pocket of the city, within the last 60 to 90 days.
Pricing Strategy Has to Change by City
The four markets I work in were not in the same condition in August, and the same pricing approach does not fit all of them:
- Richmond Hill had a sales-to-new-listings ratio of 33.1% and 5.6 months of inventory, the loosest of the group. Buyers here have genuine choice, and an ambitious asking price has the least chance of being rescued by competition.
- Markham was the tightest at 4.1 months and a 40.3% ratio, and it was the only one of the four achieving 98% of asking. Pricing has a little more room here, though not much.
- Vaughan sat between them at 4.9 months, and carried the highest average price of the three York Region cities at $1,234,758.
A strategy imported from a neighbouring city, or from what a friend experienced two years ago, is how sellers end up in the relisting statistics.
What Actually Works
Price into the search, not just the market. Buyers search in round-number brackets. A home priced at $1,025,000 is invisible to every buyer whose search caps at $1,000,000, even though the difference is negotiable in a single conversation. Sitting just above a bracket boundary is one of the most common and most avoidable pricing mistakes.
Treat the first few weeks as the real listing. A new listing gets attention from buyers who have been watching that segment, often for months. That attention is not repeatable at will, which is a strong argument for being right on day one rather than planning to correct later.
Decide the reduction plan before you list. Agree in advance what happens if showings are thin after a set number of days, and what the reduction will be. A decision made in advance is almost always better than one made under pressure after six quiet weeks.
Make the price credible rather than negotiable. With homes achieving 97% of asking, padding an asking price by ten percent to leave negotiating room mostly signals that the price is not serious. It filters out the buyers who would have paid fairly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the GTA really a buyer’s market right now?
By the August 2026 measures, yes: 4.6 months of inventory GTA-wide and a 37.5% sales-to-new-listings ratio both point that way. It is a mild one, though. Homes still sold at 97% of asking, so buyers have choice and time rather than deep discounts.
Should I price high and negotiate down?
It is the most expensive common strategy in this market. The GTA-wide gap between days on the listing and days on the property was 16 days in August, and 24 days in Richmond Hill, which is roughly what starting too high costs before a sale finally happens.
How long should a home take to sell right now?
The August averages were 35 days on the current listing GTA-wide, 37 in Richmond Hill. If a listing is materially past that with few showings, the issue is usually price rather than marketing.
Does a lower asking price mean a lower sale price?
Not necessarily. A price that draws several interested buyers in the first weeks tends to produce a stronger result than one that sits unsold and eventually attracts offers conditioned on the time it has spent on the market.
What if I simply cannot sell below a certain number?
That is worth establishing before listing, not after. If the number the market supports is below the number you need, the real decision is about timing, carrying costs and whether to sell at all, and it is better made with the comparables in front of you.
Thinking about selling in Richmond Hill, Markham, Vaughan or North York and want to know what your home would realistically sell for in this market? Reach out for seller representation and we can go through the actual comparables in your price band, or take a closer look at the Richmond Hill market first.