Selling my condo in the GTA: should I sign if the buyer's offer is only a few thousand dollars below my asking?

In most cases, sign. Don't measure the offer against last year's price or what you paid. Measure it against units the same size in your building that sold in the last month or two. Yifei met a condo seller who held out for an extra $5,000 last year and didn't sign. This year the unit was valued at about $520,000 to $530,000, roughly $60,000 less after one year.

Why a few thousand dollars is worth letting go

Once a buyer has come that far, the few thousand dollars left on the table, in Yifei's view, often doesn't even cover a month or two of condo fees plus mortgage interest.

With a condo, you can't afford to wait. One round of buyers comes through and moves on. The next round won't accept your price. Every extra month on the market, you keep paying condo fees, property tax and interest, and if prices keep sliding, one more month can cost you about those few thousand dollars.

Plenty of sellers think: I'll wait a bit, the next buyer will pay my number. Yifei has been a realtor for 11 years, and one year he closed 127 deals. He has seen many sellers let a deal fall apart over a few thousand dollars. As he puts it, sometimes it isn't that the place won't sell. It's that you're not letting it sell.

Which situation are you in

Your unit is much like others in the building, and several the same size are listed: don't fight over a few thousand. Sign.
Lots of listings in the building and few sales: the longer you hold out, the weaker your position. Even more reason to sign.
Your unit is one of a kind in the building, say a top-floor unit with a big terrace, and nothing else compares: waiting a little longer can make sense.
The offer is far below recent sales of same-size units, not just a few thousand off: counter, and bring the sales records to the table.

What to do

If you have an offer that feels low, Yifei says to check two things first. You can get a rough picture online yourself:

Pull the units in your building that are the same size as yours and sold in the last month or two, and see what they went for. Don't compare with what you paid or with last year's price.
See how many units like yours are listed in the building right now. If many are listed and few are selling, let the few thousand dollars go.

That's also the first thing he does when someone hires him to sell a condo: pull every sale in the building from MLS, which is more complete than what you'll find online, and go through them one by one with you. For the seller below, his advice was not to list high: list at around $480,000 to $490,000, set an offer date, and let buyers compete.

What Yifei has seen

A one-bedroom condo in the GTA, in good shape with lots of sunlight. The seller told Yifei it could have sold for $590,000 last year. A buyer had agreed to $590,000, but the seller insisted on $595,000. With $5,000 between them, the buyer said no and the deal fell through.

This year the seller asked Yifei to value the unit again: $520,000 to $530,000.

From $590,000 to about $530,000 is $60,000. Over one year that's roughly $5,000 a month, so the $5,000 the seller held out for was gone within about a month. That's the math for this one building over this one year, not a statement about the whole market.

The seller told Yifei: when you told me last year, I didn't believe you. Then asked whether selling now would be a shame. Yifei's answer: looking at the money, there's not much point thinking about whether it's a shame anymore.

Ask about your own situation

How many bedrooms and bathrooms your unit has, what same-size units in your building sold for recently, and how many are listed now: those decide whether to sign, counter or wait. To ask about your own situation, reach out to Yifei (RE/MAX, efay.ai).

Yifei Lin is a RE/MAX real estate agent serving the Greater Toronto Area and Niagara since 2015. For advice on your own situation, reach him at efay.ai.