u/PeterShamaei

Everyone talks about interest rates dropping or holding steady but no one is talking about what rising maintenance fees are doing to condo values in the 416.

​Seeing so many 10 to 15 year old buildings where monthly fees are creeping past $1 or even $1.20 a square foot. when a 2 bed condo has a $1100 monthly maintenance fee on top of property tax it completely kills the buyers borrowing power. A buyer could literally afford an extra $150k in mortgage debt for what that monthly fee costs.

​It feels like older buildings with bad reserve funds are going to see massive price corrections regardless of where interest rates go. Are you seeing buyers straight up walk away from listings as soon as they see the status certificate reserve numbers?

Before we start, I'm a licensed agent and I run a property search site. Not linking it, these numbers are all published on public pages anyway. I ran this because the bait-pricing threads come up constantly and I've never seen anyone put a number on it.

Data: TRREB sold records, trailing 90 days, each GTA municipality computed separately. Toronto is 6,618 sales; the smallest is 47.

One thing to clear up first. "Sold over asking" here means the close price beat the list price AT THE TIME OF SALE, not the original list. A house listed at $1.2M, cut to $999k, sold at $1.01M counts as sold over asking. So treat these as a ceiling on bidding-war behaviour. That's exactly why I've put the price-cut rate next to every one of them.

With that said:

• Over-ask rates run about 11% to 29% across the region. Markham 29.1%, Ajax 27.5%, Oshawa 27.1% at the top. Oakville 12.4%, Milton 12.2%, Halton Hills 10.9% at the bottom. Toronto sits at 22.0%.
• Sale-to-list is below 100% in all 25 municipalities - 95.4% in King up to 98.3% in Ajax. Even in the hottest markets on this list the typical sale is closing under ask.
• It doesn't track price the way you'd expect. The expensive towns are at the bottom: Oakville 12.4% on a $1.315M median, Caledon 13.2%, while cheaper Durham towns run 24-28%. Markham breaks the pattern with $1.068M median and the highest over-ask rate in the region.
• The bigger split is house type. Toronto alone, same 90 days: semi-detached 40.3% over ask (717 sales), townhouse 28.1% (640), detached 27.6% (2,086), apartment 12.7% (3,125). That's a 3x spread inside one city, wider than the entire city-to-city spread.
• The low over-ask towns are full of sellers walking their number down. Whitchurch-Stouffville: 14.6% over ask, but 25.2% of sellers had already cut. Burlington 14.6% / 21.3%. Oakville 12.4% / 20.6%.

What I can't tell you from this: whether a low list price was strategy or a bad read on the market especially because these were the last list prices.

Markham's 29.1% doesn't prove anyone is deliberately underpricing. It's consistent with that, and equally consistent with "sellers there list conservatively and the market clears above."

What I think it does show is that the GTA isn't behaving like one market. In Durham, Toronto, Brampton and the Markham-Richmond Hill corridor, more sales close over ask than have sellers cutting first. Ajax is 27.5% over ask against 7.2% cutting. Across Halton and north York Region it's inverted: Oakville 12.4% / 20.6%, Whitchurch-Stouffville 14.6% / 25.2%. Fourteen of the 25 municipalities lean toward sellers walking their number down; eleven lean the other way. Within that, the strongest predictor is house type. Semis and towns still see competition; apartments largely don't

Two more caveats: these are all-property-type city figures, not residential-only, and 90 days is more of a snapshot instead of a trend. I've also kept the smallest municipalities (Brock at 47 sales, King at 64, Uxbridge at 79) out of the highs and lows above, too few sales to rate confidently.

Happy to run a specific city or property type if anyone wants one.