A property is listed below market on a Tuesday, showings run for a week, and offers are reviewed on the following Monday evening. Everything about that sequence is designed to produce competition. Here is what is actually happening in the room.
How the night runs
Offers are registered with the listing brokerage through the afternoon. You will be told how many, and that number tends to move right up to the deadline.
The listing agent presents them to the seller, usually in order of registration, while the buying agents wait outside or by phone.
The seller either accepts one, signs one back, or sends everyone away to improve. That last one is common and it is where discipline matters most.
What an agent may and may not tell you
A listing agent may tell you the number of competing offers. Since the December 2023 changes to Ontario's rules, a seller may also choose to allow the contents of competing offers to be disclosed, but only if they direct it, and then the same information must go to everyone. If the seller has not directed disclosure, nobody may tell you what another offer says.
What has never been permitted is selective disclosure: telling one buyer what another offered in order to push the price. If you are told a specific competing number, ask whether the seller has directed open disclosure. The answer tells you a great deal about who you are dealing with.
Deciding what to strip out
In competition, conditions cost you more than dollars do. The order in which people usually give them up, and what each one actually costs:
The inspection condition. Removable at low risk if you inspect before the offer date, which most listing agents will permit during the showing window. Costs $400 to $800 that you do not recover if you lose.
The status certificate condition, on a condominium. Removable if the seller has ordered the certificate in advance and your lawyer has read it. Never remove it unread.
The financing condition. The dangerous one. You can reduce the risk with a full pre-approval and a lender who has reviewed the specific property, but the appraisal remains a real exposure. See Getting a Mortgage.
Decide your walk-away price in daylight, write it down, and tell me what it is. The purpose is not discipline for its own sake. It is that at nine on a Monday evening, after four hours of waiting and a phone call saying there are eleven offers, nobody is thinking clearly, and $30,000 sounds like a rounding error on a number that large. It is not.
A pre-emptive offer before the review date is worth considering when you genuinely want the property. It has to be strong enough that the seller will not risk waiting, which usually means well above asking, clean, and with a short irrevocable so they cannot shop it. Sellers are not obliged to look at one, and some listings explicitly refuse them.