Determining the List Price argues that holding offers is a strategy with a real downside and should not be the default. This page assumes we have looked at the evidence and decided to do it. Here is how it runs.
Setting it up
List price below the comparable evidence, deliberately and defensibly. Too low reads as a gimmick and attracts buyers who cannot actually compete.
Roughly a week of showings, with two open houses. Long enough to build an audience, short enough to keep urgency.
A pre-listing inspection available to every buyer, and the status certificate ordered in advance if it is a condominium. Both exist to let buyers write firm offers.
An offer date and time stated in the listing, commonly a Monday or Tuesday evening.
Every condition a buyer feels able to drop is worth more to you than the last few thousand dollars of price. An inspection report and a status certificate on the table are what let cautious, well-financed buyers compete with reckless ones.
On the night
By default, the number of competing offers may be disclosed but their contents may not. Since the December 2023 changes to Ontario's rules, you as the seller may direct that the contents of competing offers be disclosed, but if you do, the same information must be made available to every competing buyer. It is all or nothing, and it is your decision rather than your agent's.
Selective disclosure has never been permitted and remains the fastest way to attract a complaint to RECO.
You have three options with the offers in front of you: accept the best one as written, sign one back, or send several buyers away with an invitation to improve. Improving rounds work when you have genuine depth, and read as greedy when you have three offers and two of them are conditional.
Reading the offers
Price is not the whole comparison. A slightly lower firm offer with a large deposit and a closing date that suits your purchase is frequently worth more than the top number attached to a financing condition and a stranger's promise. See Common Clauses.
Do not do it if the comparable evidence does not clearly support it, if inventory in your segment is rising, if your property is unusual enough that its buyer pool is small, or if you cannot afford the outcome where two offers arrive and you have publicly established that the market values your home below your own asking price. That last one is the real cost, and it is not recoverable in the same listing.
Decide in advance whether you will consider a pre-emptive offer, and say so in the listing. If one arrives, every registered buyer must be given the chance to compete before you accept it. Taking one early is sometimes right, and it always means never finding out what the night would have produced.