In May, about seven in 10 homes sold for less than their asking price in Ontario and Alberta, and roughly eight in 10 in British Columbia. Across all three provinces, the average sale closed about two to three percent below list. Sellers, on the whole, are taking less than they hoped for.

The other market signals point the same way. Listings are sitting on the market longer than they were a year ago, in every major market from Metro Vancouver to the GTA. There’s more to choose from, too: Metro Vancouver alone had more than 20,000 homes for sale in May. And the bidding-war years of 2021 and 2022 are firmly behind us, at least for now.

So far, so good for buyers. But does that mean you always have negotiating room when making an offer? Is lowballing a solid blanket strategy these days?

Here’s how to tell where you actually have the upper hand — and where you don’t — before you make an offer.

“Buyer’s market” doesn’t mean every home is a deal

If you’re house-hunting this year, the broad conditions are working in your favour, but that’s not the whole story. That’s simply the broad market climate, not a guarantee for any one home. Even now, about 20-30% of homes (depending on your region) still sell at asking price or above, because enough buyers wanted them.

The trouble is that a market report can’t tell you which group the home in front of you belongs to. If you walk into a hot-commodity listing assuming you have the upper hand, you can lose it. If you walk into a quiet one without realizing how quiet it is, you might leave money on the table.

So before you make an offer, it’s worth checking where you stand on that specific home. Two numbers on every HouseSigma listing page make that very easy.

Number one: the listing’s individual popularity score

On every listing (below the comparable sold listings), there’s an individual popularity score for that home. This score rates a home out of 100 based on how much attention it’s drawing, through views and saves, compared with similar listings nearby. A high score means other buyers are watching this home, and low score means they aren’t watching it as much as other listings.

On its own, this score is a useful first read on whether you’re likely to face competition. However, attention can be nothing but noise. A home can pile up views because it’s overpriced, unusual, been shared on social media, or simply new. It doesn’t necessarily mean anyone’s actually about to make an offer. So treat the score as the start of the picture, not the whole of it.

Number two: how long it’s really been listed

Days on market tells you how long the listing has been up. This information, paired with the popularity score, is much more powerful. A home drawing steady attention that still hasn’t sold is telling you the interest isn’t converting into offers, which usually points to a price the market hasn’t accepted yet.

However, it’s worth noting that if a seller takes a stale listing down and quickly puts it back up, the days-on-market clock resets to zero. A home that’s been struggling for months can look like it only hit the market this morning.

That’s what property days on market is for. It counts the full time a property has spent trying to sell, and it doesn’t reset when a home is delisted and quickly relisted. So when a listing shows only a handful of days on market, check the property days on market beside it.

If the two match, the home really is new. If the property number is higher, you’re looking at a listing that’s been around for a while, was terminated (or expired) and reposted. That might be with a new price (check the listing history tab), or just to look fresh.

As a buyer, that data is one of the most useful signals you have. A home with a high property days on market has struggled to find a buyer, whatever the current listing says, and that often means a more motivated seller and real room to negotiate.

Reading the numbers together

Here’s how the four combinations of popularity score and property days on market play out for you as a buyer:

• Low popularity score (below 70), on the market a while: your strongest position. Few buyers are circling, and you have a concrete reason to make a confident offer under asking.
• High score, but still unsold after several weeks: the early attention never converted, usually a sign the price is too high. Watch it; a price cut may be coming, and your opening with it. If you’re really interested, an under-asking offer may work.
• High score, only just listed: the ambiguous case. Early attention can be real competition or just the noise we mentioned above, and you might not be able to tell which yet. Is it an unusual property? Did it get shared on social media because of a quirk in pricing or the home itself? Check the asking price against recent comparable sales — if it’s sharp, and the home has no obvious quirks that would account for the attention, treat the interest as likely real and get your number ready to move. If the price is above the comps, the attention may fade and the home may sit. Don’t let the score alone push you into overpaying.
• Low score, just listed: too early to read. Check back in a week or two and see whether interest builds. If it doesn’t, this takes us up to the first bullet point.

Check before you make any offer

When you find a home you like, take a minute to look at both the home’s popularity score and its Property Days on Market, side by side. Ask whether the attention matches the time on market, and what that tells you about competition. Then decide whether this is a home to push on with a lower offer, or one to chase before someone else does.

None of this replaces a good agent or a close look at comparable sales nearby. It simply gives you a faster, clearer read on your own position, so you’re not guessing.

Sammy Kohn, a leading HouseSigma agent in the Greater Toronto Area, said, “It’s a buyer’s market, but exceptions do happen. A unit my buyer client loved, sold before we could see it. It was priced appropriately from the get-go with competitive cost per square foot. Clearly the seller was well informed.

“I also see that a first offer often triggers more offers, even with homes that have a high days on market, confirming buyers taking a wait-and-see approach until another offer stimulates their buying decision.

“I always tell my buyers: if you love a place and would regret seeing it go to someone else at a price you would have paid, it’s time to act.”

Making it work for you

It’s always worth remembering that a buyer’s market only hands you leverage on average. It doesn’t spread that leverage evenly. The homes where you have the most room are the ones nobody else has noticed yet; the homes where you have the least room are the ones already drawing a crowd.

Knowing which is which, listing by listing, is what turns a general advantage into a better offer, and often a better price.

The post How to spot your negotiating room on any home purchase in 2026 appeared first on HouseSigma.

Here at HouseSigma, with the help of our internal AI tool, we analyzed the past decade of median home sale prices in Metro Vancouver, across each month of the year. The tool then ranked the months that were historically the most expensive months to buy a property, down to which were the cheapest.

We found that January is consistently, in both median price and absolute terms, the most affordable month to buy a new home. In fact, January median sale prices are generally about 6% lower than those seen in the historically most expensive months of April to June. And in recent years, sale prices have peaked in the summer to around 10% more than January prices!

All of which means you should be getting out there to find your new home right now, in the month of December, given it can take a number of weeks to find a place and sign the deal. And if it takes you a little longer than that to pin down the perfect pad, don’t worry! We found that February is the second-cheapest month of the year to close your sale.

The winter buying slump

Why is this the case? For one thing, when we’re all caught up in seasonal festivities, it can be tough to find time to do any house hunting, and buyers often put this on hold for the New Year or even early spring. This means that in December there’s a smaller buyer pool, which in turn means sellers often have to accept a lower price if they want to close the sale in January.

Another reason buyers don’t turn out in droves to open houses and viewings can be the weather – who wants to spend rainy, cold, or snowy weekends traipsing around open houses? And then there’s the fact that many homes – especially those with yards or outdoor space – don’t show as well when it’s dark and wet outside.

Jeremy Bator, a leading HouseSigma agent in BC’s Lower Mainland, agrees that buyers should jump on the opportunity to home hunt while other buyers are distracted. He said, “At this time of year, while everyone else is untangling Christmas lights, you could be scooping up a killer deal from a desperate seller. The competition’s on vacation, bidding wars are extinct, and the best part? You beat the spring rush, move in early, and kick off the new year already winning.”

Today’s buyer-favoured markets

All this is especially true this year, given the strong buyers’ markets that we are seeing across most of Canada – there’s even more of a chance of you getting a steal than usual.

Bator added, “Because it’s a strong buyer’s market in the Lower Mainland, listing inventory is actually high right now, making it a great time to house hunt.”

So, while it’s likely you’re busy with festive shopping and seasonal socials at the moment, don’t miss out on the great opportunity of getting a great price on a home. Happy holiday house hunting!

Want to find a new home this holiday season? Go to our home page to search for home listings in your area, and filter for price, bedrooms, and many other attributes.

The post How holiday shopping for a home now can save you up to 10% appeared first on HouseSigma.

Even surfacing page views can inflate interest with casual scrolling, duplicate visits, and bots, adding more noise than signal. Many platforms surface that metric because it’s easy to collect, but almost no platform distills it into something a buyer can actually use to gauge real intent.

When it’s time to act, most buyers still rely on hearsay (“multiple offers”) or agent-only dashboards, none of which give you as a buyer a clean read on the likely competition for a home.

Introducing HouseSigma competition-level estimates

HouseSigma has earned its reputation by giving buyers the facts they need to make a decision on their home purchases (such as the full listing history and true property days on market, see Business in Vancouver article, Western Investor article).

Now we’re extending that approach with a tool that estimates buyer competition for each property, shown directly on eligible Ontario listings under “Buyers who have likely toured this home.”

This tool displays two concise figures: the AI-estimated number of people who toured the home in the last 7 days and the number of tours since listed. This data translates noisy page views into a practical signal about real-world interest, so buyers can gauge the competition and plan their next step.

Why these insights matter to buyers

Real estate has long asked buyers to make big decisions in a fog. We’ve seen how skepticism creeps in when buyers have to rely solely on what listing agents say about interest and offers. Our goal is to replace ambiguity with useful, interpretable signals so that you as a buyer can act with more confidence, not more pressure. That’s why we’re putting this information in front of buyers, not tucked away in a dashboard for industry pros.

Why “page views” aren’t enough

Page views are everywhere online, including real estate. They’re easy to measure and they help with discovery but they blur window-shoppers with serious buyers.

In our own data, we’ve seen that our “popularity index” on listings – which compares that listing’s page-view popularity with other similar listings – tells buyers something directionally, but it’s not the right yardstick for real competition for that property. Popularity can occur on a listing for many reasons (such as a social media post or news article highlighting the listing for a specific reason) and doesn’t mean a lot of people are interested in actually buying it.

Internally, we found this kind of relative popularity showed a weak correlation with actual scheduled viewings – which is exactly the gap we set out to close. And it isn’t just the case for HouseSigma: other listings websites reveal a similarly weak correlation, as shown in this screenshot in which a supposedly popular listing has many viewing times available.

So we reframed the question buyers are really asking:

“I’m interested in this property, how many other serious buyers am I up against right now?”

To answer that, we anchored on tours. Attending a tour is a strong, high-intent signal on the path to making an offer, far more telling than a quick scroll. In our problem exploration, we documented tours as the clearest signal for “serious interest” compared to softer signals like listing visits: noise.

What buyers see on HouseSigma

On most active sale listings in Ontario, after scrolling down to the “Comparables” section, buyers will now see a small module labeled “Buyers who have likely toured this home.” It surfaces two numbers:

• In the last 7 days: Number of buyers who have likely toured this property in the last 7 days
• Since listed: Number of buyers who have likely toured this property since it was listed

These aren’t raw counts of website clicks. They’re AI estimates of likely tours, expressed as easy-to-scan chips right on the listing page. Our Machine Learning models combine momentum in listing attention, overall buyer traffic, and the property’s profile among other signals to estimate how many people likely toured. The estimates are calibrated on unseen data to avoid overfitting to any one listing. But why do we show two timeframes? Because they answer two different questions buyers might have:

• Last 7 days: “How hot is this home right now?”
• Since listed: “How much serious interest has built up over the entire on-market period?”

Together, these help buyers calibrate urgency (book a showing sooner vs. later), and they can frame buyers’ offer approach (should we compete assertively or look for negotiation room?).

What it is and what it isn’t

• It’s about real-world intent. We focus on tours because they’re a meaningful step between casual browsing and writing an offer.
• It’s an estimate, not a claim of registered offers. We’re not declaring exact numbers of people who toured the home, or how many offers exist or what they’ll be. We’re simply giving buyers a signal on serious buyer activity so they can plan their next move.
• It’s transparent about scope. We’re starting with Ontario sale listings where HouseSigma is a dominant player in the market. The AI estimate needs to work in an area where there is a high market share of users.

How to interpret the information

Now that you know what you’ll see on HouseSigma’s buyer competition tool, how do you interpret the data to inform your homebuying strategy?

Here are a few scenarios:

• High number of tours in the last 7 days, modest numbers since listed: That can hint at fresh momentum, such as a price reduction or new attention from external sources. Ask your agent about this, and check the listing for price changes.
• Low in the last 7 days, low since listed: Not every quiet listing is a problem; sometimes it’s an opportunity.
• Low in the last 7 days, medium-high since listed: This is a listing that likely had momentum to start with, but has tailed off without a sale. You may be able to capitalize on this.
• High both ways: If you are interested in buying this property, you should expect company.

Last but not least, context matters. Markets swing between hot and cool cycles, buyers don’t distribute evenly across similar homes, and the offer landscape can change quickly. The count is a strong input, but it is far from the entire picture.

A quick note on the data

• Freshness: We update our estimates every day based on the data we collect on HouseSigma. We’ve designed the experience with sensible fallbacks and freshness expectations, and we monitor the integration closely. If data that we can be reasonably confident in isn’t available, we avoid misleading buyers with partial or stale numbers, and the tool will not show on that listing. The point is to help buyers decide, not to distract or misinform them.
• Estimates vs exact: These numbers are estimates, based on user data from HouseSigma and AI models trained on our proprietary data (i.e. home tours booked through HouseSigma) and infer the count of tours booked on any listing every day. That being said, buyers have many opportunities at their disposal to tour a home, and we’re aware that we can’t capture all of that signal.

Try it for yourself

Buying a home is one of the highest-stakes decisions most of us make. As a buyer, you deserve clarity when it comes to competition. With likely tour counts on eligible Ontario listings, you now have a useful step toward that clarity. Fewer question marks, better timing, smarter strategy.

Give it a spin the next time you’re browsing Ontario listings on HouseSigma. And if you’ve got thoughts, we’re listening; this feature came directly from buyer feedback and field research, and we plan to keep tuning it based on what helps buyers most.

The post From clicks to footsteps: New HouseSigma tool gauges buyer competition on listings appeared first on HouseSigma.