Off-Market Sales in Etobicoke and Toronto: What Buyers and Sellers Keep Asking Us

Both sides are asking us about this now, which is new. Sellers want to know if they can move without going public. Buyers want to know how to see the ones that never get listed. Short answer: off-market sales are legal in Ontario, they do happen in Etobicoke and across Toronto, and nobody can tell you how many, including us.

What a quiet sale really involves is a trade between liquidity and price. Liquidity, in this context, is how quickly and cheaply you can turn the property into cash. You can buy speed and certainty, and you generally pay for them out of the sale price. The rest of this is about how much that costs and when it is worth it.

Want to see off-market opportunities when we have them? Our Deal of the Week goes to subscribers first, with the new and upcoming listings we think are worth a look before the weekend.

Photo: Unsplash

What we are seeing from where we sit

We are being asked about off-market sales more than we were a year ago. Noticeably more. It comes up on listing appointments in Mimico and The Kingsway, it comes up from buyers working The Queensway and Humber Bay Shores who are convinced there is a shadow inventory they are not being shown, and it comes up in conversation with colleagues at our brokerage who are seeing the same thing.

That is an observation from one team in one part of the city, and we want to be clear that is all it is. It is not a statistic and we are not going to present it as one. But it is consistent enough, and it comes from enough directions at once, that it is worth explaining properly rather than waving off.

Three forces pointing the same way

What is happening is not one trend. It is three unrelated conditions that happen to be aligned right now, each pushing toward the same behaviour for its own reasons. Worth separating them, because they will not all persist on the same timeline.

Market conditions raise the cost of a public failure. A well supplied resale market means a listing that misses is visible, and the record of it, the price cuts and the elapsed days, stays legible to the next buyer. Meanwhile the desirable pockets have the opposite problem: too little quality stock and buyers who have been waiting. Those two conditions are opposites, and both independently make a quiet approach more attractive. One because exposure is risky, the other because exposure is unnecessary.

Geopolitical and economic uncertainty raise the value of keeping your options open. This is the piece people underrate. In finance, uncertainty makes optionality more valuable, meaning the ability to wait and decide later is worth more when you cannot see clearly than when you can. Tariff escalation, a soft labour market and a confidence index below its long run average do not stop a household from wanting to move. They make that household unwilling to commit publicly to a decision they might reverse. A quiet conversation preserves the option to do nothing. A sign on the lawn spends it.

The regulatory architecture determines the shape of the channel. RECO's advertising requirements mean an agent cannot publicly advertise anything that identifies a specific property without the owner's consent, and a seller going quietly has by definition not given it. CREA's Cooperation Policy sets the MLS trigger at one to many communication. Put those together and there is exactly one compliant lane for this activity: individual, one to one conversations. That lane is narrow, it is well defined, and it is the reason the practice runs through relationships rather than through advertising. The rules did not create the demand. They determined the plumbing.

Call it a perfect storm if you like, though the phrase usually implies something is about to go badly wrong, and that is not what this is. It is three ordinary conditions overlapping. Any one of them relaxing, a clearer trade picture, more listings in the good pockets, a change to the Cooperation Policy while the Competition Bureau is looking at it, would take some of the pressure out.

What an off-market sale actually is

An exclusive listing is a written agreement between you and a brokerage, same as any listing, except the property is not entered on the MLS System. Your brokerage markets it directly: to its own agents, to its own database, to specific buyers or their representatives. Everything else about your obligations, and your agent's, is unchanged.

The rule that governs this in Canada is CREA's REALTOR Cooperation Policy, in effect since early 2024. It requires a residential listing to be placed on an MLS System within three days of any public marketing. Read that word carefully, because it is the whole mechanism. A sign on the lawn, a social post, a public website listing: the clock starts. A property that is never publicly marketed never starts the clock. That is the space a quiet listing occupies, and it is narrow by design.

Worth knowing the policy is itself under scrutiny. The Competition Bureau has an open investigation into CREA's commission rules and the Cooperation Policy, and expanded it in February 2026 with a court order for information from Greater Vancouver REALTORS. There has been no finding of wrongdoing. But these rules could change, so plan loosely.

The rules are moving, mostly somewhere else

Some of what Canadians read about private listings is United States coverage, and the rules there are not the rules here. Worth untangling.

In March 2025 the National Association of REALTORS introduced a policy called Multiple Listing Options for Sellers, implemented across US markets by the end of that September. It created a category called delayed marketing exempt listings: a seller can instruct their agent to keep the listing off public portals and syndication for a set period while it stays visible to other MLS members. It also requires the agent to obtain a signed disclosure showing the seller gave informed consent to give up the benefits of immediate public marketing.

None of that applies in Ontario. Your listing is governed by CREA's Cooperation Policy and by TRESA, and there is no Canadian equivalent of the delayed marketing category. If you have been reading about American sellers getting a formal middle path, that middle path does not exist here in the same form.

What is worth borrowing is the standard. A signed document, before you commit, that spells out what limited exposure means and confirms you chose it. Ask for that whether or not any rule requires it.

Two different things get called off-market

Worth separating these, because they behave differently and the second one is bigger than most people realize.

Never listed. The true quiet listing. The owner would move at the right number and has never gone public with it. No MLS history, no prior asking price, nothing for a buyer to anchor against. These are the ones people picture when they use the phrase.

No longer listed. Expired, terminated or withdrawn. The listing came off the MLS without a sale, and in most cases the willingness to sell did not come off with it. The owner is sitting there, a few months older and usually a little more realistic about price, with no active listing and no intention of putting one up again right away.

That second pool is substantial. In the GTA condo segment in July 2026, 4,190 new listings arrived against 1,564 sales. Inventory that large does not all sell, and a great deal of it leaves the market each month without a transaction. Every one of those is an owner who wanted to sell recently enough to sign a listing agreement.

For a buyer, the expired and terminated group is often the more productive one, because those owners have already made the decision. They have just stopped advertising it. For a seller whose listing came off this spring, it is worth knowing that a quiet approach later is a normal thing that happens, not a sign something went wrong.

One caution on this. An owner whose listing has ended is under no obligation to sell, and if they are still under a listing agreement with another brokerage they should not be approached at all. Any agent working this pool needs to check that first, not after.

Why nobody can give you a number

This is the part usually skipped. Off-MLS transactions are, by construction, absent from MLS statistics. TRREB's Market Watch counts what went through the MLS System. A deal that never entered it does not appear, so there is no denominator and no trend line for anyone to cite.

You will see percentages quoted, especially for the top of the market. Some come from people with a good vantage point. They are still estimates, and we are not going to dress one up as data.

This is a selection problem in the technical sense: the thing you want to measure is defined by its absence from the place you would measure it. Any sample you can actually observe is drawn from a population that excludes the cases of interest. Nobody solves that with a better spreadsheet.

What is putting the idea in sellers' heads

Nobody asks us about this because they read an article. They ask because they watched the place three doors down sit with a sign on the lawn from March until the leaves turned, and then quietly come off without selling. In a few pockets around here, people have watched a listing come and go twice over two years.

Now look at that 37 day figure again, because it is one of the most misread numbers in this business. It is a textbook case of survivorship bias, which is what happens when you measure only the outcomes that made it through and quietly drop the ones that did not. It is the average time to sell for the homes that sold. The neighbour whose place sat for eight months and came off unsold contributes nothing to it. Neither does the one that expired, sat empty over the winter and relisted in the spring. Every failed campaign is filtered out of the sample before the number is published.

So the number a seller reads in the paper systematically understates the thing they are actually afraid of. What they are picturing is not the average sale. It is the tail: the long, public, unsuccessful campaign, with the price cuts logged where the next buyer can read them. That tail is real, it is bigger than the headline implies, and no published average will ever show it to you.

The backdrop does not help. RBC's assistant chief economist wrote in July 2026 that the recovery "appears to be holding, albeit just barely," with resales up 0.5 percent in June after a 5.5 percent jump the month before, and seasonally adjusted transactions running 12 percent below the ten year average. "There's a long road ahead in the recovery," he wrote.

CREA's own forecasting makes the point more bluntly. In April 2026 it projected a modest annual gain in sales. By July it had reversed to a 1.4 percent decline. A forecaster changing direction inside one spring is exactly the kind of thing that makes an owner want to test the water privately first.

Three more posts for anyone weighing a move in the west end right now:

• Selling and Buying at the Same Time: Which Comes First?
• Bully Offers Explained: How Pre-Emptive Offers Work in Ontario
• Should You Sell Your Liberty Village Condo or Rent It Out in 2026?

The uncertainty underneath all of this

Ask why sellers want a quieter option and you eventually get past the local stuff and into something broader. People do not feel confident, and it shows up in the numbers.

Bloomberg Nanos Canadian Confidence Index, four-week rolling average ending July 24, 2026. Random telephone survey of 1,034 Canadians, margin of error plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Long-run averages run from 2008.

Every one of those readings sits below its long-run average, and the real estate line is the one that matters here. Barely a third of Canadians expect their own neighbourhood to appreciate over the next six months. That is not a market forecast, it is a mood, and it is the mood of the person deciding whether to put a sign on the lawn.

The wider index tells the same story. It bottomed at 46.31 in April 2026, at the peak of trade-war anxiety, and has averaged 50.81 this year against a long-run average of 54.71. It has recovered since, but recovered to mediocre.

Underneath that sits the trade file. CMHC's 2026 outlook, published in February, was direct about it: tariffs have dented the Canadian economy and job market, particularly in steel and aluminum, lumber, autos and auto parts, and "elevated price-to-income ratios, high carrying costs and lingering job uncertainty will keep many buyers on the sidelines." CMHC also sketched an alternative scenario in which business sentiment worsens and Canada slips into a mild recession in 2026, and said plainly that avoiding it would require geopolitical and trade tensions to ease.

Worth noting what CMHC said about the pickup everyone keeps pointing at. National sales were projected to rise temporarily in 2026, led by Ontario and British Columbia, and CMHC attributed that to pent-up demand from an unusually weak stretch rather than to a sustained recovery. RBC framed the risk the same way, flagging that gloom from geopolitical events, an energy price spike or renewed job market deterioration could prolong the slump. Tariff threats escalated again in late July, and oil moved on renewed conflict between the United States and Iran.

Here is the part that connects the macro to the lawn sign. Uncertainty of this kind does not usually stop people from moving. It stops them from committing publicly. A homeowner who is 60 percent sure will not launch a campaign that announces the decision to the whole neighbourhood and then records the outcome. They will take a quiet conversation instead, and keep the option to do nothing. That is the behaviour we are seeing, and it is a rational response to the environment rather than a fashion.

If you are a buyer

The belief that there is a large hidden inventory of Etobicoke bargains is mostly wrong, and we would rather say that than sell you a fantasy. Most homes here still sell on MLS, because for most sellers that is the right call.

What is real is an information asymmetry, which is just the situation where one side of a market knows something the other side does not. Closing it costs somebody effort, and that effort is the service. Economists call it a search cost. Everyone else calls it phone calls.

What is true: exclusive listings exist, they are not advertised anywhere you can search, and the only way to hear about one is to be on a list that someone actually calls. That is not a secret handshake. A brokerage sitting on an exclusive listing works its own database first, so being in a database is most of the trick.

The other half is the expired and terminated pool described above. Those owners are findable, they are not advertising, and a buyer with a clear brief gives an agent something concrete to go and ask about. That is a real service and it is where a lot of quiet deals actually come from.

Two things worth doing if this matters to you. Be specific about what you want, because a vague buyer is impossible to match against a quiet listing. And be genuinely ready, because these deals move on speed and certainty, and a buyer who needs three weeks to organize financing is not the buyer who gets the call.

If you are a seller, here is what you give up

A quiet sale trades price discovery for control. That is the whole transaction and it should be said plainly.

Price discovery is the process by which a competitive market finds the highest price someone will actually pay, as opposed to the price you hope for. It is competition doing your negotiating for you. Expose a property to every buyer and every agent and you are sampling the whole demand curve, so the outlier at the top of it can find you. Show it to nine people and the best of those nine sets your price. Sometimes that number is excellent. Across a large enough sample, though, fewer bidders produces a lower expected outcome, and expected just means the average across all the ways it could go. That is not a view about real estate. It is how auctions behave.

There is a second effect worth naming, because sellers rarely price it in. A market with few participants is a thin market, and thin markets are volatile. One motivated buyer and your result is excellent. None, and you have no result at all. You are not only lowering the average, you are widening the range of outcomes around it.

What you get back is real: no public failure, no days on market counter, no price-cut history for the next buyer to read, control over who walks through your home, and often a faster and cleaner close, because the buyers who operate this way are frequently the ones who can move without conditions.

The research, and it does not agree

United States data, and the spread between these findings is enormous. Note who published each one: a portal that earns from public listings and a brokerage that holds private inventory are not disinterested researchers. The 17.5% figure is almost certainly contaminated by selection effects, meaning the homes that go off-market differ systematically from the ones that do not, so the study is partly measuring the properties rather than the method. No equivalent Canadian study exists. Read all three as directional, not as a number to plan around.

The cleanest explanation for why the effect exists at all is adverse selection, the problem economists first worked out on used cars. When a buyer cannot verify why something is being sold privately, they cannot separate a seller with a good reason from a seller with a problem, so they price in the possibility of a problem. Everyone selling quietly absorbs a discount created by the least attractive reason a buyer can imagine. Your reasons may be excellent. The buyer cannot see them, and prices accordingly.

Side by side

The scarcity case, which is the real Etobicoke story

Everything above describes the general rule: limit exposure and you should expect to give up price. There is an exception, it is specific, and in parts of Etobicoke it is the condition we are actually operating in.

Start with the aggregate, because it misleads. Across the GTA in July 2026 there were 8,352 active condominium apartments competing for 1,564 sales. That is a glut. In the same month, new listings across all property types fell 17.8 percent year over year to 14,484, and the sales to new listings ratio climbed to 41.4 percent from 34.6 percent a year earlier. RBC noted that seller competition was easing and that rebalancing negotiating power could be steadying values in parts of Southern Ontario including the GTA.

Those two facts describe opposite markets, and both are true at once. This is market segmentation: a single average built from sub-markets that are not behaving alike. Quality detached and semi-detached stock in the established pockets, the Kingsway, Humber Valley, Sunnylea, parts of Mimico and Stonegate, is not competing with a tower on Park Lawn for the same buyer. Averaging them together produces a number that describes neither.

The supply side of those pockets is close to fixed. Nobody is manufacturing more Kingsway lots, the streets were laid out generations ago, and a renovated four bedroom on a proper lot is a differentiated good rather than a commodity. Economists call that inelastic supply, meaning higher prices do not call forth more of it the way they would with something you can build in a factory. In practice, demand has nowhere to go but into price, and the buyers in those pockets know it.

Now apply that to the adverse selection problem described earlier. The discount a private seller absorbs exists because buyers cannot tell why a property is not openly marketed and price in the possibility that something is wrong with it. In a scarce, high demand micro-market that ambiguity largely disappears. Buyers there have been searching for months, they know exactly how little comes up, and when something surfaces quietly the explanation is obvious: it has not reached the board yet. The suspicion discount narrows, sometimes to nothing.

The other half is that competition does not require an MLS listing in order to exist. Price discovery depends on the number of qualified bidders, not the venue. Where a segment holds more committed buyers than available homes, a small group of interested parties reproduces much of what an open market would have produced, because they are bidding against each other whether or not they can see one another. The thinner the supply, the less exposure actually adds.

That is the boundary of the argument, and it is narrow. It holds where supply is genuinely scarce and demand is genuinely deep. It does not hold for a one bedroom competing with ninety others, and a seller in that position who is told otherwise is being sold something.

What agents talking to each other does and does not mean

Agents in this part of the city speak constantly. That is not a secret network, it is a professional community in a geography small enough that most of us have met. Our own brokerage has reach through its office and its wider network, and experienced agents working the same streets routinely compare notes on what is coming. That reach is a genuine asset to a seller, and it is fair to ask any agent to describe theirs concretely rather than in the abstract.

The rules here are more permissive than people assume, and more specific. Two different regulators are involved and they do different jobs.

RECO governs advertising. Under its advertising requirements, an advertisement must not include anything that could reasonably identify a specific property without the owner's consent, or reveal the contents of an agreement without the consent of all parties. That is what constrains public promotion of a property that is not openly on the market.

CREA's REALTOR Cooperation Policy governs when a listing has to go on an MLS System. Its trigger is public marketing, which it defines as one to many: yard signs, flyers, digital advertising, newsletters, or any marketing to the public or to anyone not affiliated with that brokerage. Once a residential property is publicly marketed, it must be placed on an MLS System within three days.

What sits outside that trigger is broader than the conversation suggests. Marketing a listing only to agents within the listing brokerage is expressly not public marketing. And per CREA's own guidance, one to one direct communication between the listing agent and an agent at another brokerage is not public marketing either, with the qualification that it should be the listing agent making those calls rather than the message being relayed onward. A receiving agent speaking one to one with their own buyer is likewise fine.

So the practical shape of it: individual conversations, including across brokerages, are permitted and are how most of this genuinely happens. What crosses the line is the one to many version, a coming soon roster blasted to a group of agents at multiple firms, or a public advertisement. If someone offers you access to a circulated multi-brokerage list of unlisted homes, that is worth asking about, and the question to ask is which side of the one to many line it falls on.

Where this actually fits in Etobicoke

The cases that hold up are narrower than the conversation suggests. A tenanted Mimico or Long Branch property where showings are genuinely difficult to arrange. An owner with a real privacy constraint. A distinctive Kingsway or Humber Valley home whose likely buyer pool is a dozen people rather than a thousand, where a brokerage can plausibly reach most of them directly. An owner whose listing expired in the spring who would rather be approached quietly than go back up on the board.

The cases where it does not hold up are just as clear, and there are more of them. A one bedroom in a Humber Bay tower with ninety near-identical units competing against it does not need fewer buyers, it needs more. A conventional Queensway semi priced where the market actually is will almost always do better with full exposure. If you are competing on price with a hundred lookalikes, exposure is your friend.

Underneath most of these cases is the same instinct, and it is worth naming properly. What a seller is really buying is optionality: the ability to test a number and walk away without having committed to anything visible. That has genuine value, especially when you are uncertain. It also has a price, paid in exposure, and the mistake is assuming it is free.

And if the reason for going quiet is that the price is ambitious, be clear about what you are buying. A quiet listing does not make an ambitious price work. It only makes the disappointment private.

The rules, and your consent

A few things are not optional. There is a written listing agreement either way. Your brokerage owes you the same duties, including disclosure of material facts and a written explanation of how you are represented, under the Trust in Real Estate Services Act. You should be told, in writing and before you sign, that limiting exposure may affect the price you achieve, and you should be the one choosing it.

Ask directly how the property will be marketed, who specifically will see it, and what happens if it does not sell during the exclusive period. If those answers are vague, that is your answer.

How we work this with clients

The decision is never off-market versus public in the abstract. It is a question about one property. Which segment does it actually sit in, given that the GTA average describes neither end of this market. How deep is the buyer pool for it specifically, not for its postal code. What is the realistic range of outcomes on each path, not the best case on the one you are drawn to. And is the gap between those two ranges wide enough to justify what you would be giving up in exposure.

That is an underwriting question before it is a marketing question, and it should be answered with numbers and comparables rather than instinct or a preference for one approach over the other.

So that is where we start. We will tell you what your property would likely do in a full public campaign, what a limited one would realistically produce, and whether the difference is material or rounding. Sometimes the answer is a quiet approach. More often in this market it is a well prepared public listing priced to where the comparables actually are, and we will say so plainly even though it is the less interesting answer. The analysis comes before the recommendation, and you get to see both.

Market figures are from TRREB Market Watch for July 2026, RBC Economics' July 2026 Monthly Housing Market Update, and CREA's July 2026 forecast revision, current as of August 20, 2026. Observations about what we are being asked are our own experience in the west end and are not a measurement of the market. The pricing studies cited are United States research and no directly comparable Canadian study exists. Nothing here is legal advice; speak to your own lawyer about your obligations.

Every property answers this differently, and yours deserves the actual math rather than a rule of thumb. Book a call and we will walk you through both paths, what each is likely to produce, and which one we would run if it were ours.

Dave Dubbin
Real Estate Expert
Dave Dubbin & Associates
Real Estate Broker for Etobicoke and Toronto Sotheby's International Realty, Canada