Your listing isn't selling. In a 22-day market, that's a price problem.

The number that should worry you

Ottawa's median days on market in June was 22 days.

Not 60. Not 45. Twenty-two. That number does more work than most sellers want it to. It says the median home that sold in Ottawa last month went from "just listed" to "sold" in about three weeks, and half of them went faster than that.

So if you're sitting at day 40 with four showings and no offers, I want to be direct with you. You are not patiently waiting out a slow market. You are outside the market. Those are two different problems, and only one of them fixes itself with time.

"But the market is soft"

It's the first thing sellers say, and it's half true, which is exactly what makes it dangerous.

The soft part is real. June sales came in at 1,518, down 4.9% from a year ago. Months of inventory climbed to 3.3 from 2.8 last June. Year to date we're at 6,969 sales, down 6.1%. There is genuinely more competition on the shelf than there was a year ago.

Now look at what didn't move. The sale-to-list ratio in June was 98.5%, exactly where it sat in June 2025. Unchanged. Homes that sell in Ottawa are still getting 98.5 cents on the asking dollar, and they're still doing it in three weeks.

That's the tell. A genuinely soft market shows up as sale-to-list ratios falling and timelines stretching across the board. Ottawa isn't doing that. Ottawa is doing something more specific and less forgiving: it's transacting normally for correctly priced homes and quietly ignoring everything else. The extra inventory didn't make buyers slower. It made them pickier, because for the first time in years they have somewhere else to go.

Your listing isn't losing to a bad market. It's losing to the house down the street that priced itself honestly.

Check your property type before you panic

Before you touch the price, find out which Ottawa you're actually selling into. The June numbers split hard by type.

Single-family homes are the steady segment: 879 sales, off just 1.8% year over year, 2.8 months of inventory, benchmark down only 0.7%. If you own a detached home and it's sitting, the segment is not your excuse.

Townhomes are mid-adjustment. Sales were down 7.3%, active inventory jumped 27.6% from last June, months of inventory hit 3.2, and the benchmark is off 3.9%. A quarter more competition than last year is a real headwind. It's not a 40-day headwind.

Apartments are the soft one, and honestly it's the only segment where "the market" is a fair answer. 178 sales, down 14%, 5.3 months of inventory, benchmark down 6.0%. If you're selling a condo, you're in a genuine buyer's market and your pricing has to respect that. Everyone else, keep reading.

Small price cuts are money on fire

Here's where most sellers go wrong after they finally accept the price is off.

You list at $779,900. Nothing happens for a month. Your agent suggests $769,900. Nothing happens again. Then $759,900. By September you're at $739,900 with 90 days of history and every buyer's agent in the city treating you like distressed inventory.

The problem is that buyers don't shop in dollars. They shop in brackets. Someone searching Ottawa sets a filter at $750,000 and never sees your $779,900 listing, and they still don't see it at $769,900, and they still don't see it at $759,900. You gave away $20,000 and bought exactly zero new eyeballs. The only cut that does anything is the one that lands you in a bracket you weren't in before.

Cut once, cut properly, cut into the next real search band. One decisive move to $749,900 puts you in front of an audience that literally could not see you before. Three timid moves to $759,900 just tell the market you're not done cutting, so everyone waits.

And they will wait. That's the part sellers underestimate. A visible pattern of small reductions is an advertisement that a bigger one is coming.

The relist question, answered honestly

Somebody will suggest terminating and relisting fresh to reset your days on market. It's a real practice and it does technically reset the counter on a new listing number.

It also fools nobody who matters. Any competent buyer's agent pulls the property history before writing an offer, sees the terminated listing and the original ask, and walks into the negotiation knowing exactly how long you've been trying and what you started at. You've spent the reset and gained a slightly cleaner-looking listing that the only people who count can see straight through.

There's one case where relisting genuinely makes sense: when something real about the offering changed. You finally painted, you dropped the price meaningfully, you got new photos that don't look like they were shot on a flip phone in November, you cleared out the furniture. A relist should mark a real change, not disguise the absence of one.

What I actually do at day 30

Rates aren't riding to the rescue. The Bank of Canada held at 2.25% yesterday, its sixth consecutive hold, and the next decision isn't until September 2. Nobody is getting rescued by a rate cut before Labour Day. The buyer pool you have in July is the buyer pool you have.

So at day 30 with no offer, I want three things on the table. First, the honest showing count. Under one showing a week is a pricing problem full stop, because that's a search-visibility failure and price is the only search filter you control. Ten showings and no offers is a different animal, that's a condition or presentation problem, and cutting the price won't fix a kitchen.

Second, the feedback nobody wants to repeat. Not the polite version. If three agents said the basement smells, the basement smells.

Third, the real comps from the last 60 days, not the ones we used at listing. In a market adding inventory, an eight-week-old comp set is a historical document.

Then we make one decision and commit to it. Cut properly, fix what showed up in the feedback, or take it off and come back in September with a genuinely different offering. All three are defensible. Shaving five grand every three weeks until Christmas isn't.

The market is telling you something in 22 days. It's worth listening on day 30 instead of arguing with it until November.

If your place has been sitting and you want a straight answer about why, call me at 613-262-6545 or email fil@613realtor.ca. I'll tell you what the numbers say even when it isn't what you were hoping to hear. You can also see what's currently on the market to get a feel for what you're up against.