The sale-to-list ratio: how to actually price your Ottawa home

Sellers love the average sale price. It leads every headline, it is easy to quote at a dinner party, and it tells you almost nothing about how to price your own house. Ottawa's average hit $733,648 in June, up 1.3% from a year ago. Fine. Now try setting your list price off that number and watch what happens.

The figure that actually does the work is the sale-to-list ratio. In June it held at 98.5% across the OREB territory, exactly where it sat a year earlier. That one number tells you more about how to price your home than any average or benchmark on the board's release. Timing is the other half of the selling decision, and I covered that in the mid-summer playbook. This post is about the number itself.

What the sale-to-list ratio is telling you

The sale-to-list ratio is the sold price divided by the asking price, averaged across every deal that closed. At 98.5%, the typical Ottawa home sold for about 1.5% under its list price in June. On a $700,000 asking, that is roughly $10,000 of room between the sign going up and the deal firming.

Do not confuse this with the sales-to-new-listings ratio, which sat at 48.8% in June. Those two get mixed up all the time. The sales-to-new-listings ratio is a market-direction gauge, the one I wrote about last week as the summer signal to watch. The sale-to-list ratio is a pricing gauge. One tells you which way the market is leaning. The other tells you what happens to your asking price once a buyer actually engages.

Why 98.5% is a discipline number, not a licence to reach

Here is where sellers talk themselves into trouble. They see homes selling at 98.5% of ask and figure they can list high, give up a point and a half, and still come out ahead. That reads the number backwards.

The 98.5% is the average outcome for homes that were priced correctly to begin with. Sharp listings draw an offer inside a few weeks and close near ask, and that is what pulls the ratio up. The overpriced ones do not live inside that tidy number. They stall, cut the price, sit some more, and eventually sell off a lower asking. The ratio measures the finish line, not the starting line. Price to reach and you do not get a 98.5% result. You get a stale listing and a reduction.

The days-on-market figure backs this up. Median time to sell rose to 22 days in June, up from 19 a year earlier. Not alarming, but it means buyers have enough choice to wait out a seller who is fishing. With 3.3 months of inventory on the market, up from 2.8 last June, nobody has to chase your price.

The citywide 98.5% hides three different markets

This is the part that matters most, and it is why a single ratio can mislead you. Ottawa is not one market right now. It is three, and they are pricing on very different terms.

Single-family homes are the tight segment. They carried 2.8 months of inventory in June and the firmest sale-to-list ratio of the three property types. If you are selling a detached home in a strong pocket, you have real pricing latitude, and a well-set asking price still pulls competing attention.

Townhomes have loosened. Active townhouse listings were up 27.6% from a year ago, inventory pushed to 3.2 months, and the benchmark price slipped 3.9% year over year. That is a segment where the buyer has options, and your list price has to respect that.

Condos are the soft corner. Apartment-style units sat at 5.3 months of inventory in June with the benchmark down 6.0% from last year. This is the one segment where I tell sellers to price at the market and not a dollar above, because there is a wall of comparable inventory and a season-insensitive buyer who will just move to the next unit. You can see what is currently listed and count your competition yourself. Sharp pricing is the whole game in the condo market this summer.

So the honest answer to "what is the sale-to-list ratio" is a question back at you: which house are you selling, and where.

How to actually set your number

Ignore the citywide averages. Pull the last 30 days of sold comparables in your specific pocket and your specific property type. Not active listings, since those are only what your neighbours are hoping to get. Sold data, firmed and closed, inside the last month. Take the median of the true comparables, then work your list price back through the local sale-to-list ratio for that segment. That is the number that gets you an offer while the listing is still fresh.

Spring comps are already stale. A price that made sense in April, when inventory was lower, can be a reach by July. And a price anchored to what the neighbour got in 2022 is not a strategy. It is a wish.

If you take one thing from the June numbers

A high sale-to-list ratio in a balanced market is not the market being generous. It is the market rewarding the sellers who priced with discipline and quietly punishing the ones who did not. The 98.5% is earned on day one, when you set the asking price. It is not clawed back later at the negotiation table.

If you want a straight read on what your home should list at, I will pull your pocket's last 30 days of sold data and walk you through the segment ratio before we ever put a sign on the lawn. Text or call me at 613-262-6545, or email fil@613realtor.ca, and we will set a number that sells.