Journal
Notes on the Ottawa market.
Market letters, buying & selling guides, neighbourhood notes, investor and commercial analysis.
SELLING
105 days left in 2026. The median Ottawa sale needs 96.
Sep 17, 2026 · 5 min read
There are 105 days between today and December 31. A median Ottawa house listed today on a sixty day close needs 96 of them. Here is the calendar math, run backwards.
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I mapped Ottawa's flood plain. 2,805 addresses are in it.
Sep 10, 2026 · 5 min read
Ottawa's zoning by-law prohibits development inside the Flood Plain Overlay. I measured every municipal address in the city against it. Here is where the 2,805 are, and what one does to a sale.
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Your Ottawa buyer has to sell first. Underwrite their listing.
Sep 3, 2026 · 5 min read
The sale-of-property condition is back in Ottawa offers. Accept one and your sale depends on a listing you don't control. How to read that listing, and what the escape clause actually does.
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Your Ottawa buyer walked. The deposit is not yours yet.
Aug 27, 2026 · 5 min read
A dead deal does not put the deposit back in anyone's pocket. In Ontario it takes a signed mutual release or a court order, and the fast signature is not always the cheap one.
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Your Ottawa listing expired. The holdover clause didn't.
Aug 20, 2026 · 5 min read
About 1,500 Ottawa listings left the market unsold in July. Every one of them started a holdover clock, and the clause that stops you paying commission twice only works if you relist with a brokerage.
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Ottawa's average price is $683,308. Don't price off it.
Aug 13, 2026 · 5 min read
OREB's July release contains three different Ottawa home prices and they disagree. The average fell 1.6%, the median held, the benchmark slipped 0.5%. Only one of them belongs in your list price.
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The Ottawa fall market will not save your unsold listing
Aug 6, 2026 · 5 min read
Every unsold Ottawa seller is being told to hang on for September. Last fall sales dropped 17% from July while active listings climbed and months of inventory hit 4.0. The fall market arrives as inventory, not buyers.
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Firm to close: where Ottawa home sales actually fall apart
Jul 30, 2026 · 5 min read
The offer firmed and everyone exhaled. That's the wrong moment to stop paying attention. Almost every deal I've seen go sideways in Ottawa went sideways after firm, not before.
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The highest offer isn't always the best one: how Ottawa sellers should read what's on the table
Jul 23, 2026 · 4 min read
Two offers on the same townhouse, $9,000 apart. My clients took the lower one and never regretted it. In a one-offer-at-a-time market, the number on page one is the least informative thing in the document. Here's how to read the rest.
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Your listing isn't selling. In a 22-day market, that's a price problem.
Jul 16, 2026 · 5 min read
Ottawa's median days on market in June was 22 days, and the sale-to-list ratio held at 98.5%, unchanged from last year. Correctly priced homes are still clearing in three weeks. So if yours is sitting at day 40, you're not waiting out a slow market. You're outside it. Here's what to actually do about it.
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The sale-to-list ratio: how to actually price your Ottawa home
Jul 9, 2026 · 4 min read
Sellers obsess over the average sale price. The number that should actually set your list price is the sale-to-list ratio, and in June it held at 98.5% across Ottawa. That citywide figure hides three very different markets. Here's how to use it to price your home.
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Selling your Ottawa home in mid-summer: the July playbook
Jul 2, 2026 · 5 min read
Conventional wisdom says don't list in July. Mostly right, sometimes expensively wrong. Here's who should sell into Ottawa's mid-summer market, who should wait for September, and the playbook if you can't wait.
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Selling a tenant-occupied home in Ontario: the 2026 rules
Jun 25, 2026 · 5 min read
Most owners think a tenant kills the sale. It doesn't, but the rules changed in late 2025. Here's how selling a tenant-occupied Ottawa home actually works in 2026, and what it costs.
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Ontario seller disclosure rules every owner should know
Jun 15, 2026 · 4 min read
Ontario's seller disclosure rules are not what most homeowners think they are. There's no general "duty to disclose everything" — but there are specific things you absolutely must disclose, and lying or hiding them creates liability that ca…
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Selling in winter vs spring in Ottawa: trade-offs
Jun 6, 2026 · 3 min read
Every November I get the same question: "Should we list now or wait until spring?" The answer is more nuanced than the conventional wisdom that "spring is always best."
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Pricing strategy in a shifting market
May 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Pricing a home isn't about what you want for it. It's a tactical decision about how to use the asking price to drive the outcome. In Ottawa's 2026 balanced market, the wrong strategy can cost you 5% or more on final sale price.
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Preparing your Ottawa home for sale: a 30-day checklist
May 6, 2026 · 3 min read
Selling well in Ottawa in 2026 is mostly preparation. Pricing matters, marketing matters, but the homes that sell quickly and over ask are the ones the seller spent four weeks getting ready. Here's the schedule I use with clients.
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