If you’ve been trying to sell in the GTA this year and it just isn’t happening, there’s a good chance you fall into one of three situations — and they call for three different responses, not one generic “the market’s tough” shrug.
1. There Are No Real Offers
GTA condo sales hit their lowest level since 1991 in 2025, and new-condo sales in the first quarter of 2026 were down 52% year-over-year. Resale activity across all property types has slowed too — GTA average prices were down 4.5% year-over-year as of July 2026. Whether it’s a condo, a townhouse, or a detached home, it’s a genuinely difficult market to sell into right now. That’s not a reflection on your property or your pricing.
2. The Value Has Dropped Since You Bought
If you bought in 2021 or 2022, near the top of the market, selling today can mean realizing a loss that didn’t exist a few years ago. That’s a real financial decision, not just a paperwork exercise — and for a lot of owners, it’s the reason a listing keeps getting postponed.
3. The One Nobody Says Out Loud: Negative Equity
Sometimes the math doesn’t work at all. When you sell, your lawyer has to pay out — discharge — your mortgage from the sale proceeds before the buyer gets clean title. If your sale price, minus a typical ~4.5% commission and legal costs, doesn’t cover what you still owe the bank, you’re short. And that shortfall has to be covered in cash at closing, or the sale can’t close the normal way.
Here’s what that can look like: say you bought at $820,000 in 2022 with 5% down — a $779,000 mortgage. Four years in, you might still owe around $710,000. If the property’s worth $700,000 today, selling nets roughly $667,000 after commission and legal fees — about $43,000 short of the payout, before any penalty for breaking your mortgage term early. (Illustrative numbers — every situation is different — but this is the exact gap a lot of owners are quietly staring at.)
Nobody’s required to talk about this publicly, so it rarely gets discussed. But it’s one of the most common real reasons a property never gets listed at all.
So What Actually Works?
If you can financially afford to hold the property — this part matters, and it’s not true for everyone — you’re not actually stuck. There’s a third option that gets skipped far too often: rent it out while you wait for the market to turn.
- You stop paying full carrying costs against zero income. Even partial rent coverage beats nothing.
- An occupied property isn’t subject to Toronto’s Vacant Home Tax (3% of assessed value for homes empty 6+ months a year) — a smaller factor for most owners, but a real one if the unit would otherwise sit empty.
- Every dollar of rent that goes toward principal is equity you keep. On a representative $650,000 mortgage balance at today’s roughly 4.04% rate, about $15,400 of the first year’s payments goes to principal, not interest — over three years, that’s in the neighbourhood of $48,000 of equity built by your tenant, on top of whatever the property appreciates. (Illustrative, on a representative balance — not a promise of your specific numbers.)
To be direct: this isn’t a claim that renting always works out, or that you should never sell at a loss if that’s genuinely the right call for your situation. If a property would still be deeply cash-flow negative with a tenant in place, that’s a harder conversation worth having honestly — not a reason to force a “just rent it” answer.
Why the Tenant You Choose Matters More Than Ever
If you’re renting a property specifically because you’re financially stretched or waiting out a market, a bad tenant isn’t just an inconvenience — it can undo the entire strategy. A missed payment, a difficult eviction, or damage you can’t afford to repair turns “smart way to wait” into a much bigger problem than the one you started with. This is exactly where screening quality stops being a nice-to-have.
As your Realtor, I list the rental with full MLS exposure — not just Facebook Marketplace or Kijiji — and run every applicant through Equifax-backed credit, employment, income, and landlord-history checks before anyone gets a key. If you’d rather hand off the day-to-day once a tenant’s in place, my property management company, Flex Key Management, takes it from there — flat-fee management, no percentage of your rent, no long-term contract.
Let’s Run Your Actual Numbers
Whatever kind of property you’re holding — condo, townhouse, semi, detached, or multiplex — and whichever of these three situations fits, the first step is a free, no-obligation comparison: what you’d net selling today versus what renting could look like while you wait.
Call (416) 721-3316, email smendelev777@gmail.com, or visit smrealty.ca. If renting turns out to be the right move, I’ll walk you through exactly how that works, including handing off management to Flex Key Management if you want it hands-off.
