Ontario home sold at $800,000 loss after 11 failed attempts to sell

Jan 5 2024, 8:38 pm

An Ontario home re-listed for sale nearly a dozen times and eventually sold at a massive loss shows just how much prices tend to fluctuate in the GTA real estate market.

The detached home, located at 1099 Caldwell Avenue in Mississauga’s Lorne Park neighbourhood, has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a two-car garage.

According to the listing, the property is just under one acre and boasts over 4,300 square feet of living space. In June 2021, the property was sold for approximately $400,000 over asking at $2.65 million.

From there, the home was listed and re-listed 11 times over the next two years as the sellers repeatedly attempted to get the property sold — ranging its price from $3.39 million to $1.99 million.

After several attempts, the home was finally sold for $1.8 million in December 2023 through a power of sale, roughly $800,000 less than it was sold for just two years prior.

A power of sale, which differs from a regular home sale, is a clause written into a mortgage note that authorizes the mortgagee to sell their property in the event of default to repay the mortgage debt.

In these cases, the lender forces a sale on the public market and gets all the funds owed to them while the current owner keeps any excess profit. In a foreclosure, the lender usually takes ownership and gets to keep all the profits from the sale.

While overall demand for housing remained buoyed by “record immigration” in 2023, more of this demand was directed at the rental market, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board’s (TRREB) latest report.

The board found that the number of GTA home sales in 2023 came in at less than 70,000, all thanks to affordability issues brought about by high mortgage rates.

“High borrowing costs coupled with unrealistic federal mortgage qualification standards resulted in an unaffordable home ownership market for many households in 2023,” said new TRREB President Jennifer Pearce.

“With that said, relief seems to be on the horizon. Borrowing costs are expected to trend lower in 2024. Lower mortgage rates coupled with a relatively resilient economy should see a rebound in home sales this year.”

There were 65,982 home sales reported through TRREB’s MLS System in 2023 — representing a 12.1% dip compared to 2022. The average selling price for all home types in 2023 was $1,126,604, which is a 5.4% decline compared to 2022.

“Buyers who were active in the market benefitted from more choice throughout 2023. This allowed many of these buyers to negotiate lower selling prices, alleviating some of the impact of higher borrowing costs,” said TRREB Chief Market Analyst Jason Mercer.

“Assuming borrowing costs trend lower this year, look for tighter market conditions to prompt renewed price growth in the months ahead.”

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