Are Home Sellers Being Too Stubborn?

Dave and Steve Saretsky talk about stubborn sellers, human psychology and why waiting for a rebound could cost homeowners big.

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  It’s been interesting watching the last six months in Ontario how stubborn a lot of the sellers have been on their price point.

If they don’t have to sell, that’s fine, but if they have to sell because they’ve committed to a move or they’re getting moved by their job, et cetera, it’s kind of crazy how much above the market they are. And they’re sitting there for months and months and months. And I worry when they do eventually realize they have to come down, the price is gonna be significantly lower than it was when they first listed it.

Yeah. You know, it’s crazy. Like, again, I just love like human psychology and sentiment and sort of like, you know, how people react in, in markets and you know, it’s, I think it was in 22 and then in a good chunk of 2023, you actually saw new listings, like people bringing their homes to market. You saw those collapse like 20 year lows people were like, oh, I like, oh, I missed, you know, back in like February of 2022, I could have got a million. Now you’re telling me it’s like 950 and like, uh, and like I’m just gonna wait. Like rates are gonna come back down. Like the market always rebounds. You know, a year later, like every correction historically over the last 20 years has been very, very short-lived.

So like, let’s just hold off. And so what we saw, basically, what kind of kept prices relatively stable, I think for the first 18 months of, of rates going up. It wasn’t this flood of like foreclosures coming to market. What we saw was actually just, uh, the, the market got starved of listings. And it was only eventually over time where people realized, okay, well, you know, prices haven’t really bounced back.

Like at some point you gotta move on with life. And we’ve finally started to see the inventory. And now this year, right in, in 2025, we’ve seen in some, some months we’re seeing 10, 15 year, 20 year highs in new listings. Um, ’cause I think feel people are finally, sellers are finally capitulating and saying, okay, like.

I gotta get out now and, and I think that’s what we’ve seen now is we’ve seen the prices have really gapped down this year in 2025. We’ve seen a noticeable drop in prices.