Calgary Answers · Buying · Reading the Numbers

Is the List Pricejust an opinion?

Partly. It is a decision a seller made, on advice, for a purpose — and the purpose varies enormously from one listing to the next.

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Who actually sets it

The REALTOR® recommends; the seller decides. Under Alberta's designated agency model, that listing REALTOR® represents the seller personally, so the number they recommended was arrived at in the seller's interest — and the seller was free to overrule it. Frequently they did. That is how two comparable homes on the same street end up listed at prices that cannot both be right.

The four things a list price is usually trying to do

  1. Sit at market. The most common and least interesting case: careful comparable work, priced to sell in a normal timeframe.
  2. Sit under market deliberately, to draw several buyers at once and let competition find the price. Here the list price is a marketing device, and reading it as a ceiling is a costly mistake.
  3. Sit above market with room built in, because the seller expects to negotiate, or wanted the bigger number and their agent agreed to try it.
  4. Sit well above market as a test. No urgency, no plan, no intention of taking less. These listings sit, and no offer fixes them.

A list price is a claim about value. A sold price is evidence of it — which is why the two are treated so differently, and why sold data requires a free registered account under Alberta's MLS® rules.

Telling them apart

You cannot tell from the listing itself. You can tell from comparable sales, from how that segment is currently moving, from the listing history, and from the first week of activity: a home priced under market draws a crowd immediately, and a home priced as a test draws nobody and then sits.

Which of the four you are looking at should shape how you write your offer more than almost anything else about the property. Checking whether it is overpriced → · How an offer price gets built →