Good argument on Movesmartly, on a possible reason for the surge in new listings in Toronto:

“Is this short term trend an indication that more sellers are looking to “cash out” at what they perceive to be the peak of Toronto’s real estate market?”

“Perhaps, but part of the increase in new listings may be explained by the many price changes we are seeing in Toronto’s real estate market. When a realtor wants to change the price for their listing at 123 Main Street for example, they can either update the listing for that home with the new price or they can take 123 Main Street off of the market and then upload a new listing for 123 Main Street at the new price. The advantage of the later approach is it resets the Days on Market for the house back to 0 making the listing look newer than it really is. One of the problems with this is that both listings would be counted as new listings because they would have different MLS numbers.”

“It’s not uncommon to see the same house listed up to 4 separate times by the same agent. In this case TREB’s data would show 4 new listings when there should have been just 1.”

I agree that listings may be overstated if this practice among agents has accelerated. But I wouldn’t be jumping for joy just yet. The official statistics show the average time to sell a house is at 35 days versus 32 a year ago. If agents are increasingly de-listing/re-listing homes, then “time on market” is understated.