A three bedroom Leaside semi with a garage and a family room addition.
A four-bedroom Willowdale detached house with a private elevator and six bathrooms.
A one bedroom-plus-den Bay Street condo.
They’re three very different Toronto properties, but they were all sold this year for less than what they were bought for.
In another sign of the struggling real estate market, 397 — or about seven per cent of all homes sold in Toronto so far in 2025 — were sold at a loss, according to new MLS data provided exclusively to the Star from real estate tech company HouseSigma.
It’s even higher in old Toronto, where sellers lost money on the price in nine per cent of sold homes.
That’s a huge jump from only 0.7 per cent across Toronto at the market peak in 2022, and represents tens of thousands of dollars in losses for sellers on top of land transfer tax and realtor commissions.
“The number of properties sold below their previous price has surged in the GTA area,” said Michael Carney, director of business development at HouseSigma.
The market is showing signs of pressure on sellers as more homeowners accept “substantial” losses, he added.
“All of this links back to the post-pandemic market frenzy driven by low interest rates and high demand, where some buyers stretched themselves thin and then later got impacted by rising rates and other macroeconomic factors including inflation, reduced immigration rates and rents.”
In terms of condos, across Toronto about eight per cent went for less than what they were bought for this year.
Three per cent of semis and almost six per cent of detached homes sold at a loss in the city so far this year. But their losses are bigger than in the condo market.
The average loss for Toronto condos in 2025 was about $56,000, while for detached homes it was about $165,000.
Some of the properties were suspected power of sales, Carney said, where the lender forces the sale of a property because the owner is in default on their mortgage.
They are harder to track, as there’s not a “power of sale” box to tick on MLS. But a listing might mention it or say a seller is “very motivated.”
The data does not factor in when the property was last sold, but “it is highly likely that a distressed sale resulted due to a purchase at the peak of the market in late 2021-2022,” Carney said.
Closing costs, realtor commissions and land transfer tax, which can add up to tens of thousands of dollars more that a seller needs to pay, are also not included in the data.
It also does not include sales that were private or preconstruction (when someone agrees to buy a home before it’s built), or homes that were sold on assignment (when someone buys the contract for a preconstruction home).
Nor does it factor in the cost of renovations that the seller might have done, or inflation.
This means actual losses are even higher; and that for sales of properties that broke even on price, which are not included in the data, the sellers actually lost money.
Many of these sold-below-bought homes are chronicled on a tongue-in-cheek Reddit group called “HouseSigma blunders,” where users dissect the losses and speculate on the backstories.
Lorry Greenspan, a sales representative with Forest Hill Real Estate Inc., said he has heard about examples around the wider GTA of sellers losing money because they borrowed “like crazy” when money was cheap.
“After 2022 the market tanked,” and at the same time some of these people could no longer afford their mortgages,” Greenspan said.
“When you’re forced to sell and it costs more for people to buy because interest rates have increased, you end up selling at a significant loss.”
Other cities in the GTA such as Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon were “heavily impacted” by losses, Carney said.
In particular, 33 per cent of condos sold in Caledon in 2025 so far went for a loss, with an average price drop of nearly $300,000. About 20 per cent of condos sold at a loss in Oshawa.
Jessie McLellan, a sales representative with the Lisa Abbott Team, Re/Max Jazz Inc., has seen plenty of recent examples in Durham region, where she works, on everything from condos to detached homes.
“Thankfully, none of our seller clients have been in the position where they’re they’ve had to sell and take losses, but certainly, some of our buyer clients have purchased properties that had sold in 2021 and 2022 and they got them for significantly less,” she said.
Greenspan said he’s seen this more on condos in old Toronto, where 11 per cent of sales in 2025 so far were at a loss, according to the data.
One a client bought a condo in December for a thousand dollars less than it sold for in 2019. He noted the seller would have made money if they sold in 2022.
“Unfortunately the market did what it did and condos fell off a cliff,” Greenspan said.
“The condo market is ripe with examples like that because right now product is trending in and around 2018 pricing. So if you bought it from 2020 until today you’re probably losing money.”
But not all of the homes sold at a loss in 2025 were last bought during the pandemic.
The Bay Street condo, for example, sold in June for $540,000, an almost $60,000 loss.
The Leaside semi went for $145,000 less than when it was bought for, and the North York detached home saw a loss of $683,000.
All three examples were last sold before the world had ever heard of coronavirus, back when Donald Trump was president of the U.S. for the first time, eight years ago, in 2017.
