As the Toronto-area housing market continues to falter, desperate preconstruction condo buyers are offering to pay for someone to take units off their hands.
Listings of assignment sales, where the original buyer tries to sell their contract for a yet-to-be-built home, are flooding social media groups with promises of “cash back.” These listings are typically not on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS).
“A lot of the assignments that we’re working with right now, the seller actually needs to pay the buyer in order to get out of the deal, because that’s what it takes to get it to a price to sell,” said Daniel Zadegan, managing partner and sales representative at the The Zadegan Group.
This is because the original purchasers signed the contracts to buy unbuilt condos at the peak of the red hot real estate market in 2022. But now, as the units are at or near completion, prices have dropped and the purchasers sometimes can’t get a mortgage for the original price, or afford the higher rates.
So they are not only forgoing their deposit, but having to fill the pricing gap for the new buyer.
“The price that they need to sell at is below what their deposit covers,” Zadegan said.
For example, if someone signed a contract on a preconstruction condo for a million dollars, made a $200,000 deposit and the price a new buyer is willing to pay for that condo has now dropped to $700,000, the deposit is only going to get the price to $900,000. The developer will still be expecting a million, so “the seller will need to pay the buyer $100K and cover that difference,” Zadegan said.
This is not limited to condos. Zadegan currently has an assignment sale for a freehold townhome in Georgetown listed at $950,000, but the original price was $1,245,000. The seller is walking away from their deposit but also offering $50,000 to cover the gap. Otherwise “the assignment deal won’t even go through,” Zadegan said.
“Typical nowadays is $50, $80, $100K,” to cover gaps like these,” he added, although he saw one assignment seller last year offering $400,000 to $500,000.
Of course the original buyers still need to have the cash and not all of them do. And if they can’t close on the original deal, or find a new buyer, builders can sue.
Zadegan added he’s seeing these cash offers “across the board” in the region, downtown as well as in the suburbs.
“Obviously the gaps are a lot more extreme in the suburbs,” he said. “A lot of these no-name towns you’ve never heard of really kind of blew up. We saw some really, really inflated pricing.”
According to January numbers from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, the average price of a home in the GTA dropped below a million dollars for the first time since 2021.
Sales of new homes in the region also reached an all-time low in December 2025, per the Building Industry and Land Development Association, with the average price for new condos hovering around $1 million. It’s been at that mark for a few months after a long tumble, while the price for new single-family homes was $1.4 million, down nine per cent year over year.
Edward Wong, a realtor at Superstars Realty Ltd., is also seeing these cash offers. For example, a current listing for a one-plus-one-bedroom condo in North York where a seller will have to give the new buyer around $111,000 on top of the original deposit of about $118,000.
“It’s about the market, right? The price was very high two, three years ago — nowadays it keeps dropping,” Wong said.
A few years ago it used to be buyers, not sellers who had to put down extra cash to get assignment sales, he added.
“Now it’s the reverse,” he said, adding the biggest cash offer he’s come across is around $200,000.
Another incentive to sweeten the deal popped up on a recent assignment sale listing for a one-bedroom-plus-den unit at the Bauhaus Condos in downtown Toronto. It’s what’s called a “builder’s leaseback program,” which the original buyer is offering with the sale, even though it comes from the builder.
“They would provide you a rental guarantee,” said Berdy Nghiem, assignment manager at Starwood Group Inc., the company behind the listing, in this case for $3,250 a month for two years.
“You can think of it as the builder is going to be your tenant, they’re going to sublease your unit.”
With all these efforts to close the deal, Zadegan said that in his experience there are still buyers out there for these assignment sales.
“There’s a price for everything,” he said.
