For one day only, this Toronto house for sale turned into an art gallery
It’s a buyer’s market now, and here come the gimmicks
Toronto’s real estate market is imploding, and it’s forcing desperate home sellers to get creative.
With open houses not doing the trick, the sellers of one South Riverdale home turned their place into a pop-up art gallery, complete with glasses of bubbly, music and free flowers. The owners also wrote out a heartfelt letter to prospective buyers, waxing poetic about the memories they’d made in the house and the beauty of the neighbourhood, reports the Globe and Mail.
The two-bedroom, three-bathroom semi at 137 Munro Street may have been freshly renovated, but it wasn’t selling, even after the owners knocked $76,000 off the asking price earlier this month, bringing it to $1,149,000, according to Zolo.com. Notably, the house was purchased for quite a bit less—$898,000—in 2021. House flippers, beware: it’s not so easy anymore.
Related: $2.6 million for a High Park house with a TV elevator and a parent hideaway
Toronto’s housing market has been plunging in recent months, reflecting a similar trend across the country. Home sales were down 6.3 per cent in February compared to the same time last year, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, and 17 per cent fewer homes were listed over the same period. Prices are dropping, too: the average selling price is now just over $1 million, 7.1 per cent lower than this time last year.
With prices falling, savvy buyers know they can hold out for a better deal. Gone are the days of bidding wars and bully offers. Sellers will have to work to get people’s attention, and the games have already begun. Welcome to the buyer’s market: it’s about to get weird.
Anthony Milton is a freelance journalist based in Toronto specializing in long-form magazine writing. He previously worked as an assistant editor at Toronto Life, where he launched the Front Row newsletter. He regularly contributes all sorts of stories to the magazine, including deep dives on sports, business and housing as well as short-form commentary on our ever-changing city, from its obsession with cherry blossoms to its maddening NIMBYism. His work has also appeared in Maclean’s, Ricochet, TVO, the Trillium and more.
