Ontario Market Heat Index — Methodology

The Ontario Market Heat Index measures how quickly and how competitively resale homes are selling across Ontario municipalities. It answers questions like: how fast are homes selling, what share sell at or above asking, how common are price reductions, and how deep are the discounts — per city and per property type, for rolling and calendar periods.

All published numbers are precomputed by a nightly engine and stored in snapshot tables; the public pages never run live calculations, so a figure you cite today can be traced to the exact snapshot, period and methodology version that produced it.

Source data comes from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) via the PropTx/AMPRE data feed, covering TRREB member-reported transactions. This is not a complete record of every Ontario transaction: areas outside TRREB's footprint may be under-represented, and some non-TRREB areas appear with community-level rather than municipal names.

Reliable historical coverage begins with the third quarter of 2025. Earlier quarters are incompletely ingested and are not published.

An individual sale is included when all of the following hold:

• The listing closed as a sale (leases/rentals are excluded).
• The property is in Ontario.
• The property type is resale residential: detached, semi-detached, freehold townhouse, condo townhouse or condo apartment. Freehold and condo townhouses are always reported separately. Pre-construction sales, vacant land, farms, multiplexes, parking spaces and commercial properties are excluded.
• The sold price is at least $10,000 (guards against data-entry placeholders).
• Duplicate records of the same sale (same address, unit and closing date) are collapsed to one.

Sales are assigned to periods by the purchase contract date (when the deal firmed up), not the future title-transfer date — this matches how market watchers experience the market and how boards report it.

For each period × geography × property type cell we publish:

• Eligible sales count — number of eligible sales in the cell.
• Median market time (cumulative days on market) — the median number of days from when the property first came to market (including linked prior listings — see relisting treatment) to the firm sale. Records with implausible day counts (negative or over 730) are excluded from time-based metrics only.
• % sold within 7 / 14 / 30 days and % taking over 60 days — shares of sales by cumulative market time.
• % sold at or above original asking — share of sales whose sold price met or exceeded the original asking price of the earliest listing in the relisting chain.
• Median sale-to-original-list ratio — median of (sold price ÷ original asking price of the chain head). Using the original price prevents relisted or repeatedly-reduced listings from flattering the ratio.
• Median sale-to-final-list ratio — median of (sold price ÷ the asking price in effect when the sale firmed).
• % with at least one price reduction, median days to first reduction, median first reduction and median total reduction — computed from observed list-price decrease events during the listing period. The total reduction is the sum of a listing's observed price cuts expressed as a percentage of its original asking price (non-compounding); intervening price increases are not netted against cuts.
• % sold below original asking and median discount — share of sales below the chain-head original asking price, and the median percentage discount among those sales.

Sellers commonly terminate a listing and relist — sometimes several times — before selling. Treating each relist as a fresh listing dramatically understates true market time and overstates sale-to-list ratios.

We link a sold listing to a prior listing of the same address and unit when the prior listing ended in a terminal status (expired, cancelled, withdrawn, terminated or suspended) within 90 days before — or up to 7 days after — the sold listing came to market. Chains collapse into a single economic sale: cumulative market time sums the days on market across the chain, and original-asking comparisons use the earliest listing's original price. In validation, roughly 15% of sales are relistings, and ignoring chains understates market time by weeks on affected sales.

Cities follow the listing's municipality as reported in the feed, with two normalizations: Toronto's MLS districts (Toronto W/C/E/N zones) are merged into a single “Toronto”, and the feed's “London South/East/North” split is merged into “London”. Province-level figures aggregate every eligible Ontario sale. Neighbourhood-level cells are planned for a later phase.

Small samples make medians and shares unstable. A city cell is published only when it has at least 50 eligible sales in the period; a property-type cell within a city needs at least 25 eligible sales. Cells below the floor are marked “insufficient data” and carry no ranked values — they are suppressed, not shown as zero.

Toronto neighbourhood pilot: neighbourhood cells (all property types combined, using our neighbourhood boundary system) are published only when a neighbourhood has at least 30 eligible sales in the period. Areas below that floor are withheld rather than ranked on unstable samples; neighbourhood figures are labelled as a pilot while we evaluate reliability.

Three period types are published:

• Rolling 90 days — recomputed nightly; always labelled Live.
• Calendar quarters — the current quarter is Preliminary and recomputed nightly as late-reported sales arrive; completed quarters are reviewed and then frozen as Final, stamped with the methodology version, the finalization date and the eligible transaction count.
• Calendar years — same lifecycle as quarters.

A frozen period is never silently recalculated. If a correction is required, the period is re-finalized as Revised with a visible revision note (see corrections policy).

• Cumulative market time is our own reconstruction from relisting linkage (validated at ≈99.7% confidence on a multi-city pilot); the feed does not supply a usable cumulative figure. A small share of older records cannot be chain-linked and contribute their own listing's market time only.
• Complete price-change history is captured from August 5, 2026 onward. For earlier periods only the last price change per listing is observable, so price-reduction metrics on periods starting before that date are labelled partial and will understate reduction activity.
• Quarters before Q3 2025 are not published (incomplete historical ingestion).
• Coverage is TRREB/AMPRE-centric — not a complete record of all Ontario transactions.
• Lease-side metrics and the composite heat score are out of scope for methodology v1.0. Neighbourhood cells are published only as a labelled Toronto pilot (all property types combined, 30-sale floor).

When an error is found in a frozen period — a data defect, an eligibility bug or a methodology fix — we do not overwrite numbers silently. The period is recomputed and re-published as Revised, with a revision number, the date, the approver and the reason recorded in a public correction history. Preliminary figures (the current quarter and rolling window) are expected to move as late sales are reported and carry no revision notes.

Questions about this methodology? Contact us.