October in southern Ontario smells like wet leaves, espresso, and hesitation. Open houses are quieter. Agents linger in doorways pretending to check their phones. And though no one wants to admit it, the market has taken a pause. We’re not in a full buyer’s market yet — but you can smell it on the wind.

The last time real estate felt this way was 2009. The world was recovering from financial whiplash, and the concept of “multiple offers” still sounded exotic. Go back even further, and you hit 1991 — the year the music stopped. It took thirteen long years before prices crawled back to their peak. Then came the delirious decade that followed: 2010 and beyond, when bidding wars became blood sport and agents set new records between sips of coffee.

Many Realtors working today have only ever known those wild Seller-focused years — a generation raised on velocity. In that version of the industry, every seller fancied themselves a mini-developer, and every buyer walked into the arena already braced to lose. But markets, like people, eventually tire of pretending.

This October, more than 130 listings across Pickering, Whitby, Oshawa, and Clarington simply… expired. Not sold, not withdrawn — expired, like a forgotten yogurt at the back of the fridge..

And yet, there’s no mystery to it, at least that shouldn’t be. The math is merciless.
One semi-detached in Oshawa sat for six months at $715,000, then again at $700,000. Both times, silence. Meanwhile, seventeen similar “semi-detached homes sold for an average of $610,000 — each one at 100 percent of asking. When you’re a hundred thousand above the evidence, you’re not overpriced. You’re invisible.

Across southern Durham, the story hums the same note: homes selling for 99 to 100 percent of asking. The drama is gone, replaced by precision. Nostalgia is expensive now. The old ritual of “testing the market” has flipped — the market is testing you.

At a condo building in north Oshawa, two near-twins hit the market. The one we sold was gone in four days with two offers and went $5,000 over asking — $20,000 higher than the same model fetched two weeks earlier. Another unit sat for seventy-eight days before vanishing unsold. Same address, same layout, wildly different outcome. The difference wasn’t luck. It was humility.

In real estate, humility hides behind math. When inventory is scarce, buyers forgive your optimism. When inventory grows, they don’t. They scroll right past you, waiting for either your algorithm or your ego to flinch first.

Even an outdated home can sell quickly when priced truthfully. And even the prettiest, most perfectly staged one can vanish into the digital abyss if priced on nostalgia. The beauty contest still matters — but the prize now goes to those who understand what era they’re in.

This isn’t a broken market. It’s a sobering one. After years of adrenaline and instant offers, the pace has slowed to something human. Buyers are thinking again. Sellers are listening — or not — but time has returned to the equation.

Real estate, like mood, mirrors the collective pulse. And right now, that pulse has shifted from feverish to reflective. The market hasn’t crashed; it’s just remembering how to breathe.

Lindsay Smith is a broker with Keller Williams Energy in Durham Region. She has been selling real estate for 39 years and can be reached at lindsay@buyselllove.ca.

Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.