Days on market
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
Last reviewed
Days on market — DOM — is the number of days a listing has been available for sale, counted from its list date. It is the most-watched freshness signal in real estate: buyers read a high count as negotiating room, sellers watch it as pricing feedback, and agents quote the market-wide average as a temperature reading. Simple number, contested arithmetic.
How Canadian boards count it
Each board’s system stamps the dates and does the counting, and the details differ. The base count belongs to the current listing: if a property is terminated and relisted, the clock restarts. Because that invites gamesmanship, systems also carry cumulative measures that span a chain of relistings of the same property. Which fields exist, how relist chains are linked, and what a member site may display are all board-level decisions — so the figure on one website can legitimately differ from another’s without either being wrong. The record of truth is the board system, and the deepest version of it — every prior list price, termination, and relist — lives in the listing history that a VOW serves to registered visitors.
What it means on your website
On an agent’s site, DOM should come straight off the board feed, recomputed as days pass — not scraped or guessed. Where it gets interesting is next to sold data: a buyer who can see that a “12 days on market” listing is actually attempt number three, priced twice before, is a buyer your site has genuinely equipped. That layered history is gated content in both big markets we cover — the walkthroughs are on showing sold prices in Ontario and BC’s sold data rules.
Common confusions
DOM measures the listing, not the owner’s campaign — relists split the difference between the two, which is the whole controversy. Conditional periods also muddy it: a home can sit “on market” while firmly under contract, depending on how statuses are handled. And the market-average DOM in a stats report is a different animal from any single listing’s count; one is a cohort statistic, the other is a negotiation signal. Keep them apart and both are useful. A good listings site does that separation for the reader: cohort averages in its market stats, per-listing counts on the listing itself.
Frequently asked questions
Does relisting a property reset days on market?
It resets the simple count — terminate today, relist tomorrow, and the new listing starts at day one. Cumulative fields and the listing history behind a VOW login still show the longer story, which is exactly why registered visitors can't be fooled by the tactic.
Is a low average days on market a seller's market?
Broadly, yes — hot markets clear inventory faster. But read it with the mix in mind: a month heavy in well-priced starter homes will post a faster average than one heavy in luxury listings, without the underlying market changing at all.
Keep reading
- Sold data Sold data is the record of what properties actually sold for. Where it lives in Canada, who may display it, and how a VOW puts it on your website.
- VOW VOW stands for Virtual Office Website: a registered-visitor experience that shows sold prices and off-market listings on a realtor's own site.
- Show sold prices Ontario Ontario agents can show sold prices on their own website through a VOW: registered visitors, terms acceptance, gated display. The steps, start to finish.
- BC sold data rules What BC agents may do with sold data: VOW-only display to registered visitors, 30-day passwords, no public sold pages. The tri-board rules in plain language.