Terminated vs expired listing
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
Last reviewed
An expired listing is one whose listing agreement reached its end date without the home selling. A terminated listing ended early — seller and brokerage agreed to cancel before the agreement ran out. Both leave the market unsold, but by different routes, and the difference says something about what happened.
The difference in practice
Expiry is passive: the clock ran out. It usually points to a mismatch between price and market — the home sat, showings thinned, and the agreement’s term simply ended. Termination is active: someone made a decision. Sellers terminate to relist at a repositioned price, to change brokerages, to pause after a life change, or as part of a terminate-and-relist manoeuvre aimed at resetting the listing’s days on market count. The underlying agreement in both cases is the exclusive listing contract between seller and brokerage — expiry and termination are just its two exits. Buyers’ agents read the two differently as well: an expiry invites a conversation about price, while a termination invites a question about what changed and when the home is coming back.
What happens next
Most of these homes come back. A relist starts a fresh listing record with a fresh count, but the chain of prior attempts — every list price, every termination — survives in board history, and registered visitors on a VOW site can see that longer story. That is worth knowing on both sides: a seller resetting the clock isn’t erasing the past, and a buyer who registers on a good listings site can read the whole journey before writing an offer. Boards differ on the mechanics — some link relist chains explicitly, others leave the connection to the history record — but the pattern holds everywhere: the count resets, the record doesn’t.
Why agents watch these statuses
Expired and terminated listings are motivated-seller signals — owners who demonstrably wanted to sell and didn’t. A whole prospecting discipline exists around re-approaching them with a better plan, and it rewards the agent who arrives first with real preparation: what the previous attempt asked, how long it sat, and what the market did in the meantime. The playbook, and where the platform fits in it, is on FSBO and expired listing leads.
Frequently asked questions
Does a terminated listing mean something was wrong with the house?
Rarely. Termination is usually about strategy or relationships — a planned relist at a new price, a change of brokerage, or a seller whose circumstances shifted. The house is typically the least interesting part of the story.
Can an expired listing be relisted right away?
Yes, with the same brokerage or a new one. The new listing starts a fresh days-on-market count, though the property's full listing history survives in board records. One caution: the expired agreement's holdover terms can still apply to buyers introduced during it, so the paperwork deserves a careful read before switching.
Keep reading
- Days on market Days on market counts how long a listing has been for sale. What resets it, how Canadian boards track it, and how buyers actually read it.
- Exclusive listing An exclusive listing is marketed by one brokerage off the MLS system. What that means for exposure, privacy, and CREA's three-day cooperation rule.
- FSBO and expired leads Canada Where FSBO and expired data legally comes from here, the DNCL and CASL rails on contacting owners, and what bought lists actually contain.
- 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.