Some homes in London, Ontario, sell quickly and for more money, while others sit, and the difference is rarely the house itself. It's how the home is priced and marketed, and who's doing the marketing. The MLS® System exists to give a listing maximum exposure, but a listing is not a sale. With the average Canadian home priced around $673,000 by CREA's latest figures, every 1% of the final sale price is roughly $6,750 — so the gap between a well-run sale and a poorly run one is measured in tens of thousands of dollars. Ty Lacroix, Broker at The Envelope Real Estate Group, has spent 24 years selling homes, not just listing them.
Have you ever wondered why some homes in London, Ontario, sell faster than others — and for more money? It's almost never the house. It's how the home is marketed, how it's priced, and who's actually behind the sale.
Let's start with how homes really sell, because there's a lot of mythology here.
How Homes Actually Sell
Open houses1%. Only a small fraction of homes sell because of an open house — and only when the rest of the marketing has been done properly first. Put a sign out at 1:00 on a Sunday for a 2-to-4 open house, and the only visitors you'll get are looky-loos, curious neighbours, and tire-kickers. None of them is buying your home.
Print advertising 2%. Very few homes sell through newspaper or magazine ads. They're called tombstone ads for a reason. Buyers today search online first — the MLS® System and the portals it feeds are where they're actually looking. Print isn't.
Buyers and sellers find each other directly 2%. Once in a while, a neighbour, relative, or coworker turns out to be the buyer. But selling to someone you know is where sellers most often leave money on the table — no competing offers, no market tension, and usually no one in your corner making sure the price reflects what the home is truly worth.
The MLS® is listed properly. 95%.The overwhelming majority of homes sell through the Multiple Listing Service® when listed with a brokerage at an accurate price and with proper terms. CREA describes the MLS® System's entire purpose as ensuring maximum exposure for a listing — it's what puts your home in front of nearly every serious buyer in the market. And yet plenty of listed homes still don't sell, because listing a home and selling a home are two very different things.
Some agents just list homes. Others sell them. That distinction is the whole ballgame.
How Many Agents Actually Sell Real Estate?
Here's the part most people never hear. CREA represents more than 160,000 REALTORS® across Canada — but they don't all sell at the same rate, or anything close to it. Pareto's old 80/20 rule is alive and well: a small minority of agents handle the vast majority of transactions, while everyone else divides up the remainder. Out of any 100 homes for sale, a handful of agents will sell most of them.
Think about what that means for you. If you list with the wrong agent, you're not getting an average result — you're statistically likely to land in the pile that sits, drops its price, or doesn't sell at all.
And time on the market isn't neutral. The longer a home lingers, the more buyers assume something's wrong with it, and the less it ultimately sells for. For a typical London home, even a 5% difference in the final price amounts to nearly $34,000. Days on market is a quiet signal — and it works against you.
The Sign Doesn't Sell the Home
A real estate company's size, name, or colour has almost nothing to do with whether your home sells. Yes, some brokerages sell hundreds of homes a year — but they also have hundreds of agents, and the average number of homes sold per agent is often dismal.
Do you really think a buyer cares what company name is on the sign? Its colour? The agent's ego picture? Buyers care about the home, the price, and whether the transaction makes sense for them. The brand on the lawn is for the agent's benefit, not yours.
The Gap
So if it's not the house, not the brand, and not the open house sign — what makes the difference?
It's everything that happens before the sign goes up and everything that happens after. The pricing strategy is built on real comparables, not hope. The preparation that makes the home show better than its competition. The marketing that reaches the buyers who are actually looking. The negotiation that protects your equity when an offer comes in. That's the work that separates a home that sells from a home that sits — and it's invisible from the curb.
After 24 years in this market, I can tell you, in a conversation, whether a home is positioned to sell or to sit. If you're thinking about selling in London — especially if you're downsizing and your equity is your next chapter — that's the conversation to have before you list, not after your home has been on the market for 60 days.
Don't list your home. Sell it. Reach out for a private conversation, and I'll tell you honestly whether your home is positioned to sell — and what it would take. No pressure, no pitch.
