A Winnipeg listing priced from a comparative market analysis built mostly on renovated comparable sales sat unsold for six weeks before a second agent identified the mismatch and repriced it correctly.
At a glance
A Winnipeg bungalow with its original 1970s kitchen and bathrooms was listed at $389,900, based on a comparative market analysis the original listing agent had prepared from five recent nearby sales. The home generated modest interest in its first two weeks and then almost none for the month after that. At six weeks with no offers, the seller brought in a second agent for a fresh opinion before deciding whether to keep waiting or drop the price.
The second agent pulled the same five comparables the original CMA had used and found the defect immediately: four of the five had been fully renovated within the previous two years — new kitchens, updated bathrooms, refinished basements — while the subject property had none of that work done. Matching on location, square footage, bedroom count, and recent sale date is the easy part of a comparative market analysis; matching on condition is the part that actually determines whether the resulting number means anything for the specific house being priced.
This is not a defect any regulator inspects for. CREA’s own MLS® Home Price Index exists precisely because raw comparable-sale pricing is vulnerable to exactly this kind of mismatch — the HPI methodology page explains the index is built to track a “typical” home’s value based on the features of homes actually bought and sold, normalizing for characteristics precisely because an unadjusted comparable set can mislead. But the HPI is a market-level benchmark, not a substitute for adjusting an individual CMA’s own comparables for condition.
Original list price: $389,900, from a CMA where 4 of 5 comparables were renovated within two years of sale.
Revised CMA, using only unrenovated or lightly updated comparables matched for condition: supported a range of $352,000–$358,000, roughly 8–10% below the original $389,900 list price.
Six weeks on market at the original price generated two showings in the final four weeks; the relisted, repriced property generated seven showings and an accepted offer within twelve days.
There is no RECO bulletin, TRESA provision, or CREA rule that prescribes how many comparables a CMA must use, how far back they may be pulled, or how condition must be adjusted for — comparative market analysis methodology sits outside the regulatory framework entirely, governed by professional practice rather than a codified standard. That absence is the actual point of this file: nothing in the regulatory structure would have caught this error before six weeks of lost market exposure did.
What did apply was the general duty every agent owes a client under RECO’s own framework — disclosure and competent service to the client’s best interests. A CMA built on mismatched comparables is not a disclosure violation in the FINTRAC or TRESA sense, but it is a professional-competence failure with a real, measurable cost: six weeks of reduced buyer traffic and a seller increasingly anchored to a number the market was never going to support.
The seller relisted at $357,500, matching the revised CMA, and accepted an offer twelve days later at $354,000 — roughly $36,000 under the original six-week-old list price, and a faster, cleaner sale than the first listing had produced. The second agent now builds every CMA with a condition column next to each comparable’s adjusted price, specifically so a client can see, at a glance, which comparables are actually alike and which needed adjustment.
The cost of a mismatched CMA is not fixed — it depends on how much slack the broader market has to absorb an overpriced listing before buyers simply stop looking at it. CREA’s July 2026 national release put the sales-to-new-listings ratio at 51.3%, inside its own stated “balanced market conditions” band of roughly 45% to 65%, with 4.7 months of inventory nationally — a market with real but not overwhelming buyer demand, not one so hot that an overpriced listing still finds a buyer anyway, and not one so slow that every listing sits regardless of price. In that kind of market, an 8–9% pricing error built on the wrong comparables genuinely costs weeks of exposure rather than being absorbed by sheer buyer volume.
Related reading: the glossary walkthrough of how a comparative market analysis is actually built, and a related file where the reset that finally worked used the same board-level data this file leaned on: an overpriced listing and a tired seller.
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