What a Price Reduction Actually Costs You in the Mission

Starting too high costs about $14,000 and a month of your time. Across Upper Mission, Kettle Valley, Lower Mission and Crawford Estates, detached homes sold in July 2026 at 96.6% of their current list price but only 95.9% of their original asking price. That 0.7-point gap is the price cut, and over the last nineteen months it has averaged 1.06 points. On a $1,265,000 home that is roughly $13,800 that never had to be given away.

Two different percentages, and why the second one matters

Almost every market report quotes sale-to-list ratio. It is the number that sounds reassuring: 96.6% means homes sold within a few percent of asking, so pricing must be roughly right. The problem is that “list price” means the price on the day it sold, not the price it launched at. If a home is listed at $1.5M, cut to $1.35M in week six and sells for $1.31M, its sale-to-list ratio is a healthy 97%. Its sale-to-original ratio is 87%, and that is the number the seller actually lived.

Tracking both, and watching the gap between them, is the only way to see what overpricing costs. Matrix publishes both for the Mission neighbourhoods, so the gap is measurable rather than a matter of opinion.

Month	Of list	Of original
Feb 2026	97.4%	96.1%
Mar 2026	96.7%	96.5%
Apr 2026	97.3%	96.4%
May 2026	97.7%	96.8%
Jun 2026	96.6%	94.4%
Jul 2026	96.6%	95.9%

June is the month worth staring at. Sale-to-list was a perfectly respectable 96.6%, identical to July. Sale-to-original was 94.4%, the worst reading of 2026. The homes that closed in June had, on average, been repriced hard before they sold. Nothing in the headline number shows that.

The cut and the calendar move together

Split the last nineteen months into the ones where the gap was a point or less and the ones where it was wider, and the days-on-market figures separate cleanly.

Months where the gap was	Count	Median days to sell
1.0 point or less	11	37
More than 1.0 point	8	64

Months with narrow gaps averaged 37 days on market. Months with wide gaps averaged 64. That is roughly an extra month of showings, of keeping the house tidy, and of carrying costs, on top of the money.

Why the first three weeks decide it

A listing gets its largest audience in its first two or three weeks. That is when the alerts fire, when the agents who have been watching the neighbourhood look, and when the buyers already searching see it as new. Price it above that audience’s range and they filter it out before they ever open the photographs. By the time the number comes down, the people it was aimed at have moved on, and the buyers still looking can see the price history.

That is the mechanism behind the numbers above. The reduction does not reset the clock; it arrives after the best audience has already gone.

What this looks like in the current market

There is a favourable side to July’s figures. Inventory across these neighbourhoods sat at five months, down from eight a year earlier, and only 68 new listings came to market against 211 active. Fewer comparable homes means less to be measured against. Sellers who price correctly are landing at 96.6% of ask in a median of 38 days, which by the standards of the last three years is a good outcome.

The discipline is the same as it has been since 2022. Price to what the market has actually paid, not to what you hope the market will find. In 2021 the market forgave an ambitious number because there was nothing else to buy. It does not any more.

Getting your own number right

The figures here are the combined average across these neighbourhoods, which is the right way to read a trend and the wrong way to price a specific house. What your home should list at depends on its own street, size, age and view. I run that from board sales data rather than an automated estimate on my home valuation page, and the broader process is set out in the selling guide. The monthly figures behind this post live on my market report, and if you are weighing a move within the area, start with Upper Mission homes for sale.