Sellers rarely ask to overprice on purpose. It usually starts with something reasonable. A neighbour's unit sold for a certain number two years ago. An agent quotes a high number to win the listing. A seller just wants room to negotiate down from something. Whatever the reason, the math on what it actually costs rarely gets spelled out, so here it is.
It doesn't just mean slower. It means less.
The instinct is that overpricing costs you time, not money. You'll just wait a bit longer for the right buyer, the thinking goes. That's not usually how it plays out. A unit that sits too long picks up a stigma. Buyers and their agents track days on market, and a stale listing signals something's wrong, even when nothing actually is. By the time a seller drops the price to where it should have started, buyers have already mentally filed the unit as "the one nobody wanted," and offers come in lower than if it had been priced right from day one.
The carrying cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet
Every extra month on the market is a month of maintenance fees, mortgage payments if you're carrying one, property tax, and insurance, none of which stop just because your unit hasn't sold. On a typical Harbourfront unit, that can easily run into the thousands per month. Three extra months of sitting isn't just three months of waiting. It's real money leaving your pocket while you wait for a buyer who might have shown up in week one at the right price.
The price-cut spiral
Here's the pattern I see most often. A unit lists high, gets a slow trickle of showings, sits for three or four weeks, then gets a price cut. The cut brings a small bump in activity, but not the flood of interest a fresh, correctly-priced listing gets. Weeks pass, another cut follows, and now the listing has two or three price reductions attached to its history, visible to every agent and buyer looking at it. Each cut reads as one more piece of evidence that something's off, even when the only thing that was ever wrong was the starting number.
What correctly priced actually buys you
A unit priced to the current market, based on what's actually closed in your specific building recently, gets its best shot in the first two weeks, when the most buyers and agents are paying attention. That's when multiple showings turn into competing offers, and competing offers are the only real leverage a seller has left in a market like this one. Overpricing doesn't protect that leverage. It burns it.
If you're weighing where to list, I'd rather show you the actual recent comparables in your building than a number designed to make you feel good for a week before the market corrects it for you.