How Many Offers on a Property?

One of the advantages agents claim to provide is being able to tell you how many offers a property has on it. That can be useful, as it can influence what you may want to offer a seller. If only you could easily accomplish the same feat! First, a quick understanding of what the regulations are. According to REBBA 2002, if you are making an offer on a property agents must reveal to you the number of offers (but not their contents)

26. (1) If a brokerage that has a seller as a client receives a competing written offer, the brokerage shall disclose the number of competing written offers to every person who is making one of the competing offers, but shall not disclose the substance of the competing offers.  O. Reg. 580/05, s. 26 (1).

That means you don’t need to be an agent to get this information. That means that getting that information can be as simple as calling them and asking.

Internally most brokerages in Ontario use one of two tools to manage offers: BrokerBay and ShowingTime. These are tools internal to brokerages, which show listing information, contact information, and the number of registered offers for the property. TRREB brokerages use BrokerBay. Conveniently enough, these tools are not available to the general public, only to agents. That is why at Zero Value Realty we created our own tool which extracts that information and makes it available to our registered customers, bypassing this artificial barrier. However, even though all TRREB agents have BrokerBay available to them, and ZVR will give you the information it contains, that doesn’t mean that information is necessarily accurate. That is, if there are offers counter there you can be sure that they exist. But if an agent simply doesn’t use it, doesn’t let offers be automatically registered through BrokerBay, and then doesn’t update it, it can be inaccurate. That is why sometimes BrokerBay will show having zero offers on the property but when called the agent might say there are some. You can of course ask the agent to please use the tools available to record them.

Remember that you can also always contact the listing agent directly (such as by phone and email) even without our automation, as they are liable to reveal this to anyone making an offer.