How Accurate Is the HouseSigma Estimate for Your Toronto Condo?

The HouseSigma estimate for a Toronto or GTA condo is good at what a listing record carries: what has sold in your building, and when. It is weak at what the record does not carry. Floor, exposure, whether parking and a locker are deeded, the fee trend and the status certificate can move the real number well away from the app's figure, up or down. This article does not measure HouseSigma's error rate. It shows what the estimate can see and what it cannot, and how I read both it and the estimate on this site.

What HouseSigma is actually calculating

I open HouseSigma every week, and Zolo and Wahi too. They are good at one job: showing me what has closed in a building and when. The estimate sitting on top of that data is a model. It reads the fields in a listing record: the square-foot range, the number of bedrooms, the building, the dates. In a tower with three hundred similar units that is a lot of raw material, which is why the number looks so confident. HouseSigma says as much itself: its own note on estimated values calls the figure a starting point for your research, not a number to follow to the letter.

The problem is what a listing record carries unevenly, or not at all. Floor. Exposure. Whether the parking spot was deeded or rented. Whether a locker came with the sale. What the fees were doing. What the status certificate said. A working broker reads all of that. A model reads whatever the form carried, and that includes the model on this site. Any automated estimate, ours included, is the start of the conversation, never the number you list at or offer at.

Floor and exposure: the same floor plan, two different prices

Take two identical layouts in one tower at Yonge and Eglinton. One is high up with an open view over the ravine. The other is on the fourth floor facing the next building's wall, with a construction crane arriving next year. Same square footage, same building, same bedrooms. The estimate may not reliably tell them apart. A buyer standing on the balcony does, in about five seconds.

I see the same thing at Yonge and Sheppard in Willowdale, along Yonge and Highway 7 in Richmond Hill and Thornhill, at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre and in downtown Markham. Buyers pay for light, view and quiet. Layout counts too. In North York and York Region, a family-sized suite with a closed kitchen sells to a different buyer than a glass-box one-bedroom-plus-den, and the model prices both as square feet.

Parking and locker: deeded, and in the number or not?

In many GTA buildings the parking spot and the locker are separately deeded. Some sales include them, some do not, and sometimes they were sold on their own. The record often does not say. So an estimate can blend units with parking and units without into one figure. Yours may be sitting on the wrong side of that blend.

This matters more north of the city. In Richmond Hill, Thornhill and Markham nearly everyone I work with drives, and the families often want two spots, one for each parent. A deeded spot there is worth a meaningful amount, more than downtown, where some buyers skip parking altogether. If you are downsizing from a house in North York into a condo, parking is probably the first thing you will ask me about.

Maintenance fees and the status certificate: what no model can open

Two buildings can post the same sale prices last year and be worth different things this year. One has a healthy reserve fund. The other has a special assessment coming. That difference lives in the status certificate. Under Ontario's Condominium Act, 1998 the status certificate discloses the reserve fund position and any pending litigation, and the Condominium Authority of Ontario sets out what it must contain. Ours does not order that document, and I have not seen one that does. It has to be requested from the corporation, and someone has to sit down and read it.

Fees work the same way. A fee that has climbed sharply over three years changes what a buyer will pay, whatever the model says, because the buyer carries that fee every month for as long as they own the unit. When the app number and the fee trend disagree, trust the fee trend.

How should you read Team Asgarian's Our Take estimate?

Every condo listing on this site that is not one of our own carries a block called Our Take. It is a model too. For a condo it works from the building's own closings, the unit's property tax bill, its size, bedrooms and bathrooms, and the maintenance fee. It shows a likely sale price against the asking price, a separate value that never sees the asking price, and the reasons the figure landed where it did: which facts raised it and which lowered it.

It shares the blind spots in this article. Floor, exposure, whether the parking spot is deeded, where the fees are heading and what the status certificate says all sit outside it, and condition stays an in-person call. So read Our Take the way I am asking you to read HouseSigma, as the opening of the conversation. Send me the building and the unit, and I will go through the comparables with you and tell you what still needs checking before anyone puts a number on paper.

How I value a unit: a recent Yonge and Eglinton request

Recently an owner near Yonge and Eglinton asked me what their unit was worth. They already had the app number. Here is what I did before I gave them mine. I pulled every sale and every expired listing in that building and its direct competitors. I checked which of those sales included a deeded parking spot and a locker and which did not. I put the unit's floor and exposure against each comparable. I looked at the fee trend over the last few years. And I asked about the status certificate before I said a number.

Those checks are what decide whether the app number is usable or dangerous for a given unit. The process is a comparative market analysis, and after 15+ years in the GTA market it is still the only way I will put a number on a condo. It also matters who is asking. A family in North York doing trade-up math, parents helping a child buy a first unit in Thornhill, or a couple refinancing all need the real number, not the rounded one.

Timing makes this sharper. As of TRREB's Q2 2026 Condo Market Report, the average GTA condo apartment sold for $634,972, down 7.5% from a year earlier, while sales rose 8.8% and new listings fell 19.0%. Any estimate that leans on recorded closings can lag a market that moved that much, whichever way it moves next.

When to trust the app and when to call someone

Trust the app for a rough range, for watching how a building is trending, and for deciding whether the question is even worth asking. Do not trust it, or ours, for setting a list price, writing an offer, a renewal or refinance conversation, or choosing between two units. Those are the moments where a wrong number costs real money.

If you are selling, read How to Sell Your Toronto Condo in a Buyer's Market next. If you are buying, anchoring on the app number is one of the Five Common Mistakes People Make Buying a Toronto Condo. For the full picture, start with A Complete Guide to Buying and Selling in Toronto's Condo Market and the rest of our condo guides.

Send me the building and the unit number and I will go through the comparables with you and tell you what still needs checking before anyone puts a number on paper. Fill out the form at the bottom of the page, or book a free consultation. Stay well and take care.