What the price numbers on this site actually mean

Most real estate sites show you a number and leave you to guess what it is. This one is built on a single public feed with known limits, so it is worth being explicit about what each figure is measuring — particularly if you are about to make a decision with it.

Every price here is an asking price

The listing data on this site comes from CREA's Data Distribution Facility, the same feed that powers REALTOR.ca. It carries homes that are currently for sale. It does not carry sold prices, and it never has — sold data comes from a different feed under different rules.

So when a community page says the median asking price in a municipality is some figure, that is the midpoint of what sellers are asking today. It is not what homes are selling for. In a market where homes routinely close under asking, the two numbers diverge; in one where they close over, they diverge the other way. Either way they are different measurements and this site will never label one as the other.

Sold-side figures — median sale price, sales volume, sale-to-list ratio — come from the Windsor-Essex County Association of REALTORS® monthly report, and wherever they appear they carry the source and the period alongside them. If a number on this site has no source line, it is a live asking figure from the feed.

The asking median and the sold median are not the same population

This is the mistake worth spending a paragraph on, because the numbers sit close enough together to invite it.

As of 22 August 2026 the median asking price across active Windsor-Essex homes was about $599,000. The median sold price reported for July 2026 was $509,500 (Source: WECAR, July 2026). The gap is roughly $90,000, and it is very tempting to read that as "homes sell for about $90,000 under asking."

That reading is wrong, and the actual sale-to-list figure proves it: sold homes came in at 100.1% of their asking price in July 2026 (Source: WECAR, July 2026). Essentially list price. Over the twelve months to July 2026 that figure never fell below 99.7% and reached 103.2% (Source: WECAR, August 2025 through July 2026).

Both things are true because the two medians describe different sets of houses. The asking median describes everything currently for sale — including the homes that have been sitting for months precisely because they are priced above what anyone will pay. The sold median describes only the homes that actually found a buyer. Over-priced inventory accumulates in the first group and never enters the second, which pushes the asking median up without any individual seller discounting anything.

The rule that follows: you may compare an asking figure to another asking figure, or a sold figure to another sold figure. Subtracting one from the other produces a number that means nothing.

The sold-side numbers, and what each one answers

Three figures appear on the market report, and they answer different questions.

Sale-to-list ratio answers did sellers get their asking price? It is the one number that survives the population problem above, because each sale is compared to its own list price rather than to the market's.

The MLS® HPI composite benchmark answers is the same house worth more than it was? It tracks a constant notional home, so unlike the median it cannot be moved by which houses happened to sell that month. In July 2026 it stood at $579,100 (Source: WECAR, July 2026) — well above the $509,500 median, again because they are measuring different things rather than disagreeing.

Months of inventory answers how long would it take to sell everything currently listed at the current pace? It was 4.3 in July 2026 (Source: WECAR, July 2026). Under roughly four months is conventionally read as favouring sellers and over roughly six as favouring buyers, but it is an arithmetic ratio, not a forecast.

Median, not average

Community pages report a median. That is deliberate.

An average is dragged around by extremes, and Windsor-Essex has plenty of them: a single riverfront property or a large parcel of farmland can move an average across an entire municipality without changing anything a normal buyer would notice. The median is the middle listing — half above, half below — and it moves only when the bulk of the market moves.

It also matters that these medians count homes. The feed is not residential-only; it carries vacant land, retail units, industrial buildings and businesses. Any figure here described as being about homes excludes those. A count that quietly included a warehouse would be a wrong answer to the question you asked.

Price per square foot has thin coverage

Floor area is optional in the feed, and only about a quarter of active listings publish it. Price per square foot is therefore computed from the listings that report it, not from all of them — which is why it appears with that caveat attached wherever it is shown.

It is still a useful number for comparing similar homes in the same area. It is a poor number for comparing municipalities, because which listings choose to report floor area is not random.

Days on market is measured from the listing's first entry

The feed records when a listing first entered the MLS® system. That is the clock this site uses, and it is reported as a median rather than an average for the same reason as price: there are genuinely ancient listings in the pool, and a handful of them will pull an average somewhere useless.

One consequence worth knowing: a home that has been relisted appears as a new entry. Days on market tells you how long this listing has existed, not how long the house has been trying to sell.

Where to go from here

• Live inventory, price bands and walking access by municipality are on the community pages.
• Payment maths, including the semi-annual compounding Canadian mortgages actually use, is in the mortgage calculator.
• Ontario land transfer tax, including the first-time buyer refund, is in the land transfer tax calculator.
• Everything currently for sale is on the listings page, unfiltered and ungated.