I am writing this for the person whose listing came off the market without selling, probably in the last week or two.
The sign is gone. The MLS number is dead. You have most likely spent a few evenings since then deciding that the house is worth less than you thought, or that your agent was wrong, or that you missed the window by a season. Before you commit to any of those explanations, it is worth knowing what the rest of the city did over the same stretch, because the honest answer to “was this normal?” turns out to depend almost entirely on what kind of home you were selling.
So I pulled it. Every Calgary residential listing that resolved one way or the other in the twelve months to August 11, 2026.
What actually happened to your listing
There were 38,439 of them.
Of those, 21,153 sold. 6,277 expired, meaning the listing agreement ran its full term and the home came off the market without a sale. That is the outcome you are sitting with. A further 11,009 were terminated, which is the code for a listing that ends early rather than running out.
That third bucket is where inflated failure rates come from, and it is worth understanding before we go any further. Terminated is not a synonym for failed. The MLS does not record a reason for any termination, so nothing in this data counts why they happen, but the ones I see in practice are mostly ordinary: a seller moving to a different brokerage, a relist with new photos at a new price, a renovation that came up, a job transfer that fell through, a decision to rent it out instead.
I checked how often those homes came back. Of the 13,166 unique addresses that hit expired, terminated or withdrawn at least once in that year, 4,476 reappeared on the MLS and sold inside the same twelve months. That is 34 per cent, measured by exact address match. Roughly a third of the homes in the failed pile were not finished.
Which means any figure that counts every non-sale as a failure is describing something other than failure. So every rate in this post uses the strict version instead: expired listings divided by expired plus sold. Terminated listings are excluded from both halves of that fraction entirely. It is the conservative reading rather than the alarming one, and some genuine failures are certainly sitting in the terminated pile where this method cannot see them.
The citywide number was never your number
Here is the part that changes the conversation.
| Property type | Sold or expired | Expired share | Median days to sell |
|---|---|---|---|
| Detached | 13,537 | 18.3% | 24 |
| Apartment | 6,739 | 33.9% | 38 |
| Row / townhouse | 4,456 | 22.9% | 31 |
| Semi-detached (half duplex) | 2,620 | 17.9% | 27 |
| Full duplex | 78 | 24.4% | 22 |
Calgary residential listings that resolved between August 11, 2025 and August 11, 2026. “Expired share” is expired listings divided by expired plus sold, with terminated listings excluded. “Median days to sell” covers sold listings only. Source: Pillar9 MLS data, retrieved August 11, 2026.
The distance between the top and the bottom of that column is 16 percentage points. An apartment listing was nearly twice as likely to expire as a semi-detached one. That is not a rounding difference between segments, and it is not something a single citywide figure can survive being averaged into.
The last column does the same thing to a number you may have been given at the listing appointment. If the timeline you were quoted was 30 to 45 days, look at the last column again. Three of the five property types have a median below 30 days. Only the apartment sits deep inside that window, at 38 days, and row and townhouse listings sit right on its lower edge at 31. So a 30-to-45-day estimate was slower than the real median across most of the market, and it made an apartment timeline sound routine when apartments were the segment least likely to finish at all.
The table needs two caveats. The full duplex row rests on 78 listings and only 19 expiries, which is a fraction of the volume behind every other row, so treat its position in the ordering as unreliable. And the association between property type and expiry, large as it is, is an association, not a cause. Property type moves with the failure rate at a size too big to be noise, and that is a genuinely useful thing to know, but it is not the same as saying your property type is the reason.
If you want the one-line version: whatever benchmark you were given at the listing appointment, if it was a citywide figure, it was describing a market that includes both ends of that table.
If you were selling an apartment
This is the hardest segment in the city right now and there is no gentle way to present it.
Of the 6,739 apartment listings that either sold or expired in that year, 2,285 expired and 4,454 sold. A 33.9 per cent expired share. Roughly one in three. The apartment listings that did sell took a median of 38 days, the longest of any property type.
None of that is happening in isolation. CREB’s August 2026 figures put apartment months of supply at 5.68 against 3.92 for the city as a whole, and the apartment benchmark price down 8.18 per cent year over year against a citywide decline of 1.08 per cent. Both of those gaps widened over the month. Apartment supply pulled further ahead of the city’s, and the citywide price decline eased while the apartment one barely moved, so the apartment segment is now pulling away from the rest of the market on both measures at once, not simply carrying more listings per sale than the city average.
That supply figure is not inventory piling up, though, and the distinction matters. Apartment inventory actually fell 4.45 per cent year over year. Sales fell 25.84 per cent, and that is what pushed months of supply up: there are fewer apartments for sale than a year ago, and the smaller pile is clearing more slowly. The listing data and the supply data are describing the same conditions from two directions, the price side of which I mapped out in Calgary’s two-speed market.
It is not confined to one part of the city, either. Inside the 28 southwest and south Calgary communities I work in most closely, the apartment expired share was 30.8 per cent across 750 sold-or-expired listings, against 12.8 per cent for detached homes in those same communities. The gap between property types holds inside the submarket, not just across the city.
If your apartment listing expired, you were in the segment where that happened most often, in a market carrying nearly six months of apartment supply. That is context, not an excuse, and it does not tell you what to do next. But it does mean the explanation is unlikely to be something uniquely wrong with you or your unit.
If you were selling a detached home
The other end of the table looks quite different.
Detached listings expired 18.3 per cent of the time across 13,537 sold-or-expired listings: 2,483 expiries against 11,054 sales. The ones that sold went in a median of 24 days. In the southwest and south communities, detached performed better still, at 12.8 per cent across 1,949 listings, with a median of 18 days to sell. Row and townhouse listings sat at 22.9 per cent citywide and 15.5 per cent in the southwest set. Semi-detached homes came in at 17.9 per cent citywide and 15.8 per cent in the southwest.
Read that carefully, though, because there is a version of this that gets used to make sellers feel worse than they should. Even in the strongest segment in this data, roughly one in eight southwest detached listings expired. That is a segment selling faster than the citywide median and failing less often than it, and hundreds of perfectly good houses still came off the market unsold.
If you were selling detached and it expired, you were in the minority. You were not in a tiny or unusual minority.
What price did, and what these numbers cannot say about it
The obvious next question is whether the homes that failed were asking more than the market was paying. Here is what the data supports, and it is less than you would hope.
| Property type | Median list price, failed listings | Median close price, sold listings |
|---|---|---|
| Detached | $738,888 | $695,500 |
| Apartment | $319,000 | $300,000 |
| Row / townhouse | $447,900 | $424,000 |
| Semi-detached (half duplex) | $619,900 | $585,000 |
Same twelve-month window and same source. “Failed listings” here pools expired, terminated and withdrawn listings together, which is a wider group than the expired-only figures used everywhere else in this post. Full duplex is omitted from this table: at 78 listings citywide, it is too thin a segment for a price comparison to carry weight.
There is a gap in every row. Here is what that gap does and does not mean, in three parts.
These are two different groups of homes, not a before-and-after on the same houses. The left column is what one set of properties was asking. The right column is what a different set of properties closed at. A more expensive home is not the same home listed higher.
The left column also covers the wider failed pool, terminated listings included, so it does not line up with the expired-only rates in the tables above. Different populations, different questions.
And the important one: original list price is not available from Pillar9 for this query. I could not retrieve it, so nothing here measures whether a seller cut their price, by how much, or when. No part of this post is a measurement of repricing. What this table can honestly support is a description of two separate groups in the same market. What failed listings were asking, and what sold homes actually got. The gap is suggestive. It is not a finding about your house, and it is not proof that price was the cause of anything.
What this data cannot tell you, and who is about to call you
The MLS is a transaction record. It logs that a listing expired. It has no field for why.
There is no code for tired photos, no field for a lockbox that was hard to book, no record of the showing where the buyers loved it and their financing fell apart, no note about the offer that came in light and got declined on principle in March. Condition, presentation, marketing, feedback, the state of the basement, whether the dog was home: none of that is in the data, and any of it might be the actual answer for your house. This post can tell you how common your outcome was. It cannot tell you what happened at your address, and neither can anyone else who is working from MLS statistics.
Which brings me to something you have probably already noticed if you have searched this question.
Search “why didn’t my house sell” and a striking share of what comes back is not written for you. It is written for agents. Cold-call scripts for expired-listing owners, objection handlers for the first sixty seconds, letter templates, “expired listing” lead-generation products. That is a real and long-standing corner of this industry, and the mechanism behind it is simple: expired listings are visible to every agent in the city, so your address is now on a prospecting list. Your phone is going to ring, possibly a lot, possibly starting today.
Some of those calls will be from very good agents and one of them might be exactly right for your relist. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am obviously not a neutral party here. But it is worth knowing why the internet is so thin on an actual answer to your question. Most of the people writing about expired listings are writing about how to win one, not about what happened to it.
What to do next, in order
First, get the file on your own listing. How many showings, over how many weeks, and what came back in the feedback. Ask for it in writing. A home with thirty showings and no offers has a different problem from a home with four showings, and the fix is different in each case. This is the single most informative thing available to you and it is not in any dataset I can pull.
Second, decide whether you need to sell at all. If the move was optional, taking the home off the market is a legitimate answer and often the cheapest one. Nothing in these numbers argues that you must relist. A property that is not on the market is not accumulating days on it.
Third, if you do relist, change something real. Relisting the same package at the same number the following week asks the market a question it has already answered. Agents can see your listing history, so the relist arrives with context whether you want it to or not. Price, presentation, photography, or access for showings: pick the ones that match what your showing feedback actually said.
Fourth, price against what closed, not against what is listed. Active listings are asking prices, and some of them are asking prices that will expire too. Recent closed sales of genuinely comparable homes are the only evidence of what a buyer paid.
Fifth, when you interview agents, including the ones who cold-call you this week, ask a specific question. Not “what would you list it at,” which invites the highest number and rewards the wrong answer. Ask what they would do differently from the last campaign, and why. If the entire answer is “lower the price,” you are talking to someone who has not looked at your file.
Common questions
Why didn't my house sell?
The honest answer is that no dataset can tell you, including this one. The MLS records that a listing expired and never records why, so there is no field for condition, presentation, showing feedback, marketing, or the offer that came in and got declined. What the data can tell you is how common your outcome was for your property type, which is worth knowing before you conclude that something went uniquely wrong. The specific answer for your address lives in your showing count and your showing feedback, so that is the first thing to ask your agent for.
How often do Calgary listings actually expire?
Over the twelve months to August 11, 2026, counting expired listings against expired plus sold, 18.3 per cent of Calgary detached listings expired, along with 33.9 per cent of apartment listings, 22.9 per cent of row and townhouse listings, and 17.9 per cent of semi-detached listings. That is a 16 percentage point spread between the top and the bottom, which is why a single citywide figure is not a useful benchmark for any individual seller.
Is an expired listing the same as a terminated listing?
No, and the difference matters. Expired means the listing agreement ran its full term without a sale. Terminated means it ended early, which happens for many reasons that have nothing to do with failure: switching brokerages, relisting with new photos, pausing for a renovation, or a change of plan. Of the 13,166 Calgary addresses that hit expired, terminated or withdrawn at least once in the twelve months to August 11, 2026, 4,476 came back and sold within that same year, measured by exact address match. That is 34 per cent, which is why every rate in this post counts expired listings only.
Does an expired listing mean my home was overpriced?
Not necessarily, and this data cannot establish it either way. Failed listings across Calgary did carry higher median asking prices than the median closing prices of sold homes in the same window, but those are two different groups of properties rather than a before-and-after on the same homes, and original list price was not available for this query, so nothing here measures whether any seller reduced their price. Price is one candidate explanation among several, and showing feedback is what tells you whether it is yours.
Should I relist right away or wait?
It depends on what you learn from the first campaign, and on whether the move is optional. If the move is optional, taking the home off the market is a perfectly good answer. If you do relist, change something substantial first, because agents can see your listing history and relisting an unchanged package the following week asks the market a question it has already answered. Price, presentation, photography and showing access are the usual candidates, and your showing feedback should decide which ones.
Why do I keep getting calls now that my listing expired?
Because expired listings are visible to every agent in the city, and prospecting expired listings is a long-established part of the business. A large share of the material published online about expired listings is written for agents making those calls rather than for the seller receiving them. Some of those callers will be excellent. When you talk to them, ask what they would do differently from the last campaign and why, rather than asking what they would list it at, because that second question rewards the highest number rather than the best plan.
The honest version
Your listing expiring was a common outcome, and how common depends heavily on what you were selling. Roughly one in five for detached, one in three for apartments, with the property type mattering more than any citywide average could show. That is genuinely useful for calibrating how you feel about it, and close to useless for deciding what to do next, because the data that explains your specific house is not in the MLS. It is in your showing count, your feedback, and an honest reading of the last campaign.
Start there. Then decide whether you are selling at all, and only after that decide on a number.
When you're ready for the number, get a straight one
No listing pitch attached. If the answer is that you should wait, I will tell you that.
