How to run an offer night in Ontario: a listing agent’s step-by-step

An offer night is the part of a listing your seller remembers. It is also the part with the most moving pieces in the fewest hours: registrations arriving by text and email, buyer agents calling for the count, a seller on speakerphone, and an irrevocable that runs out at eleven. Most of what goes wrong on the night was decided days earlier. Here is how to set one up so the night itself is the easy part.

Decide whether to hold offers at all

Holding offers makes sense when you expect more than one serious buyer in the first week: a well-priced home in a tight neighbourhood, a condo with little competing inventory, a detached house under a price threshold buyers are searching at. It works against you when the list price is a stretch, because a quiet offer night announces the stretch to every agent who saw the listing.

Talk it through with the seller before the listing goes live, and put the plan in writing: the offer date and time, whether you will consider a pre-emptive offer, and how you will handle competing offers. Your seller’s answers to those three questions shape everything that follows.

Set the date and write the instructions

Most offer dates land six to eight days after the listing goes live, which gives buyers two weekends of showings. Pick a time that gives you room to review: a 6 PM presentation with offers registered by 5 PM is a common pattern. Write the offer instructions once and use the same words everywhere they appear:

• • The offer date and the time offers will be reviewed.
• • How and where to register an offer, and by when.
• • What to include: the agreement of purchase and sale, schedules, a copy of the deposit cheque or draft, and a signed confirmation of cooperation.
• • Whether the seller will look at pre-emptive offers, and on what terms.
• • Whether a status certificate, home inspection or other report is available in advance.

Put the instructions in your offer remarks and your showing instructions, and keep them short enough that a buyer agent reads them. The offer remarks field on most Ontario boards is small, so the essentials belong there and the rest can live on a registration page.

Know what you can disclose about competing offers

This is where most of the phone calls come from, and the rules changed with the Trust in Real Estate Services Act (TRESA) in December 2023. The count of competing written offers is disclosed to every buyer who has made a written offer; that has not changed. What changed is the content.

Under TRESA, the seller can choose to share the content of competing offers, or selected parts of it, with everyone who has made an offer. The seller decides what is shared. RECO’s guidance is that the seller’s direction must be in writing before anything is shared (an email or a text is enough), and that nothing can be shared that identifies any of the people making the offers.

So before the night, ask your seller whether they want to share any offer content and, if so, what. Get that direction in writing and keep it with the file. Sharing the price of the top offer is a very different strategy from sharing nothing, and it is your seller’s call to make, informed by your advice. If you are unsure how a situation fits the rules, your broker of record is the right person to ask.

Run registrations in one place

The count is the number every buyer agent wants, and it is only accurate if registrations come in one door. A registration page or a single email address works; a mix of texts, emails and voicemails does not, because the count you give at 4:45 will be wrong by 5:00.

As each registration arrives, record the brokerage, the agent, their contact details and the time, and confirm receipt. When the count changes, tell every registered agent at the same time, in the same words. Consistency is fairness here, and it is also what protects you if a buyer agent later says they were told something different.

On the night

• • Have every offer printed or open side by side before the seller joins, sorted by price and then by conditions.
• • Check each deposit, irrevocable time, closing date and condition against the actual document, not the cover email.
• • Note the earliest irrevocable. It is the real deadline for the evening.
• • Walk the seller through net proceeds at each price, not only the headline number. A slightly lower firm offer can net more than a higher conditional one once the risk is priced in.
• • Decide with the seller whether to accept, sign back one offer, or send everyone back for improvements, and communicate that decision to every agent the same way.

If you send offers back, set a clear new deadline and repeat the count to everyone. Keep notes of what was said to whom and when; a short log written during the night is far more reliable than your memory the next morning.

The morning after

If you accepted an offer, the listing moves to conditional or firm, the deposit and condition dates start counting, and the unsuccessful agents deserve a quick thank-you. If nothing was accepted, the listing needs to change: take the offer date down on your board, rewrite the offer remarks, and talk to the seller about what the night told you about price.

Either way, keep a record of every registered offer and its documents. It is part of your transaction file, and it is the first thing you will want if a question comes up later.

Where software helps

None of this needs special tools, but the counting and the paperwork go faster when registrations arrive in one place. Listing Launchpad gives each listing an offer registration page, alerts you as registrations come in, keeps every offer’s documents on the listing, and asks you the morning after how the night went so the listing is updated before lunch.