Why homeowners who would sell for the right price don’t list

Most Edmonton homeowners aren’t looking to sell, and if you asked, they’d probably say they have no plans to call an agent or put a sign on the lawn anytime soon. But if you asked whether they’d move for the right price, the answer often changes. They might not be selling, but many homeowners do have a price in mind.

That gap, between the homeowners who are selling and the much larger group who would sell for the right price, raises a question: if so many owners would sell at the right price, why can buyers only find a house in the month or so it’s publicly listed?

Rory Sutherland has spent his career studying how people make decisions, and he has seen the same pattern. He’s the vice chairman of the advertising agency Ogilvy in the UK, where he started its behavioural science practice, and he wrote Alchemy, a bestselling book about why our choices often don’t seem logical. You may also have heard him on podcasts like The Diary of a CEO or Modern Wisdom.

Deciding not to list a home you’d sell for the right price is exactly the kind of choice Sutherland studies, and he’s tested it himself. When he speaks to groups of about 200 people, he first asks who has their house on the market, then asks who would consider selling if they got a reasonable offer. In a 2024 column for The Spectator, he wrote that every time he has asked, the second group has been more than four times as big as the first. As he said, “I even got the same result in Canada.”

A show of hands at a talk isn’t the same as a survey, and it can’t tell us exactly how many Edmonton homeowners would sell at the right price. Still, the direction is hard to ignore, and the owners in that second group are the ones buyers have no way to find. At Windfal, we’re betting that if these homeowners had a quiet way to be found, without listing and without giving up control, many of them would use it. And some of them would find out that a buyer at their price was there all along.

Why can a home only be found once it’s listed?

It isn’t because homeowners are hiding their homes. It comes down to how selling works. The standard way for buyers to find a home is for it to be listed, and a listing doesn’t come on its own. It comes with a commitment. It’s public, so anyone can see that you’re selling, and it’s on the clock from the day it goes up. And once it’s out, it’s hard to take back.

Being found and being committed go hand in hand. If you want buyers to know about your home, you have to be ready to sell it right away and in public. In Alberta, that means signing a listing agreement with a brokerage, preparing the house for photos, and keeping it ready for showings. For homeowners who have decided to sell, every one of those steps makes sense. For homeowners who would only move for the right price, it’s a lot to take on just to find out whether a buyer exists, so their homes stay hidden.

In September, the average home sold in the Greater Edmonton Area spent around 30 days on the market, according to the REALTORS® Association of Edmonton. That means a home can be owned for years and be findable for only about a month before it sells. For the rest of that time, the buyer who wants it most has no way of knowing it could be available.

What if your home could be found without being listed?

This is the problem Windfal aims to solve. A Windfal profile is a page for your home, and it separates being found from being committed, much like LinkedIn does for a career. A LinkedIn profile isn’t a job application; it lets the right opportunity find you whether or not you’re looking. A Windfal profile does the same for a home.

You set the price you’d actually sell for, and your home becomes discoverable to vetted agents and their buyers, who are the only people who see that price. Nothing about it is on the clock, and you can change your price or remove your profile whenever you want. Since your home was never listed, there’s nothing to take back. And because a profile isn’t built to sell a home within a month, it can show what you value most about living there, whether that’s the light through the trees at golden hour or the office you just finished renovating.

This is also where Windfal’s approach differs from Sutherland’s. Sutherland has his own answer: a government rule that would put every home on the market permanently. No one would be forced to sell, because an owner who didn’t want to could simply name an absurdly high price. More homes should be findable, but two things should be different. It should be the homeowner’s choice, not a rule. And the price shouldn’t be a polite way of saying no. On Windfal, it’s the price you’d actually accept, so it speaks for you and tells the other side of a possible deal how serious you are before anyone has talked.

That changes the conversation. Every home on Windfal belongs to an owner who has set a price they’d sell for; the home just isn’t listed on the MLS. When an agent reaches out, they already know you’d sell and at what price, so the main question is whether their buyer can meet it.

Doesn’t that mean buyers at my door?

It’s natural to worry that being discoverable would mean a steady stream of agents and strangers reaching out about a home that was never listed. If Windfal worked that way, it would be a good reason to avoid it.

Windfal is designed to work the other way. Every agent must apply and have their credentials checked before they can message a single home. Agents can see your profile, including your home’s address, your price, and any other details you add, but the only way they can reach you is through a message inside Windfal. Your phone number and email are never shared, and you decide whether to respond. You can also see who the agent is before you reply, so you know exactly who you’re dealing with. We’ve also developed a strict no-spam policy and remove any agent abusing the platform.

What should change, and what should stay the same?

Another concern is that people have tried to change how homes are sold for years, and it hasn’t changed for a reason. There’s some truth in that. Buyers still work with their agents, lawyers still handle the legal side, and offers still come with conditions. None of that needs to change, and Windfal doesn’t try to change it.

That includes agents. Over the past several years, a lot of the new technology in real estate has tried to take agents out of the deal. That’s the wrong direction. A good agent knows what their buyer wants, understands the local market, and knows how to close a deal. That’s why Windfal is built to work with agents. They’re the ones who connect the right buyer with a home, and Windfal helps them find homes they would otherwise never know about.

What needs to change is the link between being found and being committed. With a Windfal profile, you can set your price and find out whether the right buyer is already out there: someone who has been looking for a home like yours, in your neighbourhood, at a price that works for both of you. And finding out doesn’t commit you to anything.

If you’d like to see how your own home would look, you can set up a profile for free at windfal.com.