Seller Advice
How Long Does It Actually Take To Sell A Home In Calgary Or Airdrie?
It’s the first question every seller asks. Here is the honest answer, taken from every home we’ve sold since 2017 rather than from a market average.
Every seller asks it, usually in the first ten minutes, and usually before they ask what it’s worth.
How long is this going to take?
The typical answer is a board average — a number covering every home, of every type, in every corner of the city, most of which look nothing like yours. It sounds authoritative and tells you almost nothing.
So here is a different answer. Not the market’s number. Ours.
Our Median Days On Market, By Year
Every home the Tara Molina Real Estate Group sold, 2017 to today.
| Year | Median Days | Slowest |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 71 | 262 |
| 2019 | 43 | 351 |
| 2020 | 53 | 280 |
| 2021 | 22 | 332 |
| 2022 | 15 | 191 |
| 2023 | 14 | 174 |
| 2024 | 13 | 77 |
| 2025 | 26 | 108 |
| 2026 (so far) | 24 | 215 |
Median, not average — one 351-day listing would drag an average into fiction. 2017 is left out because we only sold three homes that year, which isn’t a sample.
Seventy-One Days. Then Thirteen.
Look at 2018 and then look at 2024.
Same team. Same photographer. Same marketing, the same conversations, the same effort. Seventy-one days, then thirteen.
Nothing about how we work changed by a factor of five. The market did.
2018 was the tail of Alberta’s slow stretch — inventory everywhere, buyers taking their time, and homes sitting. By 2022 through 2024 it had flipped completely: not enough listings, buyers competing, and well-presented homes gone in under two weeks.
2025 and 2026 are the interesting part. Twenty-six days, then twenty-four. Not the frenzy, not the freeze. Something closer to normal, which most people in this market have genuinely never sold into.
If somebody tells you confidently how long your house will take before they’ve seen it, they’re not reading the market. They’re guessing.
The Part The Median Hides
A median is a tidy number, and tidy numbers lie by omission. So here is the shape underneath it.
Across every home we’ve sold since 2017:
- 48 of them sold in under a week.
- 49 of them took more than ninety days.
Roughly one in ten either way. So when we say the median this year is twenty-four days, understand what that actually means: about one seller in ten will be done inside a week, and about one in ten will still be waiting after three months. Both of those are normal. Neither means anything went wrong.
The longest we’ve ever had took 351 days. It sold.
Presentation is the one variable you actually control.
So What Actually Moves It?
Three things, and only one of them is fully yours.
The market. Not yours to control, and the single biggest factor. Seventy-one versus thirteen wasn’t skill. It was the year.
The price. Yours, and the most expensive place to be wrong. An overpriced home doesn’t sit still — it goes stale, and then the price drop arrives from a position of weakness rather than choice. This is why we’d rather have an uncomfortable conversation at your kitchen table than an uncomfortable one at day sixty.
The presentation. Entirely yours, and the one people underestimate. We can prove that one against ourselves: one of our own homes took a hundred and five days in a year when our median was seventy-one. It was occupied, mid-divorce, and couldn’t be styled. Same marketing, same agent, thirty-four days longer. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s the clearest evidence we have that how a home shows is not decoration — it’s the number.
What This Means For You
If you’re selling this year, plan for something in the region of three to four weeks, and build your life around a range rather than a date. Don’t hand in notice on the strength of a median.
If you’re buying, the same numbers read differently: a home that’s been up for sixty days in this market has a reason, and it’s worth finding out what it is before you decide it’s a bargain.
And if you’re simply curious what yours would do — that’s a conversation, not a form. We’ll give you a range, the reasoning behind it, and where your house sits against what we’ve genuinely seen on your street.
Want The Number For Your Street?
We’ve sold more than 500 homes across Calgary and Airdrie since 2017, and the whole record is on one map. Zoom in on your community and see for yourself.
Some of these numbers aren’t flattering. There’s a 351 in there, and a 262, and a year where the median was seventy-one days.
But you can’t make a good decision from a number designed to win your listing. You can make one from this.
— Tara Molina