What Do Expired, Withdrawn and Cancelled Mean? 242 Toledo Cases

Your listing came down and somebody handed you a word for it without explaining what the word costs you. The number that settles it is this. Of 242 Greater Toledo listings that went expired or cancelled between October 2025 and early April 2026, 137 came back on the market with a new MLS number inside six months, 84 of those closed, and the ones that closed sold at a median 3.9 percent under the list price that had just failed. On a $400,000 asking price that is about $15,600. Not the twenty or thirty percent haircut sellers brace for when the sign comes down.

I pulled that from 85 NORIS exports, 12,835 deduped residential listings, matched expired and cancelled listings to their own relists on parcel number because a relist comes back with a new MLS number. Everything below is from that pull or from the listing agreement and the statute, both re-read at the source today.

What do expired, withdrawn and cancelled mean in the NORIS MLS?

Start with a correction to what this page used to say, and to what most agents will tell you. This post previously said cancelled was not an MLS status at all, that there was no button for it. That was wrong, and the data says so.

In the NORIS export, off-market listings carry distinct status codes, and the counts across every pull on file are these.

Status	Code	Listings	Carries a cancellation date
Expired	E	678	1 of 678
Cancelled	L	320	320 of 320
Hold	H	101	0 of 101
Withdrawn	W	0	n/a

Three things fall out of that table. Cancelled is its own status, with 320 listings in it, and every single one of them carries a populated cancellation date while almost no expired listing does. Hold is a fourth state nobody talks about, where the house is off the public market and has not been expired or cancelled. And withdrawn, the word everybody uses, returns zero rows in this export, which means either that NORIS routes those to hold or that the status is not in use. I am not going to tell you which, because I cannot prove it from the file.

What each one does to your paperwork is the part worth your attention.

Expired. Every written listing agreement in Ohio has to carry an end date. Ohio Revised Code 4735.55 lists "an expiration date" at subsection (C)(1) as a required term. The Northwest Ohio REALTORS form grants the brokerage the exclusive right "from" a commencement date "through midnight of the" expiration date, and no further. When that midnight passes, the listing drops and the authority behind it drops with it. Nobody signs anything.

Cancelled. The agreement was ended before its own end date, which takes your broker's agreement to let you out. That is why these records carry a cancellation date and expired ones do not: a date got entered because a decision got made. If your agent told you the listing was cancelled, something was signed or agreed, and you want to know what.

Hold. The house is dark on the public sites and your agreement is still running. This is the state people usually mean when they say withdrawn, and it is the one where sellers assume they are free and are not.

Are you free to hire someone else, or still under contract?

If your listing expired, you are free. The authority ended at midnight on its own stated date. You can interview anyone.

If it was cancelled, look for the document. A cancellation is a mutual act, so there is a piece of paper or an email behind it, and that paper is your proof you are out.

If it is on hold, you are probably still under contract with that brokerage even though the house looks gone from Zillow. Off the public sites and out of the agreement are two different conditions, and the second one is the one that controls who you can hire tomorrow.

So read the top of your own agreement before you read anything else. The commencement date and the expiration date are in the first paragraph, and the status your agent put the listing in tells you which of the three you are holding.

Does your old agent still get paid if you sell now?

This is the fear I hear most and it is smaller in the contract than it is in your head. On the standard Northwest Ohio REALTORS Exclusive Right to Sell form, paragraph 3 is titled Extensions and Protection Period, and it is narrow. The old broker is owed a fee after expiration only where the property goes to a party "with whom there have been negotiations and/or showings with the REALTOR/Broker or its cooperating brokerages during the contract period" and where you "knew or had been advised in writing of such contact."

Read that twice. It covers one named buyer the old brokerage brought around itself, and only if you were told in writing. A stranger who finds your relisted home next month is not on that list.

Then the same paragraph says this, and it is the most useful sentence on the form: "In the event the Seller lists said real estate with another licensed real estate Broker within the protection period, then the REALTOR named herein shall not be entitled to any commission whatsoever, and the REALTOR's right to a commission during the protection period is thereby expressly waived."

Signing a new listing agreement wipes out the old broker's protection-period claim. The form is written to let you move. Two cautions. The number of days in that clause is a blank on the form, filled in when you signed, so yours could be thirty or one hundred eighty and you have to look. And brokerages do use custom contracts, which is the whole reason you read yours instead of an article about a form.

If I relist, does it sell, and for how much?

This is the question sellers ask me first, and almost nobody publishes an answer to it with local numbers behind it.

Every listing in the group below went expired or cancelled between 2025-10-01 and 2026-04-03, and every one is followed for exactly 180 days afterward, so a listing that died in March is not being judged on less runway than one that died in October.

Price band at the failed listing	Dead listings	Came back inside 6 months	Closed inside 6 months
Under $250,000	36	38.9%	27.8%
$250,000 to $450,000	106	59.4%	37.7%
$450,000 and up	100	60.0%	34.0%

Across the whole group, 137 of 242 came back and 84 closed. Treat the come-back rate as a floor rather than a measurement: if a relist is missing from the export, this method reads it as a house that never returned, so the true share is higher than the number shown.

The price is the part that should settle your stomach. Of the 84 that closed, the median sale came in 3.9 percent below the list price that had just failed, and 70.2 percent closed below it. That held in both bands with enough closings to measure: 4.8 percent under in the $250,000 to $450,000 band on 40 sales, 2.8 percent at $450,000 and up on 34. The band under $250,000 produced only 10 sales, too few to put a median on. The market was not telling you your house was worth far less. It was telling you the number was off by a few percent, and that a few percent is enough to make a house invisible in a crowded field. If you want the per-foot arithmetic behind that for your own street, it is on the price per square foot page for Greater Toledo.

Timing: the homes that came back and closed did it a median 91 days after going off market, with the middle half landing between 57 and 131 days.

Should you wait before you put it back on?

The common advice is to rest the listing and come back fresh in a better season. This data does not support it.

The median gap between going off market and signing a new listing was 4 days, and 84 of the 137 relists, 61.3 percent, were back inside a week.

When it went back on	Relists	Closed inside 6 months	Sale vs the failed list price
Within 7 days	84	67.9%	2.7% under, at the median
After 7 days	53	50.9%	6.0% under, at the median

The ones that went straight back on sold more often and gave up less. The direction held inside all three price bands, though the band-level counts are too thin to quote on their own. I would not read this as proof that speed itself sells a house. I read it as sellers who already knew what they were changing moving fast, and sellers who were stuck staying stuck. Sitting out a quarter did not repair anything on its own.

Did a price cut save the listings that cut?

No, and this is the finding I would want if the house were mine. A price cut before the listing died was more common among the listings that died than among the listings that sold, inside every price band.

Price band	Dead listings that had cut	Closed listings that had cut
Under $250,000	55.6% (of 36)	25.4% (of 2,599)
$250,000 to $450,000	52.8% (of 106)	32.3% (of 1,109)
$450,000 and up	36.0% (of 100)	30.1% (of 309)

A cut is a symptom of a listing in trouble, not a cure for one. Dropping the number five percent and waiting is the most common thing a stalled seller does, and on this data it is also the most common thing a seller does right before the listing expires. The gap narrows at the top of the market, where cutting is closer to normal.

What that points at is the thing to fix before the number: what a buyer sees, what a buyer's inspector will find, and what your house costs against the four others they are comparing it to that week. When I walk a house I am looking for water, for downspouts dumping against the foundation, for siding and soffit, for a window seal that is gone. I am not a home inspector and you still need one. But I can tell you which two or three items are quietly taking thousands off every offer, and whether yours is a pricing problem or a presentation problem. If it sat without selling, the fuller diagnosis is here.

What this post will not tell you

Three things came out of the draft because they did not survive their own check, and you should know what they were.

1. The expired listings in this export have a much higher median price than the ones that closed. I am not publishing that, because these exports are paged by price range and the gap reverses sign depending on which file you look at. In one export the dead listings run $462,950 against $413,250 for closings; in another, $84,950 against $114,900. That is the export, not the market.
2. Whether relisting at the same price beats cutting it. Pooled, holding the number looked better. Inside the $250,000 to $450,000 band it flipped. A finding that changes direction by bracket is not a finding.
3. Any month-by-month trend in relist rates. The coverage check scored r = +0.96 between how many rows a month contributes and its relist rate, which means the trend is the extract and not the calendar.

If you came here from a page quoting a single Toledo median or a national ranking for the year, those are also gone. The borrowed market figures this post used to carry were nearly a year old and read as current.

What's your next move?

Find out which of the four words applies to you, because expired, cancelled, hold and relisted each send you somewhere different.

Send me your property address and your old listing agreement. I will read the protection clause in your contract and tell you three things: the date you are clear, whether any one buyer is still attached to the old brokerage, and a parcel-level relist number for your house on today's Greater Toledo data. That read is free and it is yours whether we work together or not.

If you are weighing doing it yourself this time, the owner-listed numbers are here, and what the sale costs you is here. If your listing lapsed and you want the next-steps version of this, I wrote My Listing Expired in Greater Toledo. Now What? The full playbook lives at Your Home Didn't Sell.

Call or text me at 419.540.8659, or grab a time at calendly.com/adam-geuy.

Adam Geuy, Realtor - Blacktree Realty. ABR, PSA, SRS. Greater Toledo, Ohio.

Sources

• NORIS MLS exports, 85 files under data/noris/, deduped on List Number with later pulls winning, residential only: 12,835 listings, status census of 678 expired / 320 cancelled / 101 hold / 0 withdrawn, and the 242-listing expired-or-cancelled cohort with its 180-day relist chain matched on parcel number. Pulled and computed 2026-10-15. Reproducible from stats.py in this package.
• Ohio Revised Code Section 4735.55 - subsection (C)(1) requires an expiration date in every written agency agreement; (C)(7) requires the disclosure that broker fees "are not set by law, are fully negotiable." Retrieved 2026-10-15.
• Northwest Ohio REALTORS Exclusive Right to Sell listing agreement (Rev 7-2021) - the grant of exclusive right "through midnight of the" Expiration Date, and paragraph 3, Extensions and Protection Period, quoted verbatim above including the blank day count and the express waiver on listing with another broker. Full text extracted from the live document 2026-10-15.