La Cité-Limoilou: How Negotiation Changes With Building Size

In Quebec City's La Cité-Limoilou, a house sells over asking more often than under it. A building with 4 or more units does the opposite. Duplexes and triplexes sit in between, one step at a time. Our overview of the city is in our Quebec City real estate market article; this one isolates a single mechanism: the gap between the asking price and the sale price, depending on how many units a building has.

269 sales, one window, four building types

The figures come from CourtiConnect's comparable sales database for the La Cité-Limoilou area, rentals excluded. The window runs from October 4, 2025 to September 10, 2026. Over that period the area recorded 494 sales, 269 of them houses and income properties: those are the ones examined here. Condos are not included.

Only aggregates are published, type by type: number of sales, median price, share sold over asking, and median sale-to-list ratio. No individual sale is shown. The ratio and the over-asking share are calculated only on sales with a known asking price, and that count is given on each line.

The numbers, from the smallest building to the largest

• House: 44 sales, median $538,500; 63.9% sold over asking (23 of 36); median ratio 102.4%.
• Duplex: 79 sales, median $550,000; 55.6% over asking (40 of 72); median ratio 101.7%.
• Triplex: 83 sales, median $625,000; 51.3% over asking (39 of 76); median ratio 100.4%.
• 4+ units: 63 sales, median $760,000; 32.1% over asking (18 of 56); median ratio 97.0%.

The "4+ units" category groups fourplexes, fiveplexes and a few six-unit buildings. Sales closed at exactly the asking price are rare: 3 houses, 5 duplexes, 8 triplexes and 1 building with 4 or more units.

The more units, the less often a sale beats the asking price

Read from top to bottom, the list goes down without exception. The share sold over asking moves from 63.9% for houses to 55.6% for duplexes, then 51.3% for triplexes and 32.1% for buildings with 4 or more units. The median ratio follows the same order, from 102.4% to 97.0%.

The turning point sits between the triplex and the 4+ unit building. Up to the triplex, the median sale still closes above asking. Beyond it, the median sale closes below, and close to two thirds of buildings with a known asking price (37 of 56) sell under it.

In Terrebonne, our analysis of selling time by property type already showed that building type changes how fast a property sells. Here, it is the direction of the negotiation itself that changes.

Two kinds of buyers, two ways of setting a price

The database measures the gap; it does not measure its cause. What follows is an interpretation, not a measurement. A house or a duplex attracts buyers who plan to live there. They compare the property with other homes for sale, and when several of them want the same one, the competition is settled through price.

A building with 4 or more units mostly attracts buyers who are purchasing it for its income. Their price is worked out from rents, expenses, and the financing a lender will grant on those figures. That framework leaves less room for bidding up: past a certain price, the building no longer finances on the terms the buyer has set. Our database contains no rents or building income, so it cannot put a number on that effect.

What these medians don't tell you

Sample sizes range from 36 to 76 sales depending on the line. That is enough for an order of magnitude, not for a result to the decimal: a few sales more or less would move each percentage.

The asking price used is the one on the sale listing. The database does not say whether that price had already been reduced before the deal. A building sold at 97% of an already-reduced price may have been negotiated further than the ratio shows.

Finally, these figures describe one area over one period. This article does not compare them with the previous year, and they say nothing about a specific building, whose value depends on its condition, its leases and its street.

What sellers and buyers can take from it

For a house or duplex seller, the asking price often works as a starting point: most sales in the area went past it. Setting it too high takes that momentum away from the listing.

For a seller of a 4+ unit building, the asking price works more like a negotiation ceiling. A complete file from the day of listing, with leases, income and expenses, gives the buyer and their lender the figures they reason from.

For a buyer, the same reading runs the other way: an offer under asking is the norm on the area's larger buildings, and the exception on houses. Either way, a property's value is measured against truly comparable sales.