Of every 1,105 St. Ann and St. Mary listings since January 2025 that reached a final outcome, sold, under contract, cancelled, or expired, only 373 actually sold or went under contract. The other 732, 66.2%, ended in cancellation or expiration. That’s two out of every three. And “cancelled” and “expired” aren’t the same failure, they tell you different things about what went wrong.
Most people use “the listing didn’t sell” as one category. MLS data treats it as two, and the distinction is more useful than it looks.
What “expired” actually means
An expired listing ran out its full contract term without a buyer. Nobody pulled it. The seller kept it on the market, the agent kept marketing it, and the market simply never produced an offer that closed. That’s the passive failure: full exposure, no result.
In our data, 472 listings expired since January 2025, the larger of the two failure categories by a wide margin, 64.5% of all unsuccessful listings. The median expired listing was priced at JMD $56,864,907, well over the JMD $30,000,000 median for listings that actually sold. An expired listing is the market’s clearest verdict on a price: it had every chance, and buyers still passed.
What “cancelled” actually means
A cancelled listing is different. Someone, the seller or the agent, ended it early, before the contract term ran out. That’s an active decision, not a clock running down, and it can mean several different things: the seller changed their mind about selling, switched agents, took the property off the market for personal or financial reasons, or pulled it deliberately to reset the price rather than let it limp to expiration.
Cancellation can also follow something more specific than pricing. We’ve written before about how a title defect discovered mid-sale can stall a transaction, and about how graves found on a property can change a seller’s calculus entirely. Either can turn into a cancelled listing that has nothing to do with the asking price.
260 listings were cancelled in our data, with a median price of JMD $55,981,296, almost identical to the expired median. That similarity matters: cancelled listings weren’t meaningfully cheaper or more reasonably priced than expired ones. Whatever’s driving cancellations, it isn’t that sellers are cancelling well-priced listings and only overpriced ones expire. Both groups were priced roughly the same, nearly double what actually sells.
Why the distinction matters if you’re buying or selling
If you’re a buyer evaluating a property that’s been re-listed, the history matters. A property that expired and came back at the same price is a seller who hasn’t absorbed the market’s feedback yet, there’s real room to wait or negotiate. A property that was cancelled and relisted lower is a seller who already adjusted once, which tells you they’re paying attention, but doesn’t tell you they’re done adjusting.
If you’re a seller, the practical lesson is blunter: don’t let a listing expire if you can help it. An expiration is a permanent data point. Every future buyer’s agent pulling comparables sees a property that sat on the market for its full term and still didn’t move. A cancellation followed by a fresh listing at a corrected price, ideally before the old one runs out, doesn’t carry the same signal. It’s the difference between a market verdict and a mid-course correction.
The number that should reframe how you read “market activity”
Here’s the part worth sitting with. Two-thirds of everything that reaches a final outcome in St. Ann and St. Mary doesn’t sell. Not “some deals fall through.” Two out of three. When you’re pricing a listing, or reading a market report that only talks about what sold, you’re looking at the smaller slice on purpose. The bigger story is in the 66.2% that don’t make it, and increasingly, the answer to why comes down to price, not bad luck.
For a closer look at what’s currently active on the market in each parish, see our St. Ann and St. Mary market reports, and keep this 66% in mind while you read them: an active-listings snapshot shows you what sellers are asking, not what buyers are actually paying. If you’re trying to figure out which side of that 66% your own listing might land on, that’s exactly the conversation our selling services start with.