Upsizing in Markham: What the Step Up Actually Costs

The gap is not the cost

The number most families carry in their head is the difference between the two prices. It is always the smaller number.

Take a move from a $900,000 townhouse to a $1,400,000 detached home. The gap is $500,000. The actual cost of making that move includes:

Item	On this example
The price difference	$500,000
Ontario land transfer tax on the purchase	$24,475
Legal fees on two transactions	Quoted by your lawyer
Commission on the sale	Agreed in the listing agreement
Moving and work the new home needs on arrival	Varies widely

There is no first time buyer refund on a second purchase, so the full land transfer tax is payable. Our post on land transfer tax in Markham works through the brackets and our post on closing costs covers the rest.

Markham is in York Region, so there is no municipal land transfer tax on top. The same move inside the City of Toronto would carry a second tax of similar size.

Why a rising market pushes you to move sooner

This is the piece of arithmetic most worth understanding. It runs against instinct.

When you are moving up, you own the cheaper asset and you want the dearer one. If both rise by the same percentage, the home you are buying gains more in dollars than the home you are selling. Ten percent on $1,400,000 is $140,000. Ten percent on $900,000 is $90,000. The gap widened by $50,000 while you waited.

The reverse is also true: a falling market narrows the gap and helps an upsizer. That is the honest version. It is the reason we do not tell people to wait for a better moment. Nobody knows which direction the next year goes. What we can say is which way the arithmetic works for your specific move. That is a real input to the decision.

Sequencing, which matters more than timing

You are a buyer and a seller at once. There is no order that removes all the risk, so choose which risk you prefer.

Selling first gives you a known budget. On an upsizing move that matters more than people expect, because moving up usually means stretching and you want to stretch to a real number rather than an estimate. The cost is that you may not have found the next home yet.

Buying first gives you certainty about the destination. That matters here, because a detached home in a particular school area or a particular pocket of Berczy or Cornell comes up less often than a condo does. The cost is exposure: you own two homes until your sale closes. You are carrying both.

Either way, the closing dates are negotiable on both transactions and that is the lever most people forget. A longer close on your sale buys you shopping time. A purchase that closes a few days before your sale gives you room to move without a night in between.

Our post on sell first or buy first works through the same decision from the downsizing side and the mechanics of the two closings are identical even though the conclusions differ.

Bridge financing and porting a mortgage

Two tools do most of the work on an upsizing move.

Bridge financing covers the gap when your purchase closes before your sale does. Lenders generally want your sale to be firm before they commit, because a firm sale is what proves the money is arriving. It is priced as a short term loan with a set up fee plus daily interest, so the cost depends heavily on how many days you need. Arrange it through your lender and your lawyer together and early.

Porting means carrying your existing mortgage rate and terms to the new property, typically with a top up at current rates for the additional borrowing. Whether it helps depends on how your existing rate compares with today’s and on what breaking the mortgage instead would cost in penalty. Ask your lender to quote both in writing. It is an easy comparison to run and an expensive one to skip.

What is available in Markham and at what price

TRREB’s community medians for January to March 2026, across all property types:

Community	Median sale price, Q1 2026
Cornell	$977,000
Greensborough	$980,100
Wismer	$1,048,000
Box Grove	$1,177,500
Cathedraltown	$1,200,000
Berczy Village	$1,232,000
Angus Glen	$1,349,000

Families moving up in Markham generally head toward the newer communities in the north and east, where detached family homes are concentrated. Our guides to Berczy Village, Wismer, Cornell and Angus Glen cover what each is like.

If schools are part of the decision, confirm the boundary with the school board for the specific address. In Ontario the home address determines the assigned school, boundaries change and a listing is not a reliable source.

The question we ask before anything else

Should you move at all?

It is worth pricing the alternative properly. Compare the full cost of moving, land transfer tax and commission included, against the cost of an addition, a finished basement or a reworked main floor and what that work would do to your own home’s value.

Where the gap is small, staying and building is often the better financial decision. It is also the less exciting one, which is why it gets skipped. We would rather tell you that before you list than have you discover it a year later.

If you are weighing it up

Bring us the two numbers, what your home would sell for today and what you are looking at buying. We will put the real cost of the move in front of you, including the land transfer tax, the sequencing options and what bridge financing would cost for your likely gap.

No obligation and no pressure. If the honest answer is that this is not the year, we will say so.