Most pages about high-end real estate talk about service, discretion and global networks. The thing that actually changes above a certain level is far less glamorous and far more consequential.

The market gets thin. Fewer sales, fewer buyers at any given moment, and properties that are less like one another. Everything else on this page follows from that single fact.

Which means pricing is harder, because pricing works by comparison and comparison needs a sample. Time behaves differently, because a smaller buyer pool takes longer to produce an offer. And a regional or even a community figure becomes useless, because the pocket is the market and the pocket may have had very few sales.

We are not going to define a price threshold for you, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. There is no number at which a home becomes luxury. What there is, is a point at which your property sits in the thin part of its market, and that depends on the lot, the community, the housing type and how unusual the house is rather than on a price label.

A home can be the most expensive on its street and still have plenty of comparables. A modest-looking house on an unusual lot can have almost none. The second one is the harder transaction, whatever either is worth.

So the first question is not what band you are in. It is how many genuinely matched comparable sales exist for your property, and the answer to that changes how everything else should be handled.

Pricing a home means finding recent sales of genuinely similar properties and reasoning from them. The quality of that reasoning depends entirely on the sample.

At the upper end three things degrade the sample at once. There are fewer transactions overall. The properties are less alike, because a bespoke renovation, an architect-designed build or an unusual lot can make a home close to unique. And each individual comparable therefore carries more weight, so one unrepresentative sale distorts the picture more than it would lower down.

The consequence that nobody enjoys hearing. The honest output is sometimes a range rather than a figure, and occasionally the honest output is that the sample cannot support a confident conclusion at all.

An agent who produces a precise number with total confidence on three thin comparables is not being more competent. They are overstating what the data can carry, and the cost of that lands on you as a reduction weeks later.

What good practice looks like here. Each comparable shown to you individually, with the address or at least the street, what it originally listed at, what it sold for and how long it took. Then an explicit statement of how confident the figure is and why. Then what would change the view.

Our guide to reading the housing market yourself explains why a regional average is the least useful figure available and what to read instead. That applies everywhere and it applies hardest here.

At any given moment there are fewer households able and willing to transact at the upper end, and that changes the shape of a sale.

Those buyers are frequently not in a hurry. They often have somewhere acceptable to live, they are usually choosing between quite different properties rather than similar ones, and the decision is discretionary in a way that a first move or a growing family's move is not.

So longer time on market at this level is a characteristic rather than a symptom. Which produces a practical instruction: compare days on market against similar properties in similar pockets, never against the wider municipal figure, because the wider figure is built mostly from faster-moving housing.

Where that cuts against the seller. It means planning the timeline and the carrying costs honestly before launch rather than discovering them in month four, and it means being clear in advance about what you will and will not do if nothing happens for a while.

And where it cuts against the easy diagnosis. At this level, showings without offers does not automatically mean the price is wrong, which is the usual reading lower down. It can equally mean the right buyer has not arrived yet. Distinguishing those two is a judgement call about the specific pocket and it is one of the places experience genuinely matters.

What you want from an agent is the distinction being made explicitly, with reasons, rather than a reflexive push to reduce or a reflexive instruction to wait.

The marketing fundamentals do not change at the upper end. What changes is that there is less margin for getting them wrong, because a weak launch in front of a small buyer pool wastes a larger share of your total available attention.

What genuinely matters. Photography that does the property justice rather than flattering it into something it is not. Floor plans and accurate measurements, which matter more as homes get larger and less conventional. A presentation that explains what is actually unusual about the property, since at this level the distinguishing features are frequently not obvious from photographs. And reaching the real buyer pool, which requires knowing who that is.

What is largely theatre. The claim that a private international network will produce a buyer that broad exposure would not. Occasionally a genuine off-market relationship matters. Usually that claim is a way of describing ordinary marketing in more impressive language, and the test is simple: ask what specifically in the plan is different because of this property, and who the likely buyer is. If the answer would be identical for any home at that price, it is not a plan.

And the launch question that applies everywhere. A new listing gets its largest burst of attention immediately, from the people already watching that segment. At the upper end that audience is small, so spending it on photography that was not ready, or on a price nobody will engage with, is more costly than it is lower down.

Our complete guide to selling in Richmond Hill covers the launch sequence in full.

Discretion comes up more at this level than anywhere else, and it is worth separating the legitimate version from the sales pitch.

The legitimate version. There are real reasons a household may not want their home publicly marketed or openly shown: personal safety, a confidential family or business situation, who lives there, or simply not wanting neighbours and colleagues to know. Those are sufficient reasons and nobody should have to justify them further.

The cost, stated plainly. Limiting who sees a property limits the number of buyers who can compete for it, and competition is what produces the strongest price. So an off-market or exclusive arrangement is normally a decision to accept a potentially weaker price in exchange for privacy and control.

Which is a perfectly rational trade when privacy is the reason. It is not a rational trade when it is presented as a route to a better price through a private network, because restricting exposure does not normally increase competition. If an agent proposes it on that basis, ask them to explain the mechanism.

And there is a middle course most sellers are never offered. Full exposure with controlled access: no open houses, appointment-only showings with qualification requirements, limited interior photography of private areas, and specific instructions about what is and is not published. That preserves the competition while addressing most of the privacy concern.

Whatever route you choose, get the arrangement in writing and have your lawyer look at the agreement. The terms of an exclusive arrangement are the whole substance of it.