If the number stands, 2024 will mark TRREB’s first year-over-year drop in membership in decades.Richard Buchan/The Canadian Press
Higher professional fees, lower transactions and increasingly complex market is seeing many long-time realtors leave the business in Ontario, though in other markets the numbers are still growing.
“I think it’s become a little onerous, there are some older members in the brokerage I work for that are hanging up their hat at the end of this year,” said Julie Sergi, a broker with Royal LePage Burloak Real Estate Services and chair of Cornerstone, Ontario’s second-largest real estate board with just under 9,000 members. “For seasoned agents, it’s been a much tougher year than it has been in the past. Some of them have been in a business a long time – they are almost at that 40-year mark – but there’s a sentiment out there that ‘I don’t even care to get there.’”
Toronto realtor Scott Ingram tracks membership at the largest real estate board in the country, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. The drop at peak renewal time – from December, 2023 to January, 2024 – was 8 per cent (to about 69,000 from the December peak of 75,496), making it the steepest fall since 1991.
“There’s always a dip when people don’t renew,” said Mr. Ingram, who noted about half the initial drop has been clawed back through new memberships in 2024, with the number of real estate agents in the board now at just over 73,000. If that number stands, 2024 will mark TRREB’s first year-over-year drop in membership in decades. Mr. Ingram calls it “a culling of the herd.”
TRREB declined to comment on the state of its membership, saying in an e-mailed statement that it doesn’t discuss such trends. However, according to e-mail blasts sent to members obtained by The Globe and Mail, TRREB has claimed new data-sharing products had cut into the number of realtors who held dual-memberships to access TRREB data as well as their own local market information. In a separate message, TRREB has acknowledged “challenging market conditions” as the organization proposed to raise its fees $60 “to address a trend in declining membership.”
The slowdown may not be limited to the Toronto region, according to the Real Estate Council of Ontario.
According to RECO, there were 112,000 registrants in the province at the end of 2023, nearly three times the 43,300 realtors it registered in 2003. Over the past two decades, thousands of new agents joined the industry every year with an average growth rate of 4.8 per cent annually. Some years – such as between 2008 and 2009 during the so-called Great Recession – saw growth slow to 2.6 per cent, many years saw growth closer to 7 per cent and one outlier year (2020-2021) saw more than 11 per cent growth. While 2023 ended with another high-water mark in terms of raw numbers, it also had the slowest growth in this entire period at 2.16 per cent.
It’s a pattern that has repeated across the country even in provinces that showed record growth in recent years. Nova Scotia’s 2,242 agents as of 2023 was just 2 per cent higher than the year previous, only two years after the province saw a 14 per cent spike in 2021. New Brunswick shot up from 1,025 realtors in 2020 to 1,426 in 2023 (40 per cent growth) but in 2023 things slowed to a slightly less torrid 5 per cent growth from the 20 per cent jump between 2020 and 2021. Alberta bucked this trend by accelerating growth to more than 9 per cent in 2023 as it hit 15,049 realtors, amid an overall climb of 22 per cent from 12,285 in 2020. Numbers reported by Quebec’s OACIQ (Association des courtiers et agents immobiliers du Québec’s) saw strong growth of 4 per cent in 2023 to reach 17,406 members, which is still below the 20-year high mark of 19,638 set in 2010 (followed by a decade of declines until membership started growing again in 2019).
Mr. Ingram also notes that Ontario punches well above its weight in the real estate profession: for a province with 40 per cent of Canada’s population, it has 70 per cent of the 166,000 realtors the Canadian Real Estate Association counts in the country. TRREB alone has 45 per cent of all the realtors in Canada.
But industry pros say the industry is losing veteran agents and replacing them with realtors who are part-timers.
“The majority of the agents we’re seeing leaving are retiring,” said Scott Macpherson, vice-president, professional development for Right At Home Realty in Toronto. “We’re also seeing a lot more agents that are part-time,” he said. “They are coming into the industry saying, ‘I’ll dip my toes in the water to see how it goes,’ and decide if they want to do it full time.”
Davelle Morrison, a broker with Bosley Real Estate Ltd., said that the fees for realtors are the same whether it’s part- or full-time, and they add up with thousands of dollars directed to real estate boards, the Ontario Real Estate Association, and RECO. In recent years, she noticed a spike of new realtors coming from COVID-19-shuttered industries such as hospitality and tourism, drawn to real estate because it seemed like easy money.
“I think people do find out it’s not as easy as they think it is,” she said. “I remember seeing someone in our office who worked in an events space; they were here because there were no events. That person’s no longer here. I asked ‘Whatever happened to so and so?’ They went back to the other job they were doing before.”
Some new real estate salespersons have thrived in the topsy-turvy COVID-era market, but even they are seeing less activity from other realtors. Anya Ettinger with Bosley Real Estate Ltd. got her license in 2020 and began using social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram to help build up her profile.
“In 2021, every single realtor was trying to get on social media. But I found that as the market started to turn, the amount of real estate content and amount of realtors started to taper off,” she said. “Perhaps some of them left the industry, but I’m not seeing as much content as I did before.”
The reality is that a huge volume of TRREB agents aren’t doing much actual home selling.
“According to my research through a third-party company that tracks transactions, just over 43,000 agents were credited with one or more transactions in the past 12 months,” said David Fleming, a broker with Bosley Toronto Realty Group Inc. “Over 14,000 agents were credited with exactly one transaction.” By process of elimination, that means almost 30,000 TRREB agents did no transactions at all. Mr. Fleming said the data he quotes comes with an accuracy range of 2.5 per cent, “and there are always agents who specialize in leases, or do pre-construction sales that don’t show up in the data, but this isn’t enough to move the needle.”
Ms. Ettinger recalls recent frustrating conversations with a buyer’s agent who kept sending her the wrong documentation to close a transaction.
“I think Ontario is the only place you get into real estate as a hobby,” she said. “Everywhere else it’s a career.
“There should be a much higher barrier to entry – that would make a big difference. Less about quantity, and more about quality.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Ontario has 15 per cent of Canada's population. The province represents 40 per cent of the country's population. This version has been updated.