Realtor numbers drop at Canada’s largest real estate board

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.’”