My take on why the next two years could be the toughest yet for GTA agents

By Sam Kamra | Sales Representative, Re/Max Millennium Real Estate | Founder, Listing.ca

Walk into any brokerage office in the GTA right now and you'll notice something: half the desks that used to be full are empty.

Not because people are out showing houses. Because they're gone. Quietly, without a press release, without a goodbye post on Instagram, a growing number of Toronto-area real estate agents have let their licences lapse over the past two years. And if you talk to anyone who's actually worked in this industry through the boom and the bust, none of it comes as a surprise.

I've been in this business long enough to watch cycles come and go, but this one feels different. As a Toronto sales representative with Re/Max Millennium Real Estate, and the founder of listing.ca, I've built my career on staying in the trenches through both the booms and the busts — and this one feels permanent for a lot of people.

The Numbers Don't Lie

During the pandemic frenzy, it seemed like everyone and their cousin got licensed. Multiple offers, bidding wars, houses selling $200,000 over asking in a weekend — of course people wanted in. Real estate looked like free money, and for a stretch, it basically was.

That window has closed. Sales volumes across the GTA have cooled significantly from the 2021-2022 peak, average days-on-market have stretched out, and commission income for a huge chunk of agents has dried up. When the deals stop closing, the bills don't stop coming — brokerage fees, board dues, insurance, marketing costs. For agents who were doing one or two deals a year to begin with, that math stopped working a while ago.

A Hidden Tax Problem Few Are Talking About

There's a financial time bomb sitting underneath this slowdown that most buyers and sellers never hear about: HST collected on commissions.

When an agent closes a deal, they collect HST on their commission that's supposed to be set aside and remitted to the CRA. But I know a lot of agents who, when times got tight, dipped into that money to cover day-to-day living expenses — rent, car payments, groceries — treating it like it was theirs to spend instead of money they were holding for the government.

With so many agents having done little to no business over the past 12 months, my prediction is a wave of them are going to find themselves unable to pay that money back when it comes due at year-end.

I think the next two years are going to be very bad for a lot of realtors in the GTA. You've got agents who are stretched thin, with barely any sales activity compared to what we saw over the last five-plus years, and now a chunk of them are going to owe money to the CRA they simply don't have. Naturally, the number of licensed agents in this city is going to start shrinking significantly.

I'm already seeing the fallout directly in my own business. As Sam Kamra, I've picked up so many listings recently from sellers who tell me the agent they used before is no longer licensed. The annual dues, the marketing expenses, the staging costs — it all got too expensive for them to keep going, so they packed it in and moved on to jobs that didn't require so much upfront investment with zero guarantee of ever getting paid.

Rethinking Staging: The Rise of Virtual AI Staging

One of the biggest upfront costs I point to is traditional home staging — and it's part of why I've shifted my own listings toward virtual AI staging instead.

Physical staging can run you a fortune, and there's no guarantee the house sells in the timeline you budgeted for. I've started using virtual AI staging on my listings instead, and it's helped me tremendously — both in winning new listings and in showcasing a seller's home beautifully, without the massive upfront cost.

I include the AI staging as a value-added service within my commission, rather than billing it separately, and it removes one of the biggest financial risks sellers and agents take on with a traditional staging contract. With physical staging, if the house doesn't sell in the first month, you're often looking at paying roughly half the original monthly cost for every additional month it sits. That adds up to tens of thousands of dollars fast, and I know that firsthand.

I recently staged a luxury property that didn't sell within the first two months, racking up more than $10,000 in staging costs alone in that window. Unfortunately, the seller ended up deciding to move back into the home rather than keep pushing to sell. All of that marketing and staging money is a complete loss for me — I can't recover it unless he decides to relist down the road, which I think he will. He understands the market is in a really difficult place right now. Two of the offers we received came in $200,000 to $250,000 below his expectations, and honestly, I don't blame him for stepping back.

What This Means for Toronto Buyers and Sellers

For the public, a smaller pool of agents isn't necessarily bad news. Fewer part-time or under-resourced agents in the market generally means the people who remain are handling more volume and more complexity — which should tell buyers and sellers something about who they want representing them in what is, for most families, the biggest financial transaction of their lives.

If you're buying or selling in this market, my advice as a top-producing Toronto/GTA sales representative hasn't changed: work with someone who's been through a cycle before, someone who can explain the numbers and the risks in plain language, and someone who isn't going to disappear from the industry the moment things get hard.

Where This Goes From Here

I don't think this shakeout is finished. Between softer sales activity, rising costs, and the looming CRA reckoning I expect many agents to face, I believe the next two years will separate the agents built for the long haul from those who got into the business during the boom and never adjusted.

It's going to be a rough road for a lot of good people who simply got caught in a market cycle they didn't create. But the agents who come out the other side of this are going to be a smaller, more serious group — and honestly, this business probably needs that.