Another calendar year is coming to an end, and around here it seems like it was just a short time ago that we were saying the same thing about 2021 and with 2022 on the immediate horizon just like 2023 is now. But one thing is for sure as it relates to the Canadian real estate market and working as a realtor in Canada; 2022 has been a whole lot more eventful in regard to home values and the market making a move in one direction or the other. For 2021 it was by and large that the market remained overheated and the ongoing pandemic continued to factor in a big way.

Here and now over the course of 2022 we’ve seen the market cool in a big way, and in many areas of the country median home values have dropped considerably. We’ve also seen how those declines haven’t resulted in widespread more affordable housing in the way some people had hoped, and we’ve also seen the unchanging reality that affordable housing is desperately needed in Canada and for some areas more than others. In fairness, the Federal Government is being proactive in trying to provide more affordable housing, but it’s definitely not an easy fix.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway – and the one that strikes the best balance between the interests of homeowner and prospective homebuyer – is that most real estate markets in Canada are considered to be balanced now here at the end of 2022. We’ll talk more about that in detail with this last weekly blog entry here for the year, and mention briefly as well that our online real estate lead generation system in Canada for realtors is an excellent resource for new realtors who may be finding it difficult to drum up new clientele no matter what the market conditions are.

70% in the Middle

Decreases in purchasing power and subsequent drops in demand now have about 70% of Canadian housing markets being balanced according to the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). Continuing the trend, November had sales and new listings falling across the country and it is interesting to note how 2022 saw the fewest new listings for that month for any November of the last 17 years.

Their comparison of sales-to-new listings ratios for 101 local markets came back with 69 of them being balanced, meaning supply of housing and demand for it are about the same. 21 checked out as being buyers’ markets and 11 could be seen to be a seller’s market. That’s quite the profound contrast from the beginning of this year when markets all across Canada were decidedly seller’s markets with stiff competition and rapidly rising prices prevailing.

That certainly changed about 3 months later, and quickly and drastically at that. Realtors and industry enthusiasts will know all about the workings of that, so won’t touch on that any further here.

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The report detailed further which local markets fell into 1 of 3 categories – buyer’s, seller’s, or balanced markets. Most showed themselves to be balanced and it wasn’t any truer for any region from Coast to Coast in Canada, plus also included some of the country’s most notable housing markets like Calgary, Montreal, and Hamilton-Burlington.

Some of the classic hottest housing markets came in as being buyer’s markets, including the standards Vancouver and Toronto as well as Vancouver Island, Victoria, and Mississauga. A buyer’s market, by definition, occurs when purchasers are in a more advantageous situation than sellers as a result of the number of homes on the market surpassing the number of buyers.

Other notables for this group include Niagara Falls-Fort Erie, Brantford, the GTA, Chilliwack, St. Catharines, Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge ON was right on the edge of going either way.

Of the 11 markets that came in as being seller’s markets, nearly all of them were in more remote areas where housing demand is typically never as high as elsewhere. That likely doesn’t come as a surprise, but areas like Timmins and Medicine Hat. Prince Albert, Northern New Brunswick, and Central Alberta are the furthest into buyers’ market territory.

One notable takeaway is that a senior economist at the CREA did say that all of this could change quite considerably come springtime 2023, adding further that it will be interesting to see what buyers do when listings start to come out in big numbers in the spring, along with the possibility of the Bank of Canada reversing its rate tightening and then possibly starting to cut them.

Real Estate Leads wishes all of you a Happy Holidays and Happy New Year and we’ll see you next week to have a look at what the Real Estate Market is Foreseen to do for 2023.

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Sign up with Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated buyer and / or seller leads that are delivered to only ONE realtor – You. You are the only realtor who will receive them, and these leads will be for folks near you who are genuinely ready to make a move in the local real estate market, and soon. It’s a great way to get more out of all the effort you put into building your real estate business by bringing new clients into the fold.

Generally speaking you’re going to be pretty good at what you do if you garner any degree of acclaim for it, and here at Real Estate Leads our online real estate lead generation system has a very long list of realtors who are ready to speak of just how helpful the system has been in helping them generate new leads. Some of whom become new clientele for their real estate business, and while that part of it is up to you the leads we provide are a genuine opportunity to be first-in-touch with people who are ready to make a move in your local real estate market.

And of course the important part of all of that is having the opportunity to do that before other realtors – your competition – become aware of them. Make no mistake about it – real estate is as much of a dog-eat-dog business as any and there are more realtors than there are slices of the pie to go around at all times and pretty much anywhere that you might be working as a realtor. So it is fair to say that we are indeed good at what we do and so with this blog entry we’re going to stay in the lane we know best – talking about real estate leads, and specifically with a focus on lead generations strategies that exist outside of the bounds of Internet marketing principles.

Save for number one on this list of best real estate lead generation strategies at least. Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and get the advantage for yourself and immediately see why using a real estate lead generation service IS at the top of the list here.

1. Subscribe to a Real Estate Lead Generation Service

Generating leads via free, organic strategies is still going to be preferable for many agents. But using a real estate lead generation service like ours can save you time by reliably providing you with the names and contact information of genuine potential buyers and sellers. We know that it is easy and legit to be skeptical of whether these services work, but the fact of the matter is that they do. Without going into too much detail these leads come from recipients who voluntarily participate in online surveys about real estate activity in their area, and depending on how they submit info then they may become a real estate lead.

There is more to it than that – actually quite a bit more – but all you will really likely want to know is that the leads are genuine. They are, and if they weren’t there wouldn’t be so many realtors who have stayed with our service for many years now. Which is exactly the case with Real Estate Leads.

2. Work Within Your Sphere of Influence

Your sphere of influence, or SOI, can be more simply referred to as all of the people you know. From family, friends, and colleagues to every acquaintance – professional or otherwise – that you have. This group can be an incredibly resourceful place to get real estate leads, both from your actual connections and from their contacts and referrals. But you need to be reaching out regularly. Maybe this can be through a text, a short, personal email, or even through Facebook Messenger or an Instagram direct message. Don’t be too pushy in asking for leads, but don’t be overly meek and unobtrusive about it either.

The best maxim here is to connect with people on a people-level first. If it leads to business, that’s great but also don’t concern yourself if not much comes of it.

3. Host as Many Open Houses As You Can

An open house is a face-to-face audition made for potential new clients, and whether they might be buying that home or perhaps working with you for the purchase of a different one. It is an excellent opportunity to meet someone face-to-face and doing so within the realm of the business itself and having their interests aligning with yours inherently.

When an agent opens a property to the public for a specific time, potential buyers can tour the open house without an appointment. Anyone who walks through the door is a potential lead. The value of open houses and interacting extensively with guests can’t be stated strongly enough.

4. Do Neighborhood Farming

Farming for real estate leads means putting the bulk of your focus on a particular area or neighborhood to increase your name recognition there more explicitly. This is doable through targeted marketing and community involvement. When your name is out there, you increase the chance that when someone comes to be in need of an agent then they will call you. Provided you’ve made the right impression on them of course.

Sending out any and all types of physical marketing collateral is good in the same way it always has been, but if you prefer a more automated approach, Offrs.com and SmartZip offer predictive analytics tools to find the next big real estate market to focus on.

5. Build a Social Media Presence

Building an audience on social media isn’t easy, and especially for anyone who is not social media savvy. That includes most older realtors for sure, but the effort is definitely worth it. With a strategic social media marketing plan, you can increase your reach and create a profile that displays your expertise to potential leads as soon as they click on your name. The know, like, and trust factors that can be built through social media marketing for real estate have so much value and the type of value that is really long lasting. LinkedIn is a must for realtors, but a realtor Facebook Page and one for Instagram too are great ideas.

6. Embrace Networking

Networking in the most simple sense is so beneficial for generating leads for real estate, and it’s especially effective with the way it goes hand in hand with building your SOI. But with networking you are focusing more on connections for the express purpose of building your business and so more person-to-person networking strategies are going to be needed.

You can also make efforts to be in places where people gather. You might become active with your alumni associations, join a committee at your children’s school, volunteer with a local charity, or attend fundraisers. It is smart to review market data and trends before going to an event so that you are armed to answer any questions and to show your expertise. Dress well and remember to wrap it up if that’s the way it progresses.

7. Maximize Your Website’s Search Engine Optimization

People – and all people for that matter – use the Internet to search for real estate agents available locally if they don’t already have one in mind. Your website’s SEO will determine whether or not your site comes up on the first page of the SERPS – search engine result pages if you don’t know the acronym. If you have no idea whether or not your website is SEO optimized then it is 200% worth it to pay someone to take care of that for you. Whatever it costs you will be recouped in no time at all with a greater volume of real estate business because clients found you as the realtor via a Google search or something similar.

8. Take Advantage of Targeted Messages & Mailers

Targeted mailing puts a pinpoint focus on people who meet specific criteria, like homeowners who own certain types of homes or any other type of specific criteria that might connect to certain type of client base that you would like to have more of and see a legit opportunity to make that happen. Using these approaches can allow you to reach even more potential clients than you can through networking alone. You can and should learn more about direct mail, email marketing, bulk text messages and there’s a whole lot more with targeted advertising that you should get on top of as soon as you can in order to promote yourself as a real estate agent.

9. Be Generous with Agent-to-Agent Referrals

Likely needs no explanation here, but if it does this is when you connect another agent in a different market with one of your connections. When that referral is made and they then close a deal there is always the professional expectation in this business that you will be paid a percentage of that commission. It will work the opposite way too.

Long story short, if you are a generous with these referrals you will curry the favour of other realtors in a big way and they’ll be happy to reciprocate and be even more likely to feed you even more potential new clientele who may be ready to buy or sell homes in the area where you are working as a real estate agent. And yes, that may mean sending you ones that they might be splitting with another realtor in any other scenario where you haven’t been generous in this way.

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Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated buyer and / or seller leads delivered to you exclusively. You receive them and are the only one to do so, and what that does is give you first crack at being in touch with these folks and presenting yourself as the real estate professional they need to be assisting them with the purchase or sale of a home so that they maximize their satisfaction with the new home or what they’re able to get for the sale of one. It works very well, and you can read our testimonials section to see what other realtors like you have to say about how it’s benefited them.

Any knowledgeable real estate professional would have told you at this time last year that the overheated real estate market in Canada was going to cool off eventually, and that it really was an inevitability. That of course did happen following the first third of the year, and the ‘correction’ that is a more clinical term for the normalizing of median home prices has been ongoing for more than the past 6 months as we get near the end of 2022 here.

As we’ve stated many times here, this correction is definitely a net positive and for all sorts of reasons, overall housing affordability for Canadians being at the forefront there. We’ll say that with a caveat of sorts in also saying that the market will swing back the other way again and another thing you can never look past is the way demand will always way outstrip supply in desirable major metro areas of the country. But again, overall the market correction is doing good things for would-be new homeowners, even if this is only temporary.

This is something that factors into the day-to-day for all realtors too, as when there is a market correction there will usually be more condos going on the market, while fewer detached homes are there. There are exceptions, but most of the time this is due to investor-bought condos going onto the market because of price drops and then detached home owners delaying selling their home while prices are down. For realtors this can mean the ebb of an ebb and flow, but our online real estate lead generation system here at Real Estate Leads can help those who are struggling with generating new clients right now.

Let’s stay on track and look at how real estate industry experts and economists are foreseeing the current real estate correction to be continuing well into next year.

Sales Activity Below Pre-Pandemic Levels

RBC, Canada’s largest bank, warned that the market is still firmly in correction mode and there are only a few locales that are an exception to that. There are some signs of firming, but RBC economist see real estate markets continuing to decline into 2023. Sales activity is still below pre-pandemic levels, and prices are still going down in regions with outsized gains. The general consensus is that Canada’s housing markets are still very much in correction mode and will continue to be there for the foreseeable future.

However, the correction has been mixed and markets with outsized gains have seen activity come to a near complete stop. As you’d expect that includes Vancouver and Toronto, but also the Fraser Valley, Hamilton, Ottawa, and Montreal. the prairies are a notable exception though. Calgary and Edmonton are both experiencing increased activity and the type that comes in above pre-pandemic levels. Stronger provincial economies and rising immigration are seen as what’s behind the the boosted demand for real estate in both cities.

By and Large Balanced

The sales to new listings ratio (SNLR) is a primary method for determining if markets are ‘hot’ or cooler. Most of the major markets in Canada are currently coming in at ‘balanced’ but we should keep in mind balanced is often only a temporary predecessor to them quickly becoming buyer’s or seller’s markets. Few people sell in November and December too, so SNLRs usually rise. Any perceived stability of the market might not be accurate if based on this view.

It is true thought that Canada’s markets are now having balanced SNLRs and Vancouver, Edmonton, and Montreal were all in the middle of balanced territory. The Fraser Valley is a buyer’s market, and the accelerated price erosion here is something of a surprise given how Abbotsford and to a lesser extent Chilliwack have always had maintained demand due to being the release valves for those priced out of the market in Greater Vancouver, at least to some extent.

Toronto is close to being balanced, and it is as much of a buyer’s market as it’s ever been over the course of the last 20 years, although that is relative of course and the same will always be true for major metro cities in Canada. Calgary is an exception to this trend, where the SNLR was a very hot 86% in November and is only slightly lower if at all this month. The oil boom, relatively affordable prices, and an inflow of young adults looking for work and affordable housing has resulted in majorly increased demand.

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Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated buyer and / or seller leads that are delivered to you exclusively. No other realtor will receive the same leads, and that gives you an opportunity to reach out to these people who live in the same area that you work as a realtor. Convince them that you are the real estate professional they need to guide them in buying or selling a home and you’ll have earned yourself a new client. Real Estate Leads is an excellent resource for realtors who are new to the business and eager to make a name for themselves.

The last 2 years have been especially noteworthy in Canadian Real Estate, and for no other reason more prominently than the fact we’ve seen the market reach a new record high for median home prices and then seen it come rocketing back down to lower levels that are quite drastic in comparison here in the last 2/3rds of 2022. Some people will be pleased to see average home values come down, and there is some merit to that with regards to housing affordability overall. But as we’ve stated so many times, when you consider how much of Canada’s GDP is in real estate it’s really not a good thing in the big picture at all.

The drops in median home values have been most pronounced in what we’d call medium markets in Canada, and this means that large ones like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax have stayed fairly insulated from the declines. But no matter where homeowners live in Canada, any drop in home values is never going to be seen favourably and especially if that homeowner has plans to sell their home anytime in the near foreseeable future.

Let’s keep in mind as well that there is a balance to this all, and those first-time homebuyers that are looking for an affordable first home will have less to choose from and more competition for available housing supply in their price ranges when there are fewer homes on the market because of these median value drops. Remember that owners who can put off having their home listed are quite likely to do that most of the time.

Realtors are affected by that too of course, and for any feeling the decline in their own client base our online real estate lead generation system is ideal for realtors who need an advantage when it comes generating new clients. It’s proven for providing leads for prospective new clients and giving those realtors the opportunity to be first-in-touch with them.

But back to our topic this week, there are signs that the downturn in Canadian real estate is running out of steam and that home values will start to normalize again to some extent. Here’s why.

End of Cyclical Downturn

The belief is that Canada’s housing market is now entering the latter stages of its cyclical downturn. A slowed pace of decline being seen as there was a smallish monthly increase in home resales nationwide in October, and this marked a notable shift from the steep decline in activity that took place over the 2022 spring and summer seasons.

We’re seeing that property values are coming down at this stage, even though October’s drop was the smallest since May. While an inflection point is probably still a ways away, industry insiders believe the price correction phenomena is likely behind us. The adjoining belief is that rising interest rates and the loss of affordability will mean a fairly quiet market into early next year with prices bottoming around the spring.

Good resale increases are being seen too. Home resales went up 1.3% m/m across Canada in October (424,600 units) and this would suggest market activity is nearing a bottom after going down 36% over the 7 months before October.

Local markets that recorded a monthly increase:

• Victoria (+19.7%)
• Vancouver (+6.5%)
• Edmonton (+3.3%)
• Saskatoon (+6.3%)
• Winnipeg (+2.2%)
• Hamilton (+1.7%)
• Saint John (+2.7%)
• Halifax (+9.2%)

Toronto and Calgary sales were essentially flat for the month (up 0.2% for both), while Ottawa (-2.9%), Montreal (-2.4%) and Quebec City (-1.6%) had declines. Plus, the number of existing homes changing hands remained below the levels from exactly one year ago in virtually every market.

Decline Streak Slowing

The fall in home prices hasn’t entirely stopped though. The aggregate MLS Home Price Index for Canada slipped in October again, and for the 8^th straight month. It went down below its year-ago level (-0.8%) for the first time in three years and it’s now down 10% since the February peak. It’s possible the market is in a late-stage downturn, but nothing suggests the market is going to heat up again the same way it did early pandemic either. High and rising interest rates will continue to challenge buyers and this will result in suppressed activity even if it stabilizes near current levels. The consensus among real estate insiders seems to be that benchmark prices will keep trending lower until spring.

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Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated buyer and / or seller leads that are delivered to you exclusively as the only realtor who’ll receive them. These leads are legit, and will give you the opportunity to be the first agent to contact these individuals and convince them on you being the professional they want guiding them through the purchase or sale of real estate to their maximum advantage.