The impetus to provide great service to clients is even more pronounced in real estate because of the extent to which referrals are such a big part of an agent’s success. There is the need to always have a stream of new clientele working with you, and as we all know a realtor’s income is exclusively based on earning commissions when people buy or sell a home through them. Lead generation is an ongoing focus for all agents, and it is something that they get better at with time and practice. New agents can expect to have difficulty with getting leads, but what they can do is provide the highest level of service for the clients they do have. Real estate lead generation using past clients is something you may want to focus on as you progress in your career as a realtor .

That type of superior service is important, because those satisfied clients are more likely to refer the agent to others they know who are also considering a home purchase or sale. This is part of the process that goes into building a reputation and making a name for yourself as a good local realtor in whichever city in Canada where you’re working as an agent and trying to stand out from the crowd as best as possible. These days agents are taking many different approaches to generating leads, and paid real estate leads like the ones we provide here are a popular choice for those who are new to working as a real estate agent in Canada.

With this week’s blog entry here we’re going to look at the best strategies to get real estate referrals from past clients. What you’ll likely assume is that it involves a good bit more than just providing great service and then just trusting that those folks will speak highly of you. This is correct. Much of it will be encompassed in keeping in touch with these folks and inquiring about their ongoing satisfaction with their living arrangements, and this is also something that realtors tend to get better at over time. If you come across as someone who genuinely cares and wants to help people be in their most ideal home then you’re definitely starting on the right foot.

Be Genuine

Homebuyer clients are going to be different from others who work with you to sell their home. If these clients see that you’ve really done everything possible to have them viewing homes that are best fit given their buyer prerogatives then they’re going to start to have a very favourable opinion of you. They’ll be reassured of their choice in choosing you as their realtor, and once they’ve purchased their home and are living in it there’s so much more of the chance that they’ll recommend you to their friends or acquaintances that are also ready to buy a home.

The same can apply for home sellers as it relates to real estate lead generation using past clients. There may be reason to put an even greater effort into pleasing these clients given the fact that people selling homes often have more clout when it comes to buying or selling real estate and will be in communication with others who have the same home buying power. It’s going to be very advantageous for you to be working with these types of clients and getting referrals from clients who’ve bought high-value homes is what you should be aiming to get for yourself.

Many real estate agents make the mistake of only focusing on new leads and chasing the next transaction, while neglecting the relationship that they’ve established with clients who have already bought a home or sold one through them. Sending a gift to clients who’ve bought a home is something that nearly all realtors will do, and it’s a good way to ensure these folks have a very high opinion of you. But there’s more you can and should do in order to make it so that they will refer you to others and tell them they’d do well to work with you if they’re looking to make a move.

Referrals and repeat business don’t come from a one-time gesture, and more often they come from ongoing, intentional communication. This is very central to the best strategies to get real estate referrals from past clients, and having this opinion of you being as far-reaching as possible. Even if a past client isn’t looking to move anytime soon, chances are they know someone who is. If you’ve provided them with great service and they think very highly of you then it is all the more likely they are going to recommend you as a realtor.

Check In

Often all it takes is a simple message or call, and something along the lines of ‘just checking in to see how you’re liking the new place! No reason for the call, just wanted to say hi and let your know that if you or anyone you know has any real estate questions, I’m available to answer them.’ That can be it, and as long as that comes across as genuinely caring then it can be short, thoughtful, and effective. What can also be good is making reference to a certain subject matter if you’ve learned that is something the homeowner has an interest in. An example could be to make reference to the local sports team, or a good fishing spot. You get the idea.

Just like door-knocking or farming, checking in with your past clients should be something you do on an ongoing basis. It’s a good idea to set some time each week to make a few quick calls or send an email. Set reminders to follow up every few months and be consistent with the ways you try to stay in touch with past clients. Of course it’s important not to overdo and it be sending too many communications to former clients, but a good standard is to do so once or twice a year and many realtors will choose to send a note at Christmas. You can decide based on what you know about those clients.

Real estate lead generation using past clients is very doable if you do what it takes to have them be entirely satisfied with your service and them be timely with staying in touch. Over time this builds familiarity, trust, and the greater likelihood of good referrals. Your past clients may well be your warmest leads if you’ve met and exceeded their expectations with buying or selling a home.

Sign up for Real Estate Leads and start receiving a monthly quota of buyer and / or seller leads that are given exclusively to you. No other realtor will receive the same leads, and it creates a real opportunity for you to be first-in-touch with people who are getting close to buying or selling a home and open to working with a real estate agent. It’s a proven-effective way to have greater success working as realtor and getting leads in what is often a very competitive environment in big cities in Canada.

Real estate need to be ambitious, and they need to have a measure on ingenuity from time to time too. Not every lead is going to be easily found, entirely legitimate, and converted into a client that buys or sells a home through you especially easily too. Any time that’s not the case an agent will do well for themselves if they are able to take the lead and make the best of it they can. That will usually involve little more than thanking the folks for their time and telling them to keep you in mind if they do decide to make a real estate move in the future or someone they know wants to work with a realtor now. But what if it wasn’t anything of a lead to begin with? What we’ll talk about with this week’s entry is how to convert fake leads into real estate clients.

This is a tangent we’ve never gone off on before with our regular discussions around getting leads for new clients in real estate, but there really is a lot to be said for an agent who’s up for any challenge and it knowledgable about maybe seeing there is something of an ember there with a lead that was about to be dismissed as going nowhere. There have been instances of leads being dropped by an agent and then unbeknownst to them those folks actually ended up working with a different realtor in the near future. This may have happened to you and you don’t even know it.

And it may be something that can’t be stopped from happening as agents do need to be very objective about determining when a cold lead needs to be downgraded to one that’s no longer viable at all. One way to defend against this cutting into your success as an agent who consistently has new clients is to buy real estate leads that convert, and that’s something that’s possible for any agent that decides to sign up with us and start receiving a monthly quota of buyer and / or seller leads. It’s a solid choice, but we’ll keep on track and stay with our topic of how agents can take a nothing lead and maybe actually make something out of it.

Not So Fast

There can be times when a person or couple volunteer information that leads an agent to think they’re at or near the point where they’re ready to buy or sell. But the reality is that they’re doing so because of their enthusiasm alone, and maybe mixed with a bit of wishful thinking and trying to manifest their wish. Whatever it may be, they’re not actually going to buying a home in Vancouver or Toronto or anywhere in Canada anytime soon, and this will end up with them being ditched as leads by realtors nine times out of 10. But maybe that’s not what should happen, and maybe this is where there is an opportunity to convert fake leads into real estate clients.

In the scenario above it is is never going to really be possible to ‘spur’ someone into buying a home if they can’t afford it. That is never going to be how an ethical real estate agent is going to operate in the first place, and most agents wouldn’t even consider trying to mislead a potential client about their ability to afford a home in Canada. But it can be that a lead may have mistakenly lead you to believe something about them that’s not accurate, and this is something that people who are new to working as a real estate agent may be more prone to missing.

So unless a lead tells you explicitly that they won’t be buying or selling a home and / or they will NOT be working with you as their agent then any of them shouldn’t be completely discarded. The focus needs to be on how to convert fake leads into real estate clients, and there are some easy oversights that are possible here.

Here’s a certain type of real estate lead that many agents instantly write off – the incorrect phone number. One that a lead provides but is incorrect and not theirs. In this instance most agents will apologize for disturbing the call recipient and then delete the lead from their list. But what if you take a different approach? Instead of deleting the lead or marking it as invalid, what if you aim to continue the conversation.

There are instances where these turned out to be rental leads. Meaning that this is not the original buyer, but it is someone who is still in the market and a potential client. The need to make efforts to get some more of out of each lead is furthered if your plan is to buy real estate leads that convert. So instead of assuming the lead is a dead-end, treat it as a chance to ask more questions if the call recipient is open to that. A wrong number doesn’t always have to mean that individual or couple no longer being a potential lead and someone who could become a client in the future.

What some realtors will do when they aim to convert fake leads into real estate clients is assign these ‘fake’ leads to a specialized drip campaign designed for unresponsive or ‘low-grade’ contacts. The best way to approach these leads and handle them is to put them on the back burner of sorts, but if the lead shows they are still open to further communication then you should look to educate them on the market based on their buying / selling prerogatives. Then nurture the lead in the same way you would any other and do whatever you think will trigger these people to express greater interest in working with a real estate agent.

If you’d like to start receiving paid real estate leads then we encourage you to sign up here in the same way many other agents across Canada have done. This is a proven-effective way to enhance your efforts with finding new clients in real estate and most realtors who make this yearly investment quickly see it as well worth it. Realizing even just a handful of new clients each year can make it a valuable part of your marketing budget. Please see our testimonials from realtors like you who are very happy that they’ve found Real Estate Leads and are continuing to see results from the leads they receive each month.

Remember, the leads that we provide to you are given to you exclusively, meaning no other realtors in your area of the country will get them. The opportunity to be the first agent to contact these folks is yours and yours alone. That is highly advantageous, and is a big part of what makes this paid real estate leads service so valuable.

Some people don’t do well with rejection, but they’ll do well to just accept it as being rejected really is a part of life. This is especially true for young people who are forging ahead and trying to establish a career for themselves. Sometimes they’re entirely qualified, but not any more so than some of their competing peers who are also out there looking for the same opportunities. There’s only so many of them to go around, and it’s similarly true that for realtors there are only so many legitimate client leads out there too. Some realtors are going to be rejected by leads. That’s just the way it is, but if they sign up for a real estate lead generation service the odds of that happening for many of their leads decline quite considerably.

Plus it can be the case that even the most knowledgeable and well-spoken realtors have leads that go cold on them. More often than not it isn’t because they’ve come up short in making the right impression on these people, and instead it will usually be because the homeowners or those looking to buy a home have already agreed to work with another realtor. You win some and you lose some, but any ambitious realtor is going to aim to retain as many leads as possible and eventually convert them into clients who buy or sell a home through the agent.

For a real estate agent in Canada that’s what it’s all about because that’s how agents get their commissions and make a living working in real estate. There are ways of making it more likely that leads will want to stay in touch with you and will be returning your calls, and that’s what we are going to look at with this week’s blog entry here. Many realtors are choosing to get paid real estate leads nowadays, and if the no return-call trend starts to appear with the leads it is doubly problematic for the agent because of the money they’ve invested in getting their leads each month. So let’s get right to looking at what’s the best way of dealing with a lead that seems to have disregarded you as the realtor they’ll be working with.

The Right Perspective

If you’re a realtor working in one of Canada’s densely-populated metro regions like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary then the reality of the situation is always going to be that other realtors will have also be in communication with the people you have as leads. Often times they may already have someone in mind, a friend, family member, or acquaintance. They may be working with the same realtor they worked with when they bought their current home. When realtors sign up for real estate lead generation service there’s less of a chance of that being the case.

Many of the survey participants that submit online questionnaires about real estate are going to be potential 1st-time homebuyers – an excellent source on new clientele for realtors and a real opportunity to build your client base and make a name for yourself as a local realtor. Lead nurturing is a big part of whether or not you convert leads into clients, and we’ve talked about that at length here.

But what if you acquire a lead and then you don’t even get the chance to start nurturing the lead and learning more about what these folks hope to do as far as buying or selling real estate? As we talked about at the beginning here, there are going to be times when leads don’t return your calls. They tell you that they’ll call you back but then you never hear from them again. Agents will do better if they have the right perspective when this happens, and it’s not good to assume that they’re brushing you off or that it’s their kids who have been stealing real estate agent signs in the neighborhood and throwing them into the creek.

Instead what’s really often the case is that those potential clients are just extremely busy with their lives. You shouldn’t assume they’re brushing you off. Can I call you later doesn’t mean they’re not interested and what may be more accurate is that they just can’t take the call right now. How many times have you forgotten to reply to a friend’s text or return a missed call? If a lead doesn’t return a call, email, or message over multiple sendings then it may be best to assume that they’ve done one of 3 things; already sold their home or bought a new one, put those plans on hold, or they’ve made an agreement to work with a different realtor.

Scenario three there is going to be the way it goes a lot of the time as so many people are working in real estate in Canada’s big cities and there will be opposite scenarios in the future where a client chooses to work with you instead of another equally-capable realtor. Establish good relationships with other realtors in your city, as you can refer business to each other in any instance where you’re not able to accommodate a client as well as they are likely able to.

In any instance like this you shouldn’t quickly move to downgrade your lead and put less of a priority on trying to stay in touch with them. Use a good CRM for real estate agents and the best of them will have options to schedule more intermittent contact means with these people just to see if there’s any continued interest in working with a real estate agent. And sign up for a real estate lead generation service like ours where the higher inflow of new leads means it’s less of an issue if leads go cold and you can expect a new supply of them with every new month. It’s a proven-effective way to get more new clients in real estate and so many realtors in Canada see it as a good investment.

The urbanization trend in Canada has continued with just as much gusto throughout 2025 as it has in years previous, with ever-greater numbers of people deciding to move into major urban centers and subsequently starting to look for a home to buy there. There’s no city where this inflow is as pronounced as it is for Toronto, and of course that’s no surprise given that Toronto is very much the New York City of Canada and so many folks are drawn to it for that reason. The real estate market in Toronto is always going to have a buzz to it and as you’d expect there will be plenty of people will be working as real estate agents there. It’s a competitive environment, so we’ll take this chance to go back over lead generation strategies for Toronto realtors in 2025.

It’s an important area of focus for any realtor, but especially for those who are newer to the profession and are still cutting their teeth working as a real estate agent in Toronto. It’s harder to get new clients here and simply for the fact that so many other agents have exactly the same aim. It quickly becomes a question of what can you do that’s more effective and allows you to generate new clientele with at least some measure of consistency. Even if that’s just one new client every month or two. Paid real estate leads for Toronto can be an option, and if it is something that a new agent can justify as part of their budget then it can be a real difference maker.

We’re always here for realtors who want to explore this possibility, and most realtors who do pay for leads in Toronto end up doing quite well with them. But we’ll leave that part of it for now and instead focus on more general lead strategies for realtors that are in line with the trends seen with home buying or selling for the city in 2025. We’re now nearly 2/3 of the way through the year but many of these trends are ones that have carried over from years previous and will likely be just as relevant for 2026. There is a great depth of understanding to be had with the best ways to generate real estate leads in Canada, and if it’s an area you want to gain more knowledge then you are definitely in the right place here.

Timely Stabilization

The market for Toronto is undergoing significant transformations while stabilizing nicely amidst changing economic conditions. The anticipated 12.4% increase in home sales for 2025 has by and large been realized, and the market promises new opportunities for savvy investors and homebuyers. Any belief that the market is in decline is incorrect and the numbers through the end of July bear out that there’s been no real decline at all.

Yes, transaction volumes have dropped but prices have been appreciating steadily and the opportunity for investment in real estate is the first point to make in connection to lead generation strategies for Toronto realtors in 2025.

Realtors can and should be putting greater emphasis on investment buyers, and what that usually means is casting a wider net, as the expression goes. The Toronto real estate market is experiencing a stabilization period with modest adjustments in home prices, suggesting a need for buyers and investors to adopt a flexible, data-driven approach. As for 1st-time homebuyers, detached homes and condominiums are always going to be popular and based on their buyer prerogatives. Steady price appreciation is expected to continue, so realtors can shift their focuses and be taking more of an aim at fully qualified buyers and particularly if those clients are intending to buy a detached home in the GTA.

There will always be a focus on similar-minded buyers who are not first-timers and want to buy a detached home to live in it. Emerging neighbourhoods like Leslieville and Riverdale are attracting sustained demand due to transit accessibility and sustainable living preferences. Tailoring marketing communications to represent in-demand local area expertise is always among the best ways to generate real estate leads in Canada

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) foresees these neighbourhood trends being further supported by:

1. Transit-oriented development increasing property values
2. Heightened interest in sustainable and energy-efficient homes
3. Continued migration of remote workers desiring more spacious living environments

There is also a growing preference for move-in ready homes and many buyers are hoping to find homes with flexible living spaces. The PwC Emerging Trends report highlights that sustainability is becoming a critical consideration. Neighbourhoods offering green spaces, walkability, and proximity to public transit are seeing more consistent property value appreciation. Agents should tailor their communications to reflect any local expertise they have with these neighborhoods.

Price Fluctuations & Housing Preference Shifts

Recent TREB data indicates a stabilizing yet dynamic housing market. Average home prices in the Toronto region have experienced modest adjustments, which mirrors the ongoing impact of interest rates and economic uncertainty. At this time last year the average detached home price in the GTA was in the vicinity of $1.2 million, showing a slight decrease from peak levels but maintaining significant value.

What continues to be favourable in all of this is that market sentiment remains optimistic. We’re seeing that buyers are becoming more strategic, going through more thorough research and negotiations, and on the opposite side sellers are adapting to a more balanced market environment. Realtors can do well if they advise their home seller clients that pricing strategies now require more flexibility and data-driven approaches compared to the aggressive market of previous years. This is also going to be tied into lead generation strategies for Toronto realtors in 2025

Housing prices have shown modest adjustments, with a 3% year-over-year decline but a 1% month-over-month increase as of March 2025. This subtle movement suggests a market finding its equilibrium after previous years of volatility and the general consensus in the industry is that economic fundamentals remain a key focus for experts. The CMHC has some relatively recent communications that make clear the way that foreign trade risks and potential immigration policy changes could significantly impact market dynamics.

This means that there is a need for investors and homebuyers maintain flexibility and conduct thorough market research. Buying condos in Toronto as an investment is not a good idea in the same way it was in previous years, and there’s been plenty in the news about how condos are not selling the same way they were before. The ones that are selling and garnering buyer interest are ones that are in emerging neighbourhood potential in developing urban corridors and have those flexible living spaces we talked about earlier. Condos that feature more in the way of energy efficiency and stability will continue to sell more than others too.

Market Patterns & Dynamics

The CMHC is also emphasizing that immigration patterns and employment dynamics are set to play even greater roles in shaping market demand for Toronto real estate in the coming years. Foreign trade risks and potential immigration policy changes introduce additional complexity to future market projections and investment strategies are evolving in response to the changing landscape. Cap rates are expected to begin modest compression, indicating potential opportunities for strategic investors.

The commercial and residential sectors are seeing nuanced developments, with emphasis on properties offering long-term resilience and adaptability. Investor clients looking at this market sector are best advised to put their focus on long-term value over short-term speculation and be looking for superior neighbourhood infrastructure and development potential. Any technological advancements impacting property values should be noted for these clients as well, as technological innovations, remote work trends, and sustainability considerations will increasingly influence property valuations and investment strategies.

All of what’s been shared here can be used to help shape your approach to lead generation strategies for Toronto realtors in 2025, with the overarching understanding that realtors who very clearly have their market and buyer / seller interest expertise on display are always going to find themselves better set up with greater numbers of leads being converted into clients.

If you’re an agent working in Toronto and would like to incorporate paid leads into your efforts then you can sign up for Real Estate Leads here and start receiving your monthly quota of buyer and / or seller leads right away. It’s an excellent way to supercharge your lead generation efforts.