Welcome to Real Estate Professional

CREW readers may be wondering what exactly it is they’re looking at. REP, CREW’s sister publication, has spent the last four years providing in-depth coverage of Canada’s real estate industry – from the other side. One of REP’s strengths, and what you will now be seeing in CREW four times a year, is its coverage of the country’s top dog real estate agents.

We’ve chosen to place these agents in front of the people who will most appreciate their services: CREW’s audience of real estate investors. In the coming year, CREW readers will be introduced to literally hundreds of the industry’s top performers, the most hardworking, principled and innovative realtors the country has to offer. REP used to be solely for agents and brokers. Now it’s for everyone.

With that out of the way, let’s kick off the new CREW-REP alliance with our most popular feature, Top Agents.

The editorial team at Real Estate Professional

The numbers don’t lie: 2018 was a bruising year for Canada’s real estate industry. Sales fell by 11% across the county, hitting lows not seen since 2012, and the national average price fell by close to 4%, the first decline since 2008 and the largest since 1995.

But market corrections do not impact all realtors the same. Most suffer, but many – the prepared, the respected, the innovative – thrive. And that makes this year’s Top Agents feature a special one. 2018 was the year when homes in Canada’s biggest markets didn’t sell themselves, and when new mortgage regulations put the clamps on virtually every other community in the nation. Selling your way to the top when the market is white-hot is still nothing to sneeze at, but doing so when affordability, government intervention and consumer wariness are all working against you is something else entirely.

Which is why this year’s crop of Top Agents is a mix of the old and the new, industry heavyweights whose business is so streamlined and bulletproof that it’s essentially impervious to market turmoil and smaller market agents whose consistency has earned them a seat with the big boys. REP salutes you all for staying true to your clients in anxious times and doing the right thing, over and over again.