When Toronto Realtor Anya Ettinger got her real estate license in June of 2020, she had no background in the industry. Her parents worked in the arts, her friends weren’t yet at the stage of buying or selling, and she admits she didn’t know what to expect.
“I didn’t know the pay structure, I didn’t know the day-to-day, I didn’t know anything,” she says. “I wasn’t one of those people who got into real estate thinking it was easy money. I just… didn’t know.”
Her first deal came quickly, a Kensington Market investment property owned by her mother, but it wasn’t a handout.
“They treated me like any other agent,” she says. “I had to know the answers, handle the tenants, manage PPE showings in peak COVID. And then my first actual deal came off a sign call on that property.”
That early start was followed by a long, quiet stretch. Six months passed before she closed another transaction.
Cold calls, clause manuals and a team
To fill the gap, Ettinger pulled up her LinkedIn and cold-messaged every single connection. She ran Facebook ads and called the leads herself. Without support at her first brokerage, she learned the paperwork by reading through the clause manual and piecing offers together line by line.
It was exhausting and not especially fruitful. “I was 20. None of my friends were buying or selling. I didn’t have anyone feeding me business.”
The answer, at the time, was joining a team. “I wanted business, but I also needed mentorship,” she says.
For nearly a year, she learned from watching listing appointments and buyer consultations. It gave her experience she wouldn’t have had otherwise, but eventually the numbers didn’t make sense. Her own business was starting to grow, and she found herself giving away half of what she earned.
By late 2021, she was ready to move on.
Three TikToks a day
Around that same time, Ettinger’s fiancé pushed her to try TikTok. “I thought it was silly. I didn’t want to dance on camera. But he kept telling me it was important, so I started posting.”
For nearly a year, she posted three videos a day. “It was very basic at first; down payments, land transfer tax, what Humber courses cost. I tried everything to see what would stick.”
It worked. Within six months, she was getting clients from social media.
“Viral videos don’t convert. They boost engagement, sure, but business comes from value. Every piece of content I put out has to teach something…something you didn’t know before.”
Live videos were especially effective. “I’d go live for an hour almost every day. Most of the comments weren’t useful, but every so often, someone would ask about buying in a specific neighbourhood. I’d talk to them, screenshot their username, and follow up afterwards. That’s how I started to really convert business.”
The viral snowfort
Her most widely shared video, a mock listing for a snowfort during Toronto’s overheated 2022 market, reached nearly two million views on TikTok and was picked up by outlets like BlogTO.
“It didn’t bring me clients,” she says plainly. “But it catapulted my engagement for future videos and expanded my reach. The people who hire me come from the stories, the value, the proof that I’ll fight for them.”
‘I’m not a creator’
One line Ettinger repeats often is that she doesn’t see herself as a content creator.
“Where some Realtors get mixed up is that they go from being Realtors to being content creators. I’m not that. I’m a Realtor. I create content to get clients. If the apps went away tomorrow, I’d still be a Realtor. I’d just adapt.”
That mindset has shaped her approach. She treats her TikTok and Instagram accounts as ways to meet people, but pushes them toward her website, where contact forms feed into her CRM. She writes a weekly newsletter that mixes market updates with anecdotes from her life.
“By the time people reach out, they’ve already decided they want to work with me,” she says. Her conversion rate is much higher than most agents report – in her words, “substantially higher, probably like 75 per cent.”
Systems and consistency
By 2023, the challenge wasn’t getting attention – it was keeping up. “I was busy with clients and didn’t have time to film. My pipeline dried out.”
Her solution was hiring a content manager to edit, post, and help her batch-produce clips from a podcast she records in her home studio. About three-quarters of her current content comes from those podcast clips; the rest are real-time updates and short advice videos.
It’s a system designed to keep her business steady, even when she’s busy.
Looking ahead
Now five years into the business, Ettinger says she still enjoys creating content but only because it connects her with clients.
“I’ve always been open with sharing parts of my life. People feel like they know me before they meet me, and that makes it easier to work together.”
The consistency shows. Nearly half of her clients today come directly from her online presence. The rest come through referrals and her growing sphere.
She has no plans to stop posting, but she makes it clear she’d still be fine if the platforms disappeared tomorrow.
Andrew Fogliato – The G is silent – is the owner of Real Estate Magazine and Just Sell Homes. He mostly talks about marketing but sometimes ventures into other topics in the real estate world. Sometimes he also writes bios in the 3rd person.