We’ve always believed that experience matters when it comes to selling your home. But until you look at the actual numbers, it’s hard to appreciate just how much it matters.
We pulled 2025 agent production data and crunched the numbers. Based on the data, 54% of REALTORS registered with the Toronto Regional Real Estate (TRREB) didn’t complete any buyer or seller transactions in 2025.
And when it comes to representing sellers successfully? Less than ~21,000 – of over ~70,000 agents – listed and sold at least one property last year. And when we looked at who actually handled those listings, the concentration of experience is striking.
If you listed your home for sale in 2025:
- There was roughly a 1 in 6 chance your agent listed and sold just one property all year
- A 1 in 3 chance they sold two or fewer
- And a 1 in 2 chance they sold fewer than five
A 1 in 2 chance? That’s a coin toss. And when you’re making one of the biggest financial decisions of your life, a coin toss isn’t good enough.
Some Context on the Numbers
Before we go any further, let’s be clear: there are a lot of valid reasons why an agent might not have completed many (or any) transactions in 2025 and the data isn’t perfect:
- Some registrants are managers, appraisers, or work in other areas of the industry where they wouldn’t be expected to complete transactions
- Some may be members of the Toronto board, despite working in another geographical market
- Some are on teams where deals are reported under a lead agent’s name
- Some are new to the business and still building their client base
- The data we can access doesn’t include pre-construction, exclusive or off-market sales and rentals
And let’s not forget: 2025 wasn’t an easy year to sell real estate in Toronto. Higher interest rates, cautious buyers and shifting market conditions made it challenging for everyone, including experienced agents.
So this isn’t about pointing fingers. But the data does paint an important picture for anyone thinking about listing their home in 2026, and understanding it can help you make a smarter hiring decision.
What the Data Actually Shows
When we look specifically at agents who represented sellers (vs buyers) in 2025, the numbers are harsh:
- Just 4% of all registered TRREB agents listed 50% of the homes sold in 2025
- About 1.2% of all registered agents sold nearly 30% of all listed homes
If we focus just on the ~32,000 active agents – those who completed at least one transaction last year – we see that:
- Nearly half (49.7%) listed/sold just one property
- Almost 90% sold five or fewer
- 8.8% of active agents sold 50% of all listed homes
- The top 2.6% of active agents sold nearly 33% of all listed homes
Only 50% of sellers who hired an (active) agent to sell their home, hired someone who successfully listed 5 or more properties.
The Full Picture: Buy and Sell Sides Combined
Of course, many agents represent both buyers and sellers, so their listing numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. When we look at all transaction “ends” (that’s industry-speak for one side of a deal, whether it’s a buy or a sell), the picture fills out a bit, but it’s still sobering.
Of the ~32,000 agents who completed at least one end in 2025, nearly 38% completed just one. One sale for the entire year! Over 57% completed two or fewer. And 82% completed five or fewer ends total, across both buying and selling.
So even when you give agents credit for everything they did last year, buying and selling combined, the vast majority are still operating with very limited transaction experience. An agent who helped 2 buyers and listed 1 property had 3 total ends for the year. That’s more context than the listing-only numbers, but it still doesn’t add up to deep, current market expertise.
These numbers don’t mean those agents aren’t working hard or that they’re not capable. But they do mean the depth of hands-on experience varies enormously from one agent to the next. And when it comes to selling your home, that variance matters.
Why Experience Matters When Selling Your Home
Selling a home requires a very specific skill set: pricing strategy, staging expertise, marketing knowledge and negotiation chops. These aren’t things you pick up from a textbook or online seminar. They come from doing it, repeatedly, in a market that changes month to month.
An agent who has successfully helped 10+ clients in a year has a very different understanding of what buyers are looking for right now, what pricing strategies are actually working and what marketing drives showings and offers. They’ve seen deals fall apart and know how to put them back together. They know when to hold firm and when to adjust because they’ve been in that position dozens of times, not once or twice.
An agent who sold one or two properties last year may be perfectly competent. But they haven’t had the same number of at-bats, and in a market as competitive and nuanced as Toronto’s, reps matter.
Every neighbourhood in Toronto behaves differently, every property type has its own pricing dynamics and every month brings new data. An agent who is actively selling in your neighbourhood right now will know things that someone working from last year’s playbook simply won’t.
A Note About Teams
One thing that makes the our data tricky to interpret is how teams report their sales. On some teams, all transactions are recorded under the lead agent’s name, which means the individual agents doing the work may appear to have very few (or zero) completed deals on paper. That doesn’t necessarily reflect their actual experience.
But here’s the bigger point: in a market where overall transaction volume is down and even experienced agents are doing fewer deals, being part of a team can make a real difference.
When you work with a team, you’re not just getting one agent’s experience. You’re getting:
- Collective market knowledge from a group of people actively selling in your market every week, sharing real-time intel about what buyers are saying, which pricing strategies are landing and what staging is resonating.
- Built-in access to professional services like staging, photography, marketing and transaction management that directly impact how your home is presented to the market.
- A network of trusted trades including painters, cleaners, contractors and handypeople who can mobilize quickly to get your home ready for sale.
These resources are expensive for a solo agent to maintain when volume is low. A team can invest in them because the volume across the group supports it. That kind of on-the-ground, up-to-the-minute information and infrastructure is incredibly hard for an individual agent doing three or four deals a year to replicate.
None of this means you shouldn’t care about the individual agent on the team who’ll be handling your sale. You absolutely should. Their personal experience, communication style and knowledge of your neighbourhood still matter enormously. But the infrastructure and shared expertise behind them can fill gaps that no solo agent working three listings a year can fill on their own.
The BREL Bottom Line
There are over 70,000 licensed real estate agents in the GTA, and the experience gap between them is wider than most people realize. 2025 was a tough year for the industry, and there are plenty of good reasons why an agent’s transaction count might be lower than usual. We’re not here to judge anyone for that.
But here’s what we know for sure: experience compounds. Every listing, every negotiation, every deal that almost fell apart and got saved teaches an agent something they can bring to your sale. When 1 in 3 listing clients in 2025 hired an agent who sold two or fewer properties, and 1 in 2 hired an agent who sold fewer than five, it’s worth asking yourself: do I want to be on the right side of that coin toss?
Interview more than one agent. Ask the hard questions. Look at the numbers. Your home deserves someone who’s done this enough times to get it right.