Before You Buy
Choosing a buyers agent is not the same problem as choosing a listing agent. You are picking someone who will tell you what to pay, and signing a buyer representation agreement that decides what you owe them — including if the seller offers nothing towards it. The questions to ask a buyer's agent, what to check first, and what to read before you sign.
Most buyers choose an agent the way they choose a dentist: someone was recommended, they seemed fine, and the paperwork was signed without being read. It works out often enough that the risk is invisible — right up until the moment it is not.
Choosing a buyers agent is a different problem from choosing a listing agent. A seller is hiring someone to price and market one asset. As a buyer you are hiring someone to tell you what to pay for something you have already emotionally decided you want, and you are signing an agreement that decides what you owe them and for how long. This guide covers how to pick between them and what to read before you sign. Should I get my own agent, or just deal with the one at the open house? Who is paid by whom across the whole purchase — the open house agent, the mortgage broker, the appraiser, the inspector — is a separate question, answered in who works for you when you buy.
RECO's own advice to buyers is to interview a few agents — at least three — and to check each one in its public register. Almost nobody does either. The register is free, searchable by name, and shows whether someone is registered to trade in real estate in Ontario along with charges and disciplinary action from the last 60 months.
Read it as a filter rather than a reference: most registrants have nothing on file, so a clean result tells you little on its own. It is the exception you are looking for, and it costs a minute. If a name does not appear at all, stop — trading in real estate without registration is an offence, not an oversight.
One more thing belongs at the first meeting rather than at signing: the RECO Information Guide must be given to a buyer before services or assistance are provided. An agent who takes you to a showing before you have seen it has skipped a required step at the earliest possible opportunity.
Do I have to sign with a realtor before they will show me anything? Usually yes, and that is reasonable — but it is the moment to slow down. A seller reads their listing agreement, or at least knows they signed one. Buyers routinely sign a buyer representation agreement in a hurry, in a car, or on a phone outside a property they want to see — and it is the document that decides what this costs them.
Three things in it are worth knowing before anyone puts one in front of you.
There is no standard term. How long is a buyer representation agreement? Entirely whatever the two of you agree — RECO is explicit that a representation agreement has no set time — it can be in place for a day, a few weeks, or months. So the length is a negotiation, not a rule, and "this is our standard six months" is a preference being described as a policy. If you are unsure about an agent, the honest answer is a short agreement, or one covering a single property, and asking for that is entirely normal.
Holdover clauses apply to buyers too. Most buyers have never heard of one. It means that if you buy a property the brokerage introduced you to, you may owe commission even after the agreement has ended. Ask how long the holdover runs and what exactly triggers it — being shown a home, being sent it in an email, or attending its open house are not the same thing, and the definition is what matters.
Exclusivity is a real commitment. If the agreement is exclusive, working with a second agent during the term can leave you owing two fees. So if you are wondering — can I use more than one realtor at a time? — read that clause before you assume the answer, and if you want to keep looking independently, that is a conversation to have before signature, not after. Getting out of a buyer agreement afterwards is possible, but it is on whatever terms the document already sets.
This is the change most buyers have not caught up with, and it is the reason the buyer agent fee now deserves a real conversation rather than a nod. RECO puts it plainly:
A seller might not offer any amount to cover the fees you owe to your brokerage under your agreement. This could affect the amount you are able to offer for a property.
Real Estate Council of Ontario, on signing a contract with a brokerage
Read that twice, because it moves money out of your offer. If your agreement says you owe your brokerage a given amount and the seller contributes less than that — or nothing — the difference comes from you, in cash, on closing, on top of your down payment and closing costs. It is not financed and it does not come out of the mortgage.
So the question to ask is not "what is your commission" but: what do I owe you in dollars, and what happens to that number if the seller offers nothing? Get the answer before you are standing in a house you want. The real cost of buying is set out alongside the other closing costs, and this one belongs in the same column.
For a seller, local knowledge produces a defensible price. For a buyer it does two different jobs: working out what a property is genuinely worth against its competition, and telling you which homes will be difficult to sell again.
The second one is the test almost nobody applies. You are not only buying — you are choosing the problem you will hand a future buyer. Backing onto a future arterial road, a layout nobody wants, a condo corporation with a thin reserve fund, a street where nothing moves in winter: a real estate agent for buying a house in a particular pocket of Ottawa knows which of these actually costs you on the way out, and a generalist will tell you it is a lovely home.
Ask each agent what a property like the one you want is compared against by buyers, what they expect to be hard about your search given your budget, and what they would want to check before you offered on a specific type of home. Ottawa housing types explained and what a budget buys across Ottawa are the two places to sanity-check what you are told.
If you are buying a condo or a new build, the case-specific knowledge matters more than the neighbourhood. A condo purchase turns on the status certificate; a new build turns on the builder's agreement, the deposit structure and the closing that may move twice. Both have their own guides — what condo fees cover and buying a new build in Ottawa — and an agent who has not done one should say so rather than learn on your purchase.
Every buyer's agent is paid when you buy something. That is not a scandal — it is how the job is structured, and most agents work honestly inside it — but it does mean the structural pressure runs in one direction. Nobody is paid for the six months you spent not buying, and nobody is paid for talking you out of a house.
Which makes the willingness to do it the single most useful signal you can look for. Ask each agent when they last told a buyer to walk away, and what the situation was. A specific answer, with a real property in it, is worth more than any credential on the card. A vague one — of course, all the time, I always put clients first — is a sentence anybody can say.
The related question is what they do when you are the problem. There will be a house you want more than the evidence supports, most likely in a competing-offer situation with a deadline attached. Ask directly: what do you do when I want to overpay? The honest answers describe a process — the comparables, a number agreed in advance, a phone call to slow you down. The unhelpful answer is that they would support whatever you decide, which is a promise to be agreeable at the exact moment you need someone not to be.
And listen for what they say about conditions. An agent who explains which conditions they would keep and which they would never advise waiving is giving you advice with a cost attached — conditions make offers weaker and slow their own deal down. That is the shape of guidance you are paying for.
RECO suggests referrals from family and friends, or an agent already active in the neighbourhood you want, and both are reasonable starting points. Neither is a substitute for the interview, because a referral answers whether someone was pleasant to deal with and rarely whether they were right.
Reviews have the same weakness they have on the selling side: they are collected at the moment of celebration, and nobody publishes the review of the purchase that turned out badly two years later. Read them for specifics — what the agent did when a deal went sideways — rather than for sentiment.
The one that needs saying plainly: buying through a friend or a relative with a licence makes the hardest conversation in the process harder. If your agent has to tell you the house is wrong, or that your offer is too high, they should be able to do it without it costing them a friendship. Plenty of people buy through a friend and it goes fine. Just decide in advance whether that person can tell you something you do not want to hear.
Do that and you will have made the decision on evidence rather than on rapport. The agent worth signing with is usually the one whose answers were most specific, whose agreement was shortest, and who told you at least one thing about your own plan that you did not want to hear.
Does the realtor work for me? Every person in a purchase is paid by someone, and it is rarely the person they are standing next to. How real estate commission flows, what buyer representation and multiple representation actually mean, who the open house agent works for, how a mortgage broker is paid, and why the appraisal is for the lender.
Every agent you interview will be personable and well prepared — that is the job. Choosing a real estate agent to sell your home comes down to a public record you can check, knowledge of your street rather than the city, and advice that survives bad news. The questions to ask a real estate agent, and how to judge the answers.
What do I pay on closing? The purchase price is only the headline number. Between the accepted offer and closing day, a cluster of hidden costs comes due — land transfer tax, lawyer fees and disbursements, title insurance, adjustments and the repair buffer nobody budgets for.
What my budget buys changes completely depending on where you point it. Hold a single number constant and move it around the city and it stops being a budget and becomes a set of trade-offs: space versus location versus age. Here is what you can get for it, by area.
