Selling in Ottawa
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.
You will meet two or three agents, and every one of them will be personable, confident and well prepared. That is the job. The difference between them is almost never visible in the meeting itself — it shows up two months later, in whether the price they suggested was defensible and whether they told you the things you did not want to hear.
So choosing a real estate agent is not a personality test. Ask around about how to choose a realtor and most of the answers will be about rapport; what to look for in a real estate agent is narrower than that, and duller. Three things decide it: what the public record says about them, what they actually know about your street, and whether their advice survives contact with bad news. This guide is about how to judge the answers you get. The questions to ask a real estate agent are already written down for you on the listing agent question card, and what you eventually put your name to is covered in the listing agreement guide.
Every salesperson, broker and brokerage trading in real estate in Ontario must be registered with the Real Estate Council of Ontario — RECO. To check a real estate agent you need nothing but their name: RECO's registrant search is public, free, and answers the question — is my agent registered, and has anything happened since — in about a minute. Almost no seller does it, and it is the single most useful thing you can do before the first meeting.
The register confirms that someone is registered and who they are registered with. It also carries the part few sellers know exists: charges and disciplinary action from the last 60 months. You can search an individual, a brokerage, or someone who is no longer registered but was within the past ten years.
Read it as a filter rather than a reference. Five years is long enough that a serious problem would surface, and short enough that a clean result is not evidence of a long clean career — most agents have nothing on their record, so a clean check tells you little on its own. It is the exception you are looking for. And if a name does not appear at all, stop there: trading in real estate without registration is an offence, not a technicality.
Ontario's real estate legislation requires that the RECO Information Guide be given to a buyer or seller before services or assistance are provided. Not at signing. Before.
That makes the first meeting a test in itself. An agent who works through a full listing presentation — a suggested price, a marketing plan, a fee — without ever putting that guide in front of you has skipped a step at the very first opportunity to skip one.
It is a small thing, and that is exactly why it is worth watching. Nobody's first corner-cut is a big one.
Three quite different things get called reputation, and they are not equally useful.
Real estate agent reviews are the weakest of the three. Sellers are asked for a review at the moment of completion, when relief is doing most of the talking, and nobody publishes the review of the sale that fell apart. A wall of five-star ratings mostly tells you that the agent asks for ratings. Read them for specifics instead of sentiment: one review that describes what the agent actually did when the first three weeks produced no offers is worth twenty that say professional and responsive.
The record is the strongest, because it is the only source that is neither curated by the agent nor written by their happiest client. That is the RECO search above.
References sit in between, and there is one way to make them useful. Ask for two sellers from the past year, and ask specifically that one of them be a sale that was difficult. An agent who cannot produce a difficult sale has either never had one — unlikely, over a career — or would rather you did not hear about it. That single request tells you more than the whole reference conversation that follows.
Sold signs on your own street are genuine evidence, with a caveat: they tell you an agent sold there, not that they sold well. A home that sold in nine days and one that sold in ninety after two price reductions end up as the same sign.
Interview three agents and you will get three numbers, and it is entirely normal for the highest to sit well above the lowest. It is worth understanding what produces that spread: an agent who wants the listing knows perfectly well that their number is the main thing you are comparing.
The practice has a name — buying the listing. Suggest the highest figure, win the contract, and then manage the seller down to the real price over the following weeks, once the agreement's term is running and the property has been sitting long enough to look stale. The seller ends up at the price the market was always going to pay, having spent the most valuable weeks of the listing getting there.
That cost is set out in full in pricing and timing an Ottawa home sale: the first two weeks are when a listing has more attention than it will ever have again, and a price that clears the market's judgment inside that window is worth more than a high number that quietly ages.
The way to defuse it is to ask for the comparables, not the conclusion. Which three recent sales support that number, and how were they adjusted for the ways those homes differ from yours? An agent who arrived at a defensible figure can walk you through the arithmetic. An agent who arrived at a persuasive one will talk instead about buyer demand, their own marketing, and not leaving money on the table.
The most revealing question is not what they think it is worth. It is: what would you list at, and what happens if it has not sold in the first month? The answer to the second half contains the honest version of the number in the first.
Twenty years of selling in Ottawa is not local knowledge. Ottawa is a set of quite different markets stitched together, and an agent can be genuinely expert in one of them and a tourist in yours.
Three ways to test it, none of which can be answered from a script. Name a specific sale within a few streets and ask what it tells them about your home. Ask what they expect a buyer to object to about this property in particular. And ask who the likely buyer is, and what that buyer is comparing you against — a good local real estate agent answers that immediately and in detail, because it is the thing they think about all day.
It matters because the buyer pool for a family home in Barrhaven has nothing in common with the buyer pool for a one-bedroom in Centretown, and the two sell on different evidence. School catchments, walking distance to transit, which side of a main street you are on, what is being built two streets away — that is the layer where a listing price is actually decided, and it is the layer a city-wide market summary cannot reach. How to read Ottawa market numbers covers why the headline figure so rarely describes your street.
If your sale is one of the special cases, knowledge of the case outranks neighbourhood familiarity. A condo sale turns on the status certificate, a tenanted property on what the Residential Tenancies Act does and does not allow, an unbuilt new home on the builder's agreement. Each has its own guide — selling a condo, selling a tenanted property, selling on assignment — and an agent who has not done one before should say so rather than discover it with your sale.
The tell is simple. A well-informed agent tells you something about your own street that you did not know, and can say where it came from. A poorly informed one describes the Ottawa market to you, which you can read in any headline.
The most valuable thing an agent says to you is usually the thing you were hoping they would not say. Three things to listen for.
What they would not spend money on. An agent who tells you the kitchen is dated but not worth renovating before a sale, or that staging the empty living room earns its cost while repainting the whole house does not, is giving you advice that costs them something — a bigger spend and a higher price would suit them fine. Restraint is the signal here.
What has to be true for the plan to work, and what happens if it isn't. An answer containing a decision point — if there are no offers in three weeks, here is what I will suggest and why — is a plan. An answer that only describes the version where everything goes well is a pitch. Ask for the second half explicitly and watch how readily it comes.
The things that are not the price. Your timing, whether you are buying as well as selling, a tenant in the basement, the tax position on a property that was not your principal residence. An agent who says plainly that something is outside their expertise and should go to your lawyer or accountant is more useful than one with a confident opinion about everything — the real cost of selling sets out how much of your proceeds is decided away from the sale price.
And treat promises that are not theirs to make as what they are. What a buyer will pay, how quickly it will sell, that a particular figure is achievable — none of that is within an agent's control. Committing to it out loud is a sales technique, not a forecast, and the person who does it in your kitchen is the person who will be explaining a price reduction to you in six weeks.
No — and be careful with anyone offering you the list. This site does not rank agents and does not link brokerages, for the same reason it does not publish property listings: a ranking of people is either sold, or assembled by someone earning a referral fee from the result. Either way it is an advertisement wearing the clothes of advice.
Awards and top-producer titles are usually built on sales volume, which measures how much an agent sold — not how well any individual seller did. High volume is not a mark against anyone, but it does raise a question worth asking directly: with that many transactions running, who will actually be at my showings, and who am I dealing with week to week? A team is a perfectly good answer. Discovering you have one after signing is not.
What replaces the list is duller and works better. How many agents should I interview? Two or three — three is plenty, and a fourth adds very little for the time it costs. When you interview real estate agents, ask every one of them the same questions, and write the answers down. The differences between them are the entire point, and they only become visible side by side, which is precisely why they are so easy to miss when the meetings are a week apart.
Real estate agent complaints in Ontario go to RECO: you can complain about the conduct of a registered agent or brokerage, and it does investigate. There is one limit that almost nobody learns until they need it, and it is much better known in advance.
RECO has no authority to order that monies be refunded, contracts be canceled, or damages or restitution be awarded.
Real Estate Council of Ontario, on its complaints process
So the regulator deals with conduct, and money is a separate road entirely — RECO's own advice is to get legal advice if what you are seeking is damages or restitution. What it can do is real: written warnings that stay on file, required education, conditions on a registration, fines, suspension or revocation, and publication of the outcome. That is also why the register carries five years of it, and why checking it before you sign is worth more than complaining afterwards.
The practical consequence is about timing rather than complaints. The regulator cannot unwind your contract, so the moment where you have real leverage is before you sign it — the term, the holdover clause and the cancellation terms are all negotiable then and none of them afterwards. The listing agreement guide works through each one.
If something does go wrong, the paperwork is what a complaint is assessed on: the representation agreement, the offer documents, and the correspondence. Keep it all, including the messages.
Do that and the choice usually makes itself. When three sets of written answers are in front of you, a good real estate agent is not hard to identify: evidence behind their number, something specific to say about your street, and at least one piece of advice you did not enjoy hearing. That is generally the one still standing.
The listing agreement is the document sellers read least and are bound by most. What real estate commission it commits you to and who pays the listing agent, how to cancel a listing, what a holdover clause and an exclusive listing mean, and where your interests and your agent's quietly diverge.
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.
Before you can price my home becomes how to price it, you need a home value you can defend. How comparables — comps — actually produce a market value, why a valuation, a home evaluation and a lender's appraisal are three different things, what overpricing costs in time on market, and the best time to sell in Ottawa.
Both routes genuinely work. The honest comparison isn't 'realtor commission versus free' — it's a professional service against your own time, market data, negotiating stamina and paperwork. What the commission and agent fees actually buy, what it takes to sell your house yourself, and whether commission is negotiable.
The sale price is not what you walk away with. Commission and the HST on it, lawyer fees, mortgage discharge or a mortgage penalty, preparing your house for sale, moving and overlap all come off the top. Here is how to work out your net proceeds before you list — and which line regularly shocks sellers.
