Ep. 42 - The Market Flip “Nobody” Saw Coming: Where Did the Sockless Realtors Go?

In this episode of The Last Honest Realtor, host David Fleming asks a question that says more about the market than you’d think: Where did all the sockless realtors go? And more importantly—what does their disappearance say about Toronto real estate in 2025?

What starts as a joke turns into a look back at the peak years of hype: pre-construction mania, staged social media hustle, and the agents who disappeared when the market got real. David walks through the signs we ignored, the lessons we’re still learning, and what’s left now that the dust has settled.

In This Episode:

• Why the sockless realtor became a symbol of the boom years
• What actually happened to pre-construction—and why it matters
• The Real Estate Bitcoin & Wealth Expo, in hindsight
• A $15,000 personal loss that hits a little too close to today
• Who’s still here in 2025, and why that’s probably a good thing

Timestamps:
00:00 – Where Have All the Sockless Realtors Gone?
05:00 – The Disappearance of Social Media Real Estate Stars
10:00 – Pre-Con's Collapse and the Fallout
16:00 – The Real Estate Bitcoin & Wealth Expo: Yes, That Happened
25:00 – David’s $15,000 Lesson from Nortel
30:00 – Investor-Built Cities and What They Left Behind
35:00 – What Real Professionals Are Doing Now
40:00 – Who’s Actually Buying and Selling in 2025?

Also in This Episode:

• David breaks down how a bank draft photo, a Rolex, and a Mercedes became the defining image of an entire era
• Why hype is so easy to believe when everyone else is making money
• A straight-up look at what it takes to succeed in a market that isn’t doing anyone any favours

Subscribe to The Last Honest Realtor on YouTube or your preferred podcast app. Drop a comment if you lived through the sockless era—or if you’re just glad we’ve moved on.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Where Have All the Sockless Realtors Gone?
• 5:00 The Disappearance of Social Media Real Estate Stars
• 10:00 Pre-Con's Collapse and the Fallout
• 16:00 The Real Estate Bitcoin & Wealth Expo: Yes, That Happened
• 25:00 David’s $15,000 Lesson from Nortel
• 30:00 Investor-Built Cities and What They Left Behind
• 35:00 What Real Professionals Are Doing Now
• 40:00 Who’s Actually Buying and Selling in 2025?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I was chatting with a friend of mine last week, and he posed a very important real estate question. Where have all the sockless realtors gone? Hello folks and welcome back to the Last Honest Realtor podcast. I'm your host David Fleming. Thank you so much for joining me today as we ask and answer this question in all seriousness as a way to sort of look at, gauge and evaluate the market in Toronto as it is today. Who are the players, the buyers, the sellers, the agents, the other market participants and then we compare and contrast with who they were say three years, five years or ten years ago and put this all together to ask how has the market changed and most importantly why. Then you can evaluate what mistakes have we made, and of course, there are many, and how can we use that information moving forward. Now, the story I told at the opening is a true one. I was texting with a colleague of mine who actually watched last week's podcast. He said, how are you? Great job. We got to chatting. And of course, once he said that, he told me that I have to give him credit for it. Yes, it's your friend and my friend, James Benson, fantastic real estate agent, who texted me, and I'm going to say exactly what he said. I'm just wondering... Where all the dudes without socks in their suits and loafers are right now because they're not taking pictures with their fancy cars. Now, on its own, it's kind of funny. It's just like, yeah, that's a pretty funny observation, James and David. But here's the thing. If you dig a little bit deeper, and trust me, I did because I'm doing an entire podcast about it today, I think this speaks to a microcosm of where the industry was and how it's changed since then. Because it got me thinking that if a professional like James or myself is taking a backseat to some of these sockless realtors, you know, your bro who just got his real estate license and has a really great idea on how you can not get rich quick, but make a lot of money fast, this is how you know that we have a problem. And this working backwards should have been one of the warning signs. So more on this in a moment, but in 2025 right now, This isn't just the market is changing. This is the market has changed. And in a changing market, you could almost sort of say, hey, it's changing, which is to say that, listen, it could be going forwards, going backwards. We're not really sure. The market's changed. We know this as a fact. I make no bones about the fact that sales are at an all-time low. And I say this, of course, when the Bank of Canada has reduced interest rates. So I could still make a very positive argument for all things real estate. Now is not the time to necessarily do that. But point is, everything is different. And the way that we transact, the way that we prospect as agents, the way that we market properties, the way that we sell actively or passively, the way that buyers buy, the way that sellers sell, Every single thing has changed. The participants have changed as well. The buyers, the sellers, the listing agents, the buyer agents, the pre-con agents, no wait, pre-con agents, they're literally like, you know that Wikipedia page for all of the different occupations that no longer exist? You know, like the tool and die maker from 1800s. Yeah, I think they're adding pre-construction VVIP agent platinum to that. That's another joke, which I thought was really funny. Everything has changed. So what I wanna know today is how did we get to this point What were the warning signs and why were the warning signs missed? Because that's incredibly important and I'm going to get ahead of this and tell you that I don't want this to come off as self-congratulatory, but I am going to talk about some of the warning signs and I am going to mention that I shared them and a lot of people didn't necessarily listen. But again, we have the benefit of hindsight, which is so incredibly amazing. So first, where are we? We're in a market that's changed. Now, this market has changed not only from, let's say, the post-2022 peak when interest rates went up, post-COVID, but this market has also changed from 2018 and 2019, which a lot of people forget about. And I take this for granted sometimes. Not everyone lives and breathes real estate. A lot of Torontonians do. But if you were to break our entire last 25 years down in these little three-year segments, we came off of a peak in April of 2017, which ironically felt very similar to the peak in February of 2022, only five years later, except in April of 2017, that peak was after four months of run-up, where housing prices skyrocketed, and then the government stepped in. They didn't actually really do anything. If you lived through this, they just kind of made a series of announcements about, we need to do something about home prices. We need to cool the market. Cool the market. That's what you need to do. Okay, interesting, free market and government intervention, which actually doesn't really make it free as far as the definition of a market goes, topic for another day, but they did cool the market and prices dropped. 2022, same thing, except this time they actually did something. They raised interest rates at an unprecedented rate. So in 2017, after that peak rolled off, 2018, 2019, pre-COVID, those were very, very busy years. In the real estate market, the downtown condo market, and of course, your friend, my enemy, the pre-construction market. Now, this time, incredibly busy, pre-construction dominating, absolutely everything. And I'm going to talk to you, oh gosh, I cannot wait for you to hear all about, should I spoil it? The Real Estate Bitcoin and Wealth Expo. from April of 2018. More on that in a moment. Now, pre-construction, it's dead. The house of cards, it folded. I have been talking about this so much in the last four months. If you're not familiar with my work, I started writing my blog in 2007 and immediately started saying, this is insanity. It makes no sense. I take little pleasure. Actually, that's not true. I do take a lot of pleasure, not necessarily in the misfortunes of people that lost everything in the pre-construction world, but I do take pleasure in the fact that eventually, finally, it was sort of like, okay, thank you. Thank you. We were right on this. Guys like me and Ben Rabideau, who have been talking about this forever while people continue to buy at inflated prices, are now looking at this and saying, okay, yeah, we called this. We wish that more people had listened. I could do an entire podcast on what happened in pre-construction, but essentially when you're selling$800 a square foot condos for$1,200 a square foot in pre-construction, the market had better rise. Or else, if it doesn't, you're behind by 400 a square foot. And God forbid, if it declines, you're behind by even more. Now people are walking away from deposits. Developers are suing these folks. People can't close. You've got banks giving blanket appraisals, which circumvents the Bank Act. It's a freaking mess. That is what's happened in pre-con. That is where we are. But I want to go back to where we were. And if you like my analogy about the sockless realtor, you're going to love this one. I'm gonna sum up the ridiculousness of where we were with an image. On your friend's social media or on some random agent's social media, there's a photo of a bank draft for$200,000 and it's a caption that says, just closed another deal, congrats to my happy buyers. But it's not just a photo of that bank draft because that photo shows the bank draft being held by a person wearing a Rolex strategically showcasing the check on the steering wheel of their Mercedes. I cannot tell you how many times I saw a photo like this, and I can't tell you how many times, and James Benson said, you know, posing in front of their fancy cars, how many times I've seen people doing this 2018 through 2022, 2023 maybe even, and to James's point, where are these people now? because it's gross. It was gross then and it's gross now. I've never taken a picture of a bank draft. I don't wear a watch, first of all. Somebody that I used to know was like, man, if I was you, I'd have a thousand Rolexes. I tell time by looking at the sun, okay? I don't wear a watch. And if I did, it probably wouldn't be a Rolex. And I do drive a Lexus, but that's because it's a great car. I don't need a Maserati or a Lamborghini like the people taking photos in social media, and putting it up there bragging about how awesome they are. And you know as well as I do, it's image. Most of it's not true. One of the best real estate agents in our office drives a Mazda. He's one of the top 10 agents here and he drives a Mazda. He's just an awesome dude. He's smart as hell, he's hardworking, he's great working with listings, great working with buyers, drives a Mazda. But to sum it all up guys, that's where we were. That's where we were for five or six years. You'd go on to social media and it was just a contest to see who could act like they were working the hardest. Now, where we were, people speculating on Calgary real estate when they've never been to Calgary. You know your friend that's like, yeah, I just picked up a couple of towns in Calgary. Towns? Yeah, a couple townhouses. I got a contact out there. He was able to skip the line for me. You what? You bought two pre-construction townhouses in Calgary? You've never been west of Thunder Bay. Yes, that's what was happening. And looking back on it now, it seems exactly crazy. I will say I do have one client who's a professional real estate investor who bought properties in Calgary. But he's brilliant. And the average person doing that is not. Speculating on pre-construction towns in Calgary. Oh my goodness. So real estate transitioning from... Its primary function as a primary residence towards investment, another thing that happened. Now, I'm going to take a tangent here for a moment to essentially blame the way that we have built the city of Toronto, which is to say that we need condos. Developers don't want to pay to build them, so they'll borrow money from a bank, but the bank doesn't want to lend that money to developers who have sold them all, but you're selling something that doesn't exist. So what we'll do is we'll sell pre-construction condos, and then as prices go up, and we know that investors are the ones that are buying these and basically investors are financing them, we'll just keep shrinking the units over and over and over so we can keep the absolute price the same and the units get smaller. And that is how all of Toronto's downtown core was built over the last 20 years, ergo, it was built by investors. And the worst part is, downtown Toronto was, I wanna say designed by, it was shaped by investors. There was no grand plan. There was no city planner that said, hey, here's what we'll build. There was no conglomerate of condominium developers that said, here's what we'll do. It was investors buying units completely speculatively that drove prices up and shrunk the size of condos. And even when, even when you have people that are looking to buy real estate as a primary residence, they're still so obsessed with the investment portion Remember, it's a portion of the investment. You wanna go buy stocks? Fine, that's an investment. But when you're buying a house, you're living in there, you're sleeping in there, you're raising your kids in there, you're decorating your Christmas tree in there, you're having grandma's 90th birthday in there. A portion is investment. And we reached a point where the component went to the entire thing. So I'm gonna give you an example of what's been happening over the last little while. I got a call from a young person who lives in Sarnia, whose friend was a real estate agent from London, who told him to buy a pre-construction condo as a camp miss, and you know where this is going, and I wrote about this on my blog the other day, and he called me basically, his friend's no longer in real estate, of course, but this was, as he said, about six months after they finished university, his friend got his real estate license, and it was kind of sad, but also kind of awesome, because he said to me, we all decided as a group, they were in business school, we all decided that whatever careers we had, we would always support each other, which is amazing. And these guys finished school and this guy's buddy went into real estate and he called him one day and he said, I've got a can't miss for you. And he sold a pre-construction condo in downtown Toronto. The guy from Sarnia who lives in Sarnia, who went to school, I won't say where, but then the agent lives in London and he's no longer in the business. And he basically sold him this place for not tomorrow's price today, but like eight years from now's price today. Well, actually now would be like 15 years. So say the kid paid 700,000 for a studio that's now worth maybe five and a quarter. That's where we were. Okay, another story, and this one, you ready for this, is gonna take you back a quarter of a century. Taking the glasses off for effect certainly helped. Now, infamously, in my family and my friend circle, and sometimes on Toronto Realty Blog, I have told this story over and over. In 2001, I was an intern at Celestica, in between third and fourth year university, and I was a young business student working for a faceless corporation, which of course made me the man I am today because I realized I did not to work for a faceless corporation. Was not set out for the corporate world, goes without saying, but while I was there, I found myself. And I took all the business acumen, and while I might say this, the sort of you're born with it entrepreneurial spirit, and I started to do things to make money, to take what I had learned and make profits, absorb losses, revenues, expenses. One of those things was using this magical new website that was only two years old called eBay. And I bought and sold concert and sporting event tickets. Now, in 2025, I recognize Ticketmaster controls it. They're virtual tickets. And I'm pretty sure that the CRA is involved. Back then, you could do whatever you wanted. Paper tickets, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Toronto Maple Leafs, whatever it is. Here's my point, guys. I was working in a company with all kinds of other employees who were grown men and women employees. watching what the kid intern did, and some of them tried to emulate it. Now, I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I lost money on events. I actually went down to scalp Janet Jackson at Cop's Coliseum and lost my shirt. But the point is, over the years, I refined it. I learned wins, losses. And one day, a colleague of mine who's a 45-year-old man with a wife and two kids comes to me crying. He says, I need your help. I said, what? He says, well, I saw what you were doing, and I bought four tickets to Paul McCartney in Los Angeles, and I can't sell them. You did what? He tells me he spent$1,000 a ticket on Paul McCartney in Los Angeles. His wife went absolutely crazy when she saw them and he's freaking out. Okay, why did you do that? Listen, far be it for me to say at the time when I was 21 years old, I knew that people watching Paul McCartney aren't on eBay. They barely know the internet exists and you can't make a profit on tickets that were$1,000. Best event I ever had, Zwan, it was a side project by Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. Tickets were like$20. Crazy people were paying 500 bucks for them. So the point of this story, as it is a tangent but hopefully a fun one, is that all of these other people in this actual company that was responsible for making electronics and they were like real ass adults, they were watching what this 21-year-old kid was doing. They tried to emulate it. And that's exactly what people did in the real estate market between 2018 and 2023. Everyone was watching everyone else and saying, I can do that too. And saying, it doesn't matter. I don't need experience. I don't need knowledge. I'm just going to do it. And so excuse the story there. I hope it was fun. Yeah, I still drive by Don Mills in Edmonton every once in a while and remember when. But that to me is... an analogy for you, if you will. And I'm drawing on my personal experience there, but I see so many similarities between what's happened over the last few years. People just getting in over their heads, people that are making moves without thinking, and I'm not just talking about the people buying pre-construction, I'm talking about real estate agents selling it, and I'm talking about the real estate agents getting into the business in general. Now, I wanna go to the warning signs, and this is going to be so amazing, folks. I mention this. The Real Estate, Bitcoin, and Wealth Expo. I'm gonna warn you, there's going to be a lot of sarcasm, so just hang on and bear with me. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can look back at this and think it's crazy. Here comes that self-congratulatory moment. I was asked by Toronto Life in 2018 to be part of a panel. A paying audience came to watch a bunch of speakers. I put together an entire presentation called Don't Believe the Hype. This was seven years ago. The warning signs were there. We just missed them or ignored them. This is in NOW Magazine, the Real Estate, Bitcoin, and Wealth Expo, Canada's largest money-making expo. No, it says that, guys. Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, baseball legend Alex Rodriguez, Shark Tank's Daymond John, Dragon Den's Manjeet Minhas, and all these other people. Live performance by Pitbull, who's a musician but then started telling people how to make money. I think at one point he said, I should have bought Napster. Hundreds of opportunities in real estate, investing, and wealth making. Was this not a sign? They were asking$1,500 per ticket. And I remember saying, when you put together real estate, Bitcoin, and wealth, this is hype. This is FOMO. You are selling fear of missing out. And this isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. It's just a fantastic way to make a lot of money and fast. Now they also, are you ready for this, threw in cannabis. What? Could they not have thrown in Briex stock? Some of you don't get that reference. It's a very famous stock that went bust in the early 2000s. Now, I have here a picture, which I'm going to show for those of you watching. The real estate... Wealth Expo with Sylvester Stallone, Daymond John, and Alex Rodriguez, who probably had to look up Toronto on a map. I have here one of the graphics shown during the presentation. Alex Rodriguez winning in every stage of the game, which is ironic considering he's a career cheater who took steroids and had the longest suspension in the history of baseball. Here's a picture of an advertisement in the subway. Celebrity millionaires teach you how to get rich. Sylvester Stallone's knockout strategies. Pitbull telling you how to go from negative to positive. All right. The Real Estate, Bitcoin, and Wealth Expo. Network, learn, profit. Get your tickets now.$1,500 each. I have here a photo of some of the other speakers. The billion-dollar marijuana market. Hot properties. Flipping apartment buildings. Who's flipping apartment buildings? The entire purpose of buying an apartment building is to keep it for the long term because the return is so small and the expenses are so high. The cap rates are non-existent and the way that you fund these is not like residential. It is an absolute expert field and you're talking about flipping apartment buildings? Guys, I did a presentation in 2018. I went up on stage and I told people, don't believe the hype. And I don't think anyone there, well, some people there probably listened. But after that, we know that so many people just ran around and bought pre-cons and you're looking at Calgary townhouses and you've never actually been there. My goodness, guys, the warning signs were there. It was FOMO. But the best lessons in investing are are learned by doing, experiencing, winning, and losing, and most importantly, taking responsibility. Now, I paid$15,000 for the greatest lesson I ever learned, and I'm gonna tell you all about it. I didn't pay$15,000 for the lesson. I lost$15,000 at 21 years old. It was my life savings. 1999, I wanna take you back to the tech era. Boom. And for those of you that didn't live through it, let me explain. The internet really only became mainstream around that time. I went to school in 1998. I still have the dial-up modem. That's how far back we are. Now, every single tech stock was going crazy on the exchanges. You could literally take this pen, go and bookmark pens.com, and then you could say, my business model is we're going to sell pens on the internet. And you know what? There's probably a venture capitalist out there that'll throw$200 million to fund that idea. That is, as history has shown, how crazy the tech boom was. And guess what? A young enterprising man named David Fleming wanted to get in on the action. 19 years old, I went downtown to meet in person my father's stockbroker to say, I want to be a player. And I took my life savings,$15,000. Actually, it was$17,500. That's every penny I ever made from my first job making shish kebabs at Bruno's, from pumping gas at Sunoco, to bartending at Shark City, to waiting tables at Eastside Mario, the fish market at Metro, back then Dominion. And I wrote a check for$17,500 to a gentleman at RBC Dominion Securities. And it just sat in my account. And I went every single day. And I looked online to see what was moving up, what was moving down. Everything was moving up. To not get in would have been crazy. And one day I called him and he said, I'm buying Nortel Networks. Some of you right now are cringing. Some of you have no idea what I'm talking about. Maybe you're Googling Nortel Networks. Don't leave. I'm gonna tell you what happened. So Nortel Networks was trading at$50 a share at that time. And my stockbroker, this is a person that was in his probably late 60s that had been through many different market cycles that should have known the basic fundamentals of investing. told me to put everything into one stock. I know you're going to say this is hard to believe. I know you're going to say, well, I would never do that. And that's the first rule. I am telling you, a person who trades stocks for a living, who has been through every up and down, took a 19-year-old kid, actually I was 20 at the time, and said, you have$17,500. I would buy 300 shares of this stock at$50 a share. He told me to take all of my money and put it in one stock. So naturally I did. And guess what? It went up to$51. I had just made$300. In fact, it went up to$53. That was$900 of profit. And I was walking around McMaster University feeling like an absolute king. I could not believe the fact that I used to pump gas for$6 an hour, and I just made 900 bucks investing in stock. Then, of course, it went to 52, and then 51, and then 50. And at 49, it hurt a little bit. And it dropped down to 45. Now, at 45, well,$5 times 300 shares, I was down$1,500, which is what I used to take home from an entire summer of making shish kebabs, pumping gas, waiting tables, or whatever it was. Now, I specifically remember calling my stockbroker at 49, at 47, at 45, and saying, what should we do? Do you know what his advice was? Hang on. That was his advice. Hang on. It's like how when Trump announced tariffs and the stock market went to heck, every single person out there said, don't look at it. Don't look at your statements. Don't look at it. That is the worst possible advice. You should look at it all the time. You should know exactly what's happening. And I hear people out there today telling their clients, don't look at it. It doesn't matter. It's the same thing my stockbroker told me in 1999, 2000. Don't look at it, he said. It's just a paper loss. A paper loss? Well, that's interesting. He said it's not a real loss until you actually exercise it, and why would you do that? Now, when the stock dropped in a single day from$45 to$30, that represented two things. Number one, it was the day I set my bench press record at The Pulse, which was the name of the gym at McMaster University, because I was so incredibly angry. It was also the day that I realized I had lost$4,500 on paper in a single day. Now, my broker did not tell me to sell it at 30 or 29 or 28 or 27 or 25 or 24. You know where this is going. I got a phone call from him one day when I was at the aforementioned Celestica in 2001 when the stock was trading at about$2. Oh, yeah, because he never told me to sell. And he said, I'm going to give you an early Christmas gift. I'm going to sell you a thousand shares of Nortel at a dollar. I said, what? He said, don't ask. Don't ask. Just take it. Just take it. I said, okay. He said, can I exercise the trade? And by then I had already set up like, you know, an E-Trade portfolio and I was doing my own thing, which again, I don't think anyone should do, but I was 20. So he sells me the shares for a dollar. And I turn around and I sell them for$2. So I made$1,000. And in the process, I sold the 300 shares that he had sold me. And I locked in that$48 per share loss. I love telling that story. It's my favorite story. And it's really hard because, I mean, I was there. You ever think back to when you're younger and you're like, I was there. I was there when my father said to me, Dave, this is the best lesson you're ever gonna learn. Because he saw a statement at the house and he opened it thinking it was for him. And it was showing that I had lost about 14,000 of my$15,000. And he said he was gutted. He felt sick. He couldn't believe it. And, you know, his words, this is the best lesson you'll ever learn at the time fell on deaf ears. But the truth is that experience made me the person I am today because I learned from it. I don't trust anybody. I really don't. That was a stockbroker with all the experience in the world, been through every single market cycle, and he took a kid and told him to put his entire life savings into one stock and then never told him to sell it. You learn by doing. You learn by winning. You learn by losing. And hopefully, cumulatively, you come out ahead. But I learned at the time the reality is retail investing is for suckers. Absolute suckers, and I know you're different. You trade on your Questrade. You're literally in the advertisement where they show you can get rich sooner and you can retire sooner and all the fees and all that. Absolute nonsense. I am very happy to pay extremely high fees with somebody that does this for a living. My money is with a family member. They probably charge the biggest fees in the world, and I do not care because that's what they do for a living. I don't trade on Scottrade. Oh my God, that's how old I am. Questrade, Robinhood, whatever it is. Different schools of thought, but I'm also a full-service real estate agent who believes in that value. So my point, guys, is that while I am talking about all of the signs here, the Real Estate Bitcoin and Wealth Expo, the people that bought pre-construction townhouses in Calgary when they've never been west of Thunder Bay, the kid that bought the pre-con in Toronto when he's from Sarnia and his buddy is from London, FOMO. and I too fell into the trap. I was 20 years old, I'm not immune, I'm no different than anybody else. But I have spent all of my time in real estate since I started the blog in 07, encouraging people to not fall into the same trap. And this is exactly what has happened over the last decade. So who were the players then, as I say? I'm gonna give you another anecdote. A colleague of mine was saying that he recently spoke to what he calls pre-con mom. She has 12 pre-cons closing this year. This is right out of the big short. She has 12 pre-cons closing this year and she does not know what to do. She's a mom, you know, and I'm not trying to make this sexist. It could be a stay-at-home dad, but it sounds to me like maybe she was bored and needed something to do, bought a pre-con, liked it, bought another one, made some money, flipped it. She got 12 pre-cons closing this year if they close. That is an idea that is an anecdote of who the players were back then. How about the sellers? How about the fact that for a long time when offshore money, and I've told you guys many times, I think the whole foreign buyer situation was really overestimated, but at the same time, there were so many foreign deals where they were assigning the pre-con and they were never taxed on the money. that they made. Think about it. You buy a pre-con for$400,000, then you assign it for$500,000. The buyer that buys it from you for$500,000, they close, they pay land transfer tax with the government and all those wonderful things. But that portion in the meantime was never taxed. And I bet there are tens of billions of dollars, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars out there from, I don't know, the year 2004 through... you know, 2020, whenever this sort of music stopped, that went untaxed. To me, when I think of the players, specifically these sellers, I think of flippers, I think of speculators, I think of these assigners with their untaxed revenue, I think of folks that were looking at the investment portion of real estate and it became the entirety. And it's not just the flippers, it's not just the speculators, it's not just the people that are going to the real estate and Bitcoin Wealth Expo, the guys that say let's buy a house, renovate it, and flip it for more money. I also think the people that were actually doing it as a primary residence also started to think just about the investment potential when they should be thinking about the school district. They should be thinking about how long it takes to drive to work, or to their mom's house, and we all got carried away in that. Now when it comes to the agents, I think the players then represented the worst of the worst. I think that that idea of the bank draft being held on the steering wheel while showing off the Rolex and the Mercedes logo, to me really underscores everything that was wrong with real estate. And it became this contest on social media, this sort of culture of looking busy. You think about a typical video of a real estate agent that starts with their alarm clock at 5.30, and it's like them like, early bird gets the worm and then they like make some shake out of kale and whatever. And then they go to their workout class. Then they're in the office at like seven 30 in the morning, which is total nonsense. Cause nobody in real estate does that. And then they just have this montage of how busy they are. And then it ends with like a photo of their laptop on their steering wheel. Like that's a totally normal thing. And it's like 1145, like long day. Can't wait to do it again tomorrow. Like, How many times did we see that on social media? And I'm not even a big social media person. But that, to me, is when I think real estate agent 2018 to 2023, that is what I think of. And that is that FOMO, that is that nonsense, that is that social media nonsense fake culture that everyone bought into and everyone got carried away with. And it's part of the reason that we find ourselves here today. And I think back, I wrote a blog post about how a colleague of mine who's really big in social media, was approached by a media company that wanted her to do ads for Humber College to make real estate look cool, get more people licensed. Humber College is running a business. And at the end of the day, the Real Estate Council of Ontario took the education away from the Ontario Real Estate Association and gave it to Humber College. Well, Humber College... They need people to sign up. That's how they make money. So a marketing company goes out and says, hey, you're cool. You're on social media. Will you do some ads with us to help make real estate as a career look cool and get more people licensed? Are you kidding me? Is it any wonder we ended up here? Now, all these new agents who have absolutely no clue, they're selling pre-construction, they're making promises they can't keep, they're telling people, buy this pre-construction now, you don't have to close. In fact, there was an article in the newspaper where there's an actual quote from a guy that got burned saying, I knew I wouldn't be able to get the mortgage, but my friend, the real estate agent told me, don't worry, you'll be able to assign it. Did you have a backup plan? Did you have a plan B? And where is that real estate agent now? Not in the real estate industry, I can tell you that. The discount agents, the fly-by-night agents, all of these guys were able to, if they got a listing, hold an offer night, do a really terrible job at it, be really unprofessional, but they were able to get the property sold because the market was so hot back then, you could sell absolutely anything. So that was then. How has it changed? I gave you so many anecdotes back then. and so many stories and analogies dating back to my days as a 19-year-old during the tech boom, seriously. Yeah, we've come full circle now. It's 2025. I'm looking at the last five, six, well, back to say 2017, 2018, when this boom of real estate agents came in and fear of missing out took over and the Real Estate, Bitcoin, and Wealth Expo. What is it like in 2025 and who are the players? The buyers... There are people that want to buy a home. There are people that want to move into it. There are families that are looking to upsize. There are people moving to Toronto or to Canada. They are buying homes to live in them. And yes, there are still some investors out there. It's the sharps. It's a gambling term. I don't gamble, but it's a funny term. The sharps are out there and they're subscribing to buy while others are selling and sell where others are buying. The Sharps are out there right now and they're saying, okay, if I could get an absolute steal, I'll buy this place. Big money. Institutional money will follow next. That's who's buying. And dare I say, at least in the former category there, the folks that are buying to actually live in the houses, that is kind of what real estate was intended to be. Now, I'm not an anti-capitalist. I do believe if someone wants to invest, sure, absolutely go for it. But that should represent a portion of the market and not the driving factor behind real estate. Now it takes guts. It takes guts to buy right now. But fortune favors the bold. And honestly, you have to think about the time horizon. So I need to address a point here. And this is in spirit of honesty, because I haven't been honest enough telling you about losing my life savings at 20 years old. I'm no different than the average agent that had a client buy in 2022 at the market peak, who now has a client whose house isn't worth as much. That's what markets do. The difference between me and other folks, whether it's James Benson, who I mentioned at the onset, and other agents, is that we weren't day trading homes. A client of mine that bought in 2022, sure, they've got a 25-year timeline. They just bought a four-bed, four-bath in Leaside for$3 million by selling their semi. Their kids were three and five. They're going to be there until they finish high school. We weren't day trading homes. And that's how you ensure that you don't get burned. Markets go up, markets go down. And the real estate market has always gone up on a long enough time horizon, and it will continue to. But I'm not gonna say, oh, no one has ever lost money when I've sold them a house. No, markets go up and down. But that is the difference. And I'm gonna make a point in a moment that all of this And for those of you listening, you can't see, I'm waving my hand on all of these images of Sylvester Stallone and Pitbull and cryptocurrency and cannabis as it relates to real estate, even though it shouldn't because they're completely different industries. This is gone, man. This, hopefully, will be just a distant memory as we move forward and people learn from their mistakes, as I learned as a 19-year-old losing his life savings on Nortel Networks. Now, who are the players from the seller perspective? Well, at the most basic level, they're the folks that are selling in this market, which means fair market value, which means understanding the current dynamics and not thinking it's something else. Of course, there are a lot of those folks. And I use the example of if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? Okay, well, there's a lot of those listings on the market right now. I've got a conduit 579 that's been listed for two months. Why is the guy two floors up at 679? I'm not bragging about my ability to give away real estate. I'm saying that there are sellers out there that they're never gonna sell. They're the trees falling in the woods that no one's around. That's what's happening in this market. The sellers, not the would-be sellers, the sellers that are actually selling are those that aim to transact. They are selling because they're downsizing. They bought a small condo and now they're selling the big house. They are selling because they're upsizing. They bought a big house, they're moving in with their family that's gonna grow into the proverbial Leaside four bed, four bath, they're selling their semi. This is different from the players then who were only selling because they bought, who were only selling to flip, who were only selling because it was speculative in nature, who were only selling because the entire purpose of their purchase was to eventually sell. Now the last part of this, who are the players now? The agents. They're the professionals. They're the ones who made it through the war and came back. And I mean that in a proverbial sense. All apologies to the literal sense. But that's effectively how I see this, is that over the last six or seven years, we have had so many people enter the business for the wrong reasons. We've had people that have had success, and by success I mean for their own pocketbooks, not the people that are calling me now crying because they can't sell their assignment and they're$200,000 behind in their pre-con, but those folks are gone for the most part. You're not gonna see photos now on social media of real estate agents throwing dollar dollar bills, y'all. You're not gonna see it. People want to hire professionals. And I mentioned my friend James Benson at the beginning and I said, if folks like James and I are getting passed by, because someone's yoga teacher has a real estate license and they want them to sell a pre-con. That was the sign then. That was the warning sign then that was missed. And now what I see is that the job of a realtor in peak times is more important than ever. And I don't wanna talk about what we do. I don't wanna talk about who I am. So I'm gonna tell you about some other agents that I admire. Alex Brot, that's a brand. People say an Alex Brott type listing. Do you know what that means? Do you understand how powerful that is? You see a listing on MLS and you say, oh, that's an Alex Brott type listing from the write-up to the photos to the staging. Ralph and Corey, they've got a brand. They've got a style. People like it. They're drawn to it. They respect it. A guy like Paul Johnston, Unique Urban Homes, and I don't want to speak out of school for Paul, but I don't know that Paul's necessarily taking that crappy tenanted place and city place. His entire unique urban homes is that these properties he lists are amazing. These are the agents. These are the professionals. And yes, I'm talking about myself and my team as well. But there are so many incredible agents out there that do the things that need to be done that Becky, the part-time spin instructor and coach, Somehow magically working 85 hours a week as a realtor and putting it all on social media for you to see, getting up at 5.30 in the morning, drinking our kale shake, going to bed at 11 o'clock after a successful day flogging 14 pre-cons. Those days are gone, man. We've got a listing we're prepping right now. We just put in new countertops. We had a new sink installed. We put in new floors. We're painting everything. We've got a long list of fixes on the outside of the house. We're talking not necessarily about the fluff and pizzazz of the house, but now we're talking about, and I mentioned this in a previous podcast, the nuts and bolts, the unsexy things that during the boom people didn't care about. We have a new furnace, we have a new air conditioner, we put in a backflow valve, we put in a sump pump. This is what we're marketing. We're getting that property ready for sale by getting into the weeds with the seller. Replacing countertops, man. Yeah, that's what you need to do in this market. You need a real professional. And that's what was missing. for so long, because in 2019, you could have a fly-by-night real estate agent take a C-minus listing, put it on MLS, set an offer date, and they're gonna get their 10 offers. Now, they're not gonna get the price that myself or one of these other agents could have got, but the seller doesn't know that, right? They got a 1.5% discount on commission, and they think they've done such a good job, they're never gonna know the difference. But it was selling, they got their 10 offers. You can't do that today. The A's are selling in competition, on offer nights. The B's aren't, the C's aren't, and the D's sure as hell are not. And what has changed, the players that were in the game, I might say dominating the game, at least from a social media and from a loudest noise wins perspective, those folks, for the most part, are gone. The players have changed because the game has changed. And we are now in a completely different market than we were in before. And for the love of God, the real estate Bitcoin and wealth expo with a focus on cannabis. For those of you guys that didn't live through that, you're looking back now and you're saying, God, it was so easy. It was so easy to see the warning signs. Then how come so many other people missed them? Anyways, folks, I appreciate you watching today. And yes, with the benefit of hindsight, you could of course say, oh my God, David, you're doing this now. But as I mentioned, I've been putting this in the blog for quite some time. I've been rallying against the pre-construction for many years. I did this seminar for Toronto Life in 2018. I talked about all of this. And I am hoping the folks that didn't learn then are certainly going to learn now. So thank you so much for watching. As always, folks, I hope you enjoyed the many trips down memory lane here. If you're watching on YouTube, please feel free to drop me a comment. I always love reading those. And please remember to like, comment, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you here next time on The Last Honest Realtor.