A real estate at home in Pointe-Claire in Montreal's West Island in May, 2024.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
When Chelsea Despatie and her husband bought their second Ottawa-area home on a whim, before selling their first one, they quickly realized they might not have enough leftover cash to cover much-needed renovations.
That was particularly true when they factored in the fees they would have to pay a real estate agent for selling their first home.
So they searched online for alternatives and found ComFree, a company that claims to standardize the process of selling a home without a realtor.
Launched in 2002, the company was sold a few years later and went through multiple iterations and owners before being relaunched in 2023 by founders Travis and Erin Holowach. They compare their model to the way robo-advisers such as Wealthsimple allow people to invest on their own.
ComFree offers packages ranging from $497 for simple help listing a property on the multiple listing service (MLS) to $1,197 for help from lawyers, photographers and support from the company’s team.
Ms. Despatie’s package included a “For Sale” sign, a real estate lawyer, help throughout the selling process and posting their home on the MLS – which makes it vastly easier for a home to be seen by buyers and agents and can be challenging for a homeowner to do on their own.
A bidding war ensued, and the home sold for tens of thousands of dollars above their listing price, which they set low at the outset by factoring in the commission savings to make the house more competitive.
Ms. Despatie said using ComFree was a total success. They saved more than $20,000 in realtor fees – more than enough to cover renovations to their new home.
“It was smooth sailing. I’m not too sure what a realtor could’ve done differently,” Ms. Despatie said. She noted that when her home went up on the MLS on a Friday, it wasn’t visible to realtors on the local listing board yet. That means all the interest she got was driven by prospective buyers who were looking at homes themselves, not their realtors.
She opted to give a 1.5-per-cent commission to the buyer’s realtor, which is much lower than normal. ComFree users can choose a zero-commission sale, too, but Ms. Despatie hoped the commission would spur more realtors to show her property to clients.
William Strange, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, says the real estate industry is overdue for major changes. He points out that travel agencies largely disappeared once new technology allowed consumers to directly access information that was previously only available to agents. In real estate, consumers can now access information such as listings and sales statistics, which is why Prof. Strange has believed since the early 2000s that low-cost real estate platforms would become more commonplace.
Yet only about 1 per cent of home sales in Toronto are done without a realtor, he points out. And he says he would still use a realtor himself.
Unlike ComFree, Prof. Strange wouldn’t characterize a real estate transaction as simple. It’s generally the largest transaction in a person’s life, and decisions such as correctly pricing a home can be complicated.
However, he expects the status quo, in which realtors make ever-larger commissions as home prices grow faster than inflation, will change at some point.
Toronto realtor Nasma Ali, the founder of One Group Toronto Real Estate, said even she can see the merit of using a service such as ComFree. She has helped her clients buy owner-listed properties before.
But there are some potential challenges, too. Ms. Ali said realtors will often try to steer their clients away from owner-listed properties, since they stand to lose on commissions.
She said the practice is unethical but rampant nonetheless.
As a result, owner-listed properties run the risk of being on the market for much longer than realtor-listed ones.
She also said pricing your home is an important aspect of the process that sellers can have misgivings about. They stand to either leave money on the table or lose out on potential interest if they price their homes incorrectly – one way or the other.
Ms. Ali noted that even realtors use other realtors to sell their homes because they don’t want emotions to get in the way.
ComFree co-founder Travis Holowach says his company does support its users in pricing their homes. It lists about 50 to 60 properties a month in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario and claims a 92-per-cent success rate.
He said the 8 per cent of homes that don’t sell are generally due to issues around pricing – a factor that is ultimately in the seller’s control.
He disagrees with realtors who say their services may be necessary in specific scenarios, adding that owners of everything from multimillion-dollar properties to affordable condos have trusted ComFree.
One of the main reasons for that belief: Buyers have never been more empowered to find the properties they want.
With websites such as Realtor.ca receiving millions of visits per month, gone are the days when realtors had exclusive access to a list of properties and had more sway over which properties they showed. Now, prospective buyers can easily find a house without needing a realtor to show it to them first.
“There’s perceptions of why it would make more sense to go with a realtor, but I’ve never had somebody say, ‘No, I think I would still use a realtor’ after talking to them,” Mr. Holowach said.
