Buying real estate leads vs owning them: what Toronto teams actually pay
Every lead source has a price. The more useful comparison is what each one costs per lead, and what your team still has the month you stop paying.
· 8 min read
A GTA team can get leads four ways: buy them, run ads, take referrals, or build a site that produces its own. Each has a price, and most comparisons stop there. This one adds the question that decides the long-run cost: when you stop paying, what's left?
Prices below were checked on November 6, 2026, and each one names its source. Where a figure is an example rather than a published price, it's labelled as a sample.
What "buying leads" means in Canada
A bought lead is a person's contact details, sold to you by a company that found them. The vendor runs ads or a website, collects names from people who want to buy or sell, and delivers them to agents who pay for an area.
Two things vary between vendors and matter as much as the price:
- Exclusivity. An exclusive lead is sold to one agent. A shared lead goes to several, and the first to call usually wins.
- Where the person signed up. They registered on the vendor's ad or site, in the vendor's brand. When you call, they may not know who you are.
Four ways a team gets leads
- Bought leads: a vendor delivers them for a monthly fee or a price per lead.
- Paid ads: you pay Google or Meta per click and send the clicks to your own page.
- Referrals: another brokerage sends you a client and takes a share of the commission when the deal closes.
- An owned site: a neighbourhood portal or team site that ranks on Google and registers visitors as leads.
Most teams use more than one. Comparing them is about deciding where the next dollar goes.
What each one costs
Bought leads
realestateleads.ca sells exclusive leads to licensed Canadian agents and publishes its packages in CAD (services page, checked November 6, 2026):
| Package | Monthly | Leads a month | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buyer leads | $849 | 20 to 40 | $21 to $42 |
| Buyer and seller leads | $899 | 20 to 40 | $22 to $45 |
| Buyer leads | $1,549 | 50 to 90 | $17 to $31 |
| Buyer and seller leads | $1,599 | 50 to 100 | $16 to $32 |
| Buyer and seller leads | $2,699 | 110 to 200 | $13 to $25 |
The cost-per-lead column is our arithmetic from the published prices and lead ranges. The vendor says its monthly fee includes the ads. Most agents take a six-month term with a $200 deposit; the alternative is a $600 setup fee with no lock-in. Areas are limited, so availability depends on your market.
Paid ads
Google charges per click. These are average cost-per-click estimates for a few GTA agent searches on Google Canada (DataForSEO via OpenSEO, November 2026, in US dollars):
| Search | Cost per click (USD) |
|---|---|
| real estate agent toronto | $8.95 |
| richmond hill real estate agent | $7.94 |
| real estate agent | $7.75 |
| etobicoke real estate agent | $4.74 |
A click only buys a visit. To turn it into a cost per lead, divide by your page's conversion rate, the share of visitors who leave their details. As a sample: if 1 in 20 visitors registers, a $7.94 click works out to about US$159 per lead. At 1 in 10, it's about US$79. If someone manages the campaigns for you, add their fee; ours is 15% of ad spend with a $400 monthly minimum.
Ads are the fastest source to turn on and the fastest to turn off. Traffic stops the day the budget does.
Referral fees
Referral fees are negotiated between brokerages, and there's no published standard rate. In Ontario, payment also has to go through your brokerage: RECO's Bulletin 3.3 says an agent can't receive payment directly from any source other than the brokerage they work for.
As a sample, take a 25% referral fee on the listing side of an average GTA sale. TRREB reported an average selling price of $1,024,108 for October 2026 (TRREB, November 4, 2026). At a 2.5% listing commission that's about $25,600 in gross commission, and the referral fee is about $6,400 for that one deal.
Referrals cost nothing until a deal closes, which makes them the lowest-risk source. They're also the one you control least: you can't order more of them in a slow month.
An owned portal
A neighbourhood portal is a site focused on one farm. It ranks for the area's searches and asks visitors to register to see sold prices. On a VOW (virtual office website), the board requires that registration, so every sign-up is a named lead.
Our Neighbourhood plan, which covers the portal, the team site and monthly SEO, is $790 a month plus a $1,500 setup fee, with a six-month minimum (pricing, CAD plus HST). That's $10,980 in the first year and $9,480 a year after that.
There's no price per lead, because the cost doesn't change with volume. What changes is how many people register, which depends on the farm's searches and how well the portal ranks. A focused portal usually takes three to six months to rank, so the early months bring fewer registrations.
For a real figure: the bungalow-search portal in our case study logged 950 registrations from January 1, 2025 to November 4, 2026, about 43 a month (from the team's CRM, exported November 5, 2026). That portal covers one kind of home across the whole GTA, so a single-neighbourhood portal has fewer searches to win. As a sample for comparison: at 20 registrations a month the Neighbourhood plan works out to about $40 per lead, and at 40 a month, about $20.
Side by side
- Bought leads (published)$13 to $45
- Owned portal, 20 to 40 registrations a month (sample)$20 to $40
- Google ads, 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 visitors register (sample)US$79 to $159
Bought leads: realestateleads.ca packages, checked November 6, 2026. Owned portal: Pixelizio Neighbourhood plan, $790 a month. Google ads: a $7.94 cost per click (DataForSEO, November 2026), in US dollars and not converted. Referral fees are paid per closed deal, so they aren't on this scale.
| Bought leads | Google ads | Referrals | Owned portal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Monthly package | Per click | Share of commission at closing | Flat monthly plan |
| Cost | $13 to $45 per lead (published) | US$79 to US$159 per lead (sample) | About $6,400 per closed deal (sample) | $20 to $40 per registration (sample) |
| Exclusive to your team | On exclusive plans | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Where they met you | The vendor's ad or site | Your page | Another agent | Your site, in your brand |
| What you know about them | Contact details, buying or selling | Contact details | The referring agent's notes | Contact details and the street or listing they looked at |
| When you stop paying | New leads stop; past leads stay yours | Traffic stops the same day | Nothing to stop | The domain and every registration stay yours; rankings last only while the pages stay online |
What the price doesn't show
Beyond exclusivity, two things decide whether a lead is worth what you paid:
- Intent. Someone who registered to see what sold on their own street is researching a decision about their home. Someone who clicked a "homes under $800K" ad may be a year from moving. Both are worth calling, with different follow-up.
- Context. A name and a number give you little to open with. A registration that shows which street, building or listing they looked at gives you a reason to call and something useful to say.
When buying leads makes sense
Bought leads and ads are fast. A team that needs conversations this month, or a new agent without a farm or sphere yet, can have them within days. They also suit a team testing a new area before committing to it.
They make less sense as the only source. The cost repeats every month, and nothing builds up between purchases.
How an owned portal builds over time
A portal is slow to start. Its cost is front-loaded: setup, then months of building pages before they rank. After that, every page that ranks keeps working, and each new page adds searches the portal can answer.
That's the trade. A bought lead costs the same in month twelve as in month one. A portal costs the same each month too, so its cost per registration depends on how well it ranks. In a farm with real searches and beatable competition, that number comes down as pages rank. In a farm dominated by national portals, it may never come down. Rankings can also drop: a Google update can cut traffic to any site, including a well-built one.
How to decide
Four questions, in order:
- Do you need leads this month? If so, bought leads or ads can fill the gap while something slower gets built.
- Do you have a farm? An owned portal works best for a team that already knows an area and can write about it. If you don't have one yet, start with how to farm a neighbourhood online.
- What is one listing worth to you? Using the sample above, one average GTA listing is about $25,600 in gross commission, and a year of the Neighbourhood plan is $10,980. Put your own commission, split and conversion rate into that sum.
- What should be left when you stop? If that matters, put part of the budget into something your team owns.
Most teams end up with a mix: referrals and sphere as the base, bought leads or ads when they need speed, and an owned site that keeps working between campaigns.
Follow-up rules apply to every source
However a lead arrives, follow-up email falls under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). An inquiry gives you implied consent for six months; for anything longer you need express consent, which a registration form can ask for. Referral fees are paid through your brokerage, under RECO's rules on financial benefits. This is general information, not legal advice; check with your brokerage.
If you want to see how an owned portal would sit next to what you pay for leads today, our real estate lead generation page explains how the portals work, and pricing lists every plan.
