Buyers start search online (Canada)

The number people are usually reaching for: in the National Association of REALTORS® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, essentially every buyer now uses the internet during their home search — recent editions report it as all buyers — and 43% of buyers in the 2024 edition made browsing properties online their literal first step, ahead of every other action including contacting an agent (21%). Those are US figures, because Canada has no exact equivalent survey. But the Canadian evidence that does exist points the same way, and the practical conclusion for a Canadian agent is identical.

The US numbers, precisely

NAR’s annual profile is the source behind nearly every “buyers start online” claim, so it’s worth quoting it accurately rather than in folklore form. Across the 2020–2025 editions, “looked online at properties for sale” has been the most common first step every single year, ranging between 41% and 47% of buyers. Internet use at some point in the search climbed until it stopped being a statistic — recent editions simply report that all buyers used it. The runner-up first step, contacting a real estate agent, sat at 21% in the 2024 edition. When you cite these, keep the year attached; the profile updates annually and the edition you quote is what makes the number checkable.

What the Canadian evidence adds

CREA doesn’t publish a first-step breakdown, so the honest Canadian picture is assembled from adjacent sources. CMHC’s Mortgage Consumer Survey has tracked research behaviour for years — in the 2021 edition, 43% of mortgage consumers did their research entirely online and another 33% mixed online and offline, which put three-quarters of Canadian buyers doing at least some of their homework on a screen, and that was half a decade ago. Layer on the sheer scale of traffic Canadians send to CREA’s national listing portal and the direction is unambiguous. Nothing about the Canadian market suggests buyers here behave differently from the US pattern; what’s missing is a formal survey, not the behaviour.

How to read the stat without fooling yourself

Two misreadings are common. The first treats “buyers start online” as “buyers convert online” — they don’t, mostly; the browsing phase runs weeks or months before anyone fills in a form, and the same NAR data shows agents remain central to the actual transaction. The second treats the stat as an argument for being on portals only. In practice the browsing phase is exactly when a buyer meets some agent’s web presence — a search result, a neighbourhood page, a listing alert — and familiarity earned there decides who gets the eventual call. The stat doesn’t say the web replaces you. It says the web is where you’re auditioned, which is the case for having a real website in one sentence.

Keep the citation fresh

A note on hygiene, because this page exists to be quoted: buyer-search statistics age, and the profile behind them updates every year. When you use these numbers, carry the edition year with the figure and check back annually — the first-step share has moved within a six-point band over the past half-decade, and an undated “97% of buyers” from an old deck is exactly the kind of zombie stat that undermines an otherwise sharp presentation. We review this page against the current editions on the review date shown above, and update the figures when the sources do. If the number you’re about to cite doesn’t have a year attached, find one before it goes in front of a client.

What it means for your own numbers

If effectively all buyers pass through the online phase, your web presence is a funnel with known math: visitors, captured contacts, and the long nurture in between. That’s a solvable systems problem — how realtors actually get leads breaks down the channels, and a lead generation setup built around search, alerts, and gated value is how the browsing behaviour in these statistics turns into names in your pipeline. The buyers are already searching. The only open question is whose site they’re searching on.