How to Choose a Residential Real Estate Agency in Montreal

Most buyers start the search for an agency by asking who has the most years behind them. It is a reasonable instinct and the wrong first question. A better one is narrower: how well does this agency know the specific slice of the market you are buying into? Montreal in mid-2026 is not one market moving in one direction. It is several, and they are pulling apart.

The city trades as three markets, not one

Look at the second quarter of 2026 across the Montreal census metropolitan area. Residential transactions totalled 13,365, down 7% from a year earlier, according to APCIQ. That single number hides more than it tells.

Condominium sales fell 10% year over year. Single-family sales fell 6%. Plex sales fell 5%. The headline decline of 7% describes none of them precisely. A buyer who reads the aggregate and assumes every corner of the market cooled at the same pace is working from an average that no individual segment matches.

Prices told a different story again. The median single-family home reached $645,000, up 3%. The median condominium sat at $430,000, up 1%. The median plex of two to five units came in at $874,000, up 5%. Same quarter, three trajectories.

Time on the market splits the same way

How long a property sits before it sells is one of the plainest signals a buyer has, and it separated by segment in the second quarter of 2026.

A single-family home took 32 days on average, three days faster than a year earlier. A condominium took 48 days, six days slower. A plex took 43 days, six days faster. Active listings across the metro averaged 20,735 for the quarter, up 14% year over year, so the pool a buyer chooses from is deeper than it was, and the depth is not spread evenly.

The gap between a house selling in 32 days and a condo sitting for 48 is the gap between two different negotiating positions in the same city.

An agency that understands why condominium inventory is lengthening while houses still move quickly can shape an offer around it. One that quotes the metro-wide figure treats a condo buyer and a house buyer as if they face the same conditions. They do not.

Why borough-level data beats the regional average

Here is the criterion worth carrying into every agency conversation: borough-level transaction data matters when pricing or offering on a home, because a CMA-wide average conceals variation wide enough to change an offer strategy.

The segment splits above make the point at the metro scale. The same divergence repeats one level down, between boroughs and even between streets. A median condominium price of $430,000 across the whole census metropolitan area blends the Plateau, Verdun, the West Island and Rivière-des-Prairies into a single figure that fits none of them. A house selling in 32 days on average includes neighbourhoods where well-priced listings clear in a week and others where they linger past the quarter's mean.

A buyer pricing an offer needs the number for the segment and the pocket they are buying in, not the number for the region. An agency that works a defined territory closely can supply the finer figure, because a broker whose transaction work is concentrated in particular property types and neighbourhoods sees the local pattern before it shows up in a quarterly release. Aguinaga at LJ Realties has built much of his work around plexes and around first-time, military and relocation buyers, files where the difference between the borough number and the regional number is exactly what determines whether an offer lands. That concentration is the reason segment-specific figures beat the aggregate: they come from someone watching the same few streets month after month.

What to ask, by what you are buying

A condominium buyer in a slower, deeper market should ask how the agency reads absorption and how it prices a listing that may take longer than the seller expects. A single-family buyer should ask for borough-level comparables, for a read on school catchments, and for a candid assessment of what work a property needs before the offer goes in. A plex buyer is buying an income stream, so the relevant fluency is the math behind it: what a rent roll shows, what unit turnover costs, how the numbers hold up against a policy rate now sitting at 2.25%.

Interview the agency the way you search for the home

The generic screening question is volume. The useful one is share. "How many of your last ten transactions were in this segment and this borough" tells a buyer far more than a career total, because it measures relevance rather than tenure. Ask who actually runs the negotiation. Ask whether the agency can show figures below the level of the APCIQ press release, since that release is where the public conversation starts and a good agency's knowledge goes further.

A buyer segments the property search without thinking about it, ruling out a condo when they want a yard or a plex when they want no tenants. The agency search deserves the same discipline. Match the agency to the segment, and the years of experience question answers itself.

LJ Aguinaga is a licensed real estate broker in Montreal and the owner of LJ Realties.