For 23 years, REAL Trends has ranked the largest residential real estate brokerages in the United States in an annual survey published each May. Upon its release, the REAL Trends 500 provides not only a clear snapshot of who is the biggest, but some interesting nuggets on the industry that can be drawn from the data collected. This year, for the first time, a similar survey was published for the Canadian market. By comparing the REAL Trends Canadian 200 to the two hundred largest firms on the US list, we thought the following findings were pretty interesting:

• Although the average Canadian office in our sample had fewer sales professionals (40 per office vs. 51 in the United States), it generated far more transaction sides per year (592 vs. 367) and nearly twice the sales volume ($179 million vs. $97 million.)
• That meant that sales professionals in our Canadian sample were over twice as productive as their U.S. counterparts (14.9 annual transactions vs. 7.2 in the US).
• Over half of the firms in the Canadian survey would have cracked the top 500 of the U.S. list. Not too shabby considering Canada is one-ninth the population of the United States.