Before you read any further today, quickly ask yourself: how old are you?

It’s not a trick question.

I just want you to keep that in mind as we examine the topic at hand today, as well as the photos you’re about to see.

Speaking of photos, does anybody know what this is?

Looks familiar, doesn’t it?

Maybe a tube of lipstick?

Okay, let me take the cap off and perhaps that will help:

Ah, of course!

It’s an “initial stamp,” or for those who called it by a more functional name, a “circle-maker.”

I’m really going to date myself in today’s blog, but that’s okay.

I mean, if I really wanted to date myself, I’d talk more about what it was like to download MP3’s on Napster in September of 1998, but I digress…

Any real estate agent (or perhaps lawyer?) who is in their 40’s will undoubtedly remember the initial stamp.

Back before DocuSign, when we actually met our clients in person and had them (gasp!) sign paperwork by hand, this was an essential tool of the trade for real estate agents!

I mean, just look at how handy it was when I was working on this offer for a condo in 2009:

Oh, those were the days!

And for those of you who looked to break free of the tyranny of circles, you can’t imagine what it was like working with agents who had the audacity to (gasp!) draw triangles:

Awful!

A circle-maker was about five or six bucks but ended up costing you a far lot more, since they were always being lost!  I swear, I probably went through three or four every year.

Now, I could regale you all with stories about how every real estate agent with twenty years’ in the business or more will remember what it was like driving to the only all-night Kinko’s on University Avenue to send and receive faxes when working on a live deal, but that’s not what I want to do today.

A picture paints a thousand words!

And I have a picture for you:

What in the world is that?

Well, it says “Multiple Listing Service” on the front, so perhaps it’s a user manual for the MLS system?

Close.  Or maybe not really.  You decide.

Because this isn’t a user manual on how to use the MLS system.

No.

This is the MLS system!

Check it out:

These were your listings!

This book is from 1987, and was provided to me courtesy of David Young, who has been in the real estate business for two hundred and sixty-two years.

This book is fascinating!

So let’s take a little tour, shall we?

Here’s a listing that shows, not only did we not figure out “staging” just yet, but taking a picture of a house with a giant pile of garbage in front of it wasn’t really an issue:

I think the black-and-white photos actually helped this listing.  It would look even worse in colour…

Now, imagine you’re looking at a property on House Sigma or Realtor.ca, and it suddenly disappears.

Did it sell?  What happened?

It’s worse on our end, trust me.

There’s nothing quite like logging on to our TRREB system and seeing a property for which we had interested clients has sold.

But how did that happen in 1987, you ask?

Here’s a listing for a nice house on Gilgorm Road:

Looks nice!

Is that a Porsche in the driveway?

Maybe I’ll take my clients, right?

Well, flip the listing over to see more information and…

Dag-nabbit!

You just know the property is sold firm when somebody goes out of their way to get out a physical ink pad, find the stamp, and then slam “SOLD” down on the paper.

Why not remove it from the book?

Ugh!  The clients will be really pissed when I go meet them in person in their living room in two weeks…

Now, how do you know when a property is temporarily taken off the market?

What was the system back then, you know, before the Internet?

Well, just write “temp off market” in blue pen on the listing, and that will do the trick!

What did a price reduction look like in 1987?

How aggressive were people being?

Well, this house was $189,000 but is now $194,000:

Does $5,000 move the needle?

It’s like reducing from $1,940,000 down to $1,890,000, so maybe it does!

Now, when listing land value for sale, people had to get really creative:

Wait….that’s not really creative.

Not at all.

I think they’re probably better off having a photo of Tom Selleck or Don Johnson.

Then again, it’s better than this next one…

…I think…

When is the “next production day?”

Maybe like a week later?

As for new-builds, there was no Internet, so there was no way to attach surveys, floor plans, or architectural drawings to the MLS listing, let alone provide an A.I. tour of the completed home.

So if you were a buyer looking for a house that was going to be built, this is what you got:

Now, that was 1987.

But also in my possession is a copy of the TORONTO STAR CLASSIFIEDS from March 1st, 1997.

Let’s take a look at real estate advertising, shall we?

This is incredible:

First things first: some of these agents are still active!

But this is so much fun, right?

Look at the Royal LePage ad at the top left.

ON THE INTERNET

The younger generation can’t believe there was a time when a brokerage, or any business, for that matter, needed to specify that they were on the World Wide Web, but that’s how things were back then!

Not only that, note the email address:

ro******@******rt.ca

They couldn’t get the full word in the email address?  Was “ro*********@******rt.ca” already taken?

And what was passport.ca?

Probably some random email service, which the younger folks won’t believe is how we accessed email back in the day.

Theodor Babiak, who is still working today is a household name on Toronto’s west side, has an @interlog.ca email address.

Lauretta Stewart had @onramp.ca, whatever that is.

What the heck is @torfree.net?

Wow, let’s look at some of these ads!

This agent wasn’t in time to “stop the presses” but was able to update that her listing was sold, so she didn’t piss anybody off:

Ah, there’s that @torfree.net again!

How about this guy, grinding away for his clients!

He put an ad in the newspaper asking if anybody had a house for his buyers:

That’s incredible.

But there was no Signal or WhatsApp group on which to network with agents, and while he could have picked up the rotary-dial telephone in his office to call other agents across the city, he decided to get in touch with them where he knew they’d all be gathering: in the weekend classified ads!

This lady wrote a poem, and you might notice one of the “2026 Words Of The Year” therein:

This might be the earliest usage of the term “riz.”

It might not have meant the same thing back then (for those older folks, I just recently learned that “riz” is an adjective derived from “charisma” that is used to describe what we would have called a “player” or “playah” back in the early-2000’s).

Nice little poem!

But here’s where advertising has really changed.

Take a look at this ad:

What’s missing?

Well, LOTS!

How about a photo of the property, for one thing?

How about the address?

It’s incredible to think, but this is how real estate was sold back then.

You would see an advertisement for a a property, and rather than a photo of the house, it would be the agent’s face.  They would say “South Leaside” and throw out “$300,000,” and then you would pick up the phone and call them.

“Hello, I’m calling about your ad in the newspaper.”

Those words haven’t been uttered this century, but once upon a time, that’s how commerce worked.

“Can you tell me more about the Olde Kingsway home?  Just how elegant is it?  And, oh yeah, what’s the address?”

This classifieds section is full of these ads with no photos or address of the house, and I think that might be the biggest difference between real estate in 1997 and real estate in 2026.

Last, but not least, have you had trouble searching for a rental property?

Did you ever rue the day you first checked out Craigslist, Kijiji, ViewIt, or even Realtor.ca?

Careful what you wish for, because it could be a whole lot worse…

Listings weren’t by geography, nor were they by price.

It was chaos!

Listings were alphabetical, but “Bloor” could be Bloor and Broadview, or it could be Bloor and Islington!

There was no efficient way to sort through the ads, but, unfortunately, this was the only way to find a rental.

The older folks are laughing right now, thinking about how this literally feels like yesterday for them, and yet I’m taking pictures of the classifieds like this is a 1900’s time capsule.

But while the TRB demographic does skew a bit older, there are some folks reading this who have no clue what this image represents.

They’re like a young version of myself thinking the television was broken when a show came on and it was in black and white.

I hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane, folks!

Please feel free to share – anything and everything!