Ask five vendors what a realtor's website should cost and you'll get five currencies. So here is the honest 2026 sheet, in Canadian dollars, with what each tier actually buys.
Tier 1: The template ($0–$50/month)
Your brokerage's agent page, or a DIY builder with a real-estate skin. Fine as a business card. The problem is structural: you're one of hundreds on the same domain (brokerage route) or one of millions on a generic platform (builder route). Local SEO barely exists, follow-up is whatever you wire up yourself, and nothing compounds. You pay forever and own nothing.
Tier 2: The custom build ($3,000–$15,000 + hosting)
A real designer builds you something beautiful. This is genuinely better — you own it, it can rank. But then reality arrives: the blog hasn't been touched since the handoff, the "contact us" form emails your inbox at midnight with no reply until Thursday, staging and copy are per-listing invoices, and every improvement is another billable hour. The build is the cheap part; running it is the cost.
Tier 3: The AI bolt-on ($395–$1,000+ USD/month)
The current wave: AI texting, AI calling, lead scoring. Powerful — and incomplete. It nudges leads but has no website to land them on, no media tools, no review engine. You're buying one organ of a body and keeping the rest on life support. Note the currency, too: USD pricing on a Canadian commission.
Tier 4: The done-for-you platform (what we built)
Realtix prices the whole presence — site, SEO, AI follow-up, staging and listing copy, reviews, scheduling, sphere nurture — at $697 CAD/month plus a $1,997 build, and we run it rather than hand you another login. The comparison that matters isn't feature-by-feature; it's what your time costs. An agent closing twenty transactions a year bills out at hundreds of dollars an hour. Every hour spent configuring a funnel or chasing a showing confirmation is bought back at that rate.
The number that actually matters
Whatever tier you pick, run it against one question: if this tool answered every lead in under a minute for a year, what is one extra transaction worth to you? In most Canadian markets that's $10,000–$30,000 gross commission income on a single side. A system that produces one incremental deal pays for itself several times over. One that produces none — however pretty — is a write-off. Price accordingly.