Case Study

Alberta Real Estate Association (AREA)

Grow your members by building a Top Realtor Training Program that follows regulation standards and community requirements. A great program was created within a tight timeline.

Building Alberta's Top Realtor Training Program

Who is AREA?

The Alberta Real Estate Association (AREA) is where expert and aspiring real estate professionals in Alberta can find licensing education and lifelong career support.

As the professional provincial body, AREA provides leadership, advocacy, and professional development to over 13,000 Alberta REALTORS®.

AREA Logo
a couple and a real estate agent looking at a document on a kitchen setting

The Challenge

Real estate pre-licensing education was previously provided by the Real Estate Council of Alberta (RECA). A legislative change in 2020 removed education from RECA’s mandate and opened up opportunities for other organizations to provide their own education offerings.

AREA aimed to be first on the market with the Fundamentals course and four specialized practice courses and needed support to develop 300+ hours of effective online learning.


A highly competitive environment required being able to develop a high-quality learner-centric program within the target timelines.

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Our Solution

AREA engaged Onlea to take on the massive challenge of producing engaging eLearning that would meet RECA competency requirements and prepare learners for the RECA licensing exam—with a very tight timeline.

Onlea’s writers and learning designers worked closely with AREA’s subject matter experts to produce clear and accurate content.

Working with Onlea allowed AREA to leverage their 75+ years of local industry experience, resulting in thorough self-paced training that anticipates learner questions and uses custom graphics, interactions, and real-world examples to answer them. This represented a huge leap forward from the previous self-study program, which consisted of lengthy PDF documents.

The Results


According to RECA’s statistics, AREA is currently the most popular choice for real estate pre-licensing education in Alberta. More than twice as many licensing exam takers prepared by taking AREA’s Fundamentals course compared to the second most popular provider. AREA is also the only recognized provider of the specialized “Practice of Rural Real Estate” course and the Real Estate Broker Program.

Here’s what some AREA learners had to say about their experience: "Took the Fundamentals of Real Estate Course from AREA. It was very well done, and I passed the exam! They were also very responsive when I emailed them with questions."
- David Grant Miller

"AREA is a great place for learning. They are very responsible and helpful. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to get into the realty business."
- ZiXian Wang

Onlea helped AREA to achieve speed to market and ROI and to provide value to their community of partners and learners.

The program is available at AREA Learn