No rule bans the camera — the law cares about whether visitors know it's there and why.
Short answer
Ontario’s regulator leaves this open: RECO’s own bulletin treats “registering of attendees” as one example of a risk-minimization step, not a mandatory procedure. The governing law is privacy legislation instead — PIPEDA outside Alberta, BC and Quebec, or each of those three provinces' own private-sector law inside them — which requires you to identify why you’re collecting the footage and get appropriate consent.
RECO’s bulletin on hosting an open house names risk-minimization steps an agent should consider — removing valuables, “the registering of attendees”, and access restrictions — but frames registering attendees as one example, not a standardized mandatory protocol. It has nothing to say about a video camera specifically. The regulator governs whether and how you run the event; what happens to the data a camera collects is a separate body of law.
Most of Canada runs on PIPEDA. But Alberta, British Columbia and Québec each have their own general private-sector privacy law deemed “substantially similar” to PIPEDA, which applies instead for an organization operating wholly within that province. BCFSA’s own consumer guidance draws exactly this split for its members: it distinguishes the confidentiality duty real estate professionals owe under the Real Estate Services Act from privacy law — the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) — which governs how anyone's information, client or not, may be collected, used and stored.
Whichever statute applies, the same fair information principles govern: identifying purposes, limiting collection to what that purpose needs, obtaining appropriate consent, and openness about the practice. A clearly posted notice — “this open house is recorded for security purposes” — satisfies identifying-purpose and openness in a way a hidden camera cannot; recording audio of visitors’ private conversations pushes well past what a security purpose needs.
Post visible signage stating the purpose, keep the footage’s use limited to that stated purpose, and treat repurposing it for marketing — a highlight reel of a busy open house, say — as a new use that needs its own, separate consent.
See also: what CASL says about following up with the same visitors and the authority question for the event itself
A 30-minute call is enough to sort out the signage and consent wording that keeps it defensible.
