Anonymised, illustrative composite. A celebratory Instagram post went up two days into a thirty-day closing — and the buyer who wanted the number kept quiet found it anyway, in a caption that never once used a dollar sign.
At a glance
An agent closed a competitive multiple-offer deal and, thrilled, posted to Instagram two days into the thirty-day closing period: “SOLD! $50,000 over asking in 3 days,” tagging the neighbourhood and showing the property’s exterior with the For Sale sign still visible. No names appeared anywhere in the post.
The buyer had specifically wanted the winning bid kept quiet, worried about appearing to have overpaid to friends and family who knew the neighbourhood’s asking prices. Anyone locally could back-calculate the actual sale price from the public asking price and the caption’s “$50,000 over asking” — the dollar sign never had to appear for the price to be effectively disclosed. The buyer saw the post, complained to the agent, then to the brokerage, then to RECO when the initial response felt inadequate.
The post went up on day two of a thirty-day closing, meaning the deal had not yet completed. It stayed live for six days before being taken down, reaching roughly 1,400 people in that window — not a niche audience, and squarely including the neighbourhood the buyer was trying to avoid.
RECO’s Bulletin 5.4 states the rule for advertising a sold property in one line: brokerages and agents must not include anything that could reasonably be used to identify a party to the transaction, identify the specific property, or determine any of the contents of the agreement of purchase and sale — including price — unless the relevant consent has been given in writing. That consent requirement changes with timing: before completion, disclosing “sold” together with price or terms needs written consent from both the seller and the buyer, not the seller alone. This agent had neither.
The post’s accuracy did not help. The Competition Act’s general-impression test weighs both the literal truth of a representation and the overall impression it conveys — a different statute answering a different question (misleading impression, not consent), but it establishes the same underlying point from another direction: being factually correct is not, on its own, a defence to how a real estate advertisement is regulated. “It was true” does not substitute for the consent Bulletin 5.4 actually requires.
The brokerage required the post removed the same day it was flagged, the agent apologised directly to the buyer, and the file went through the brokerage’s own internal review first — the correct order under RECO’s own complaints process, which routes to the brokerage before RECO. The buyer accepted the internal resolution — removal, apology, and a new brokerage policy against advertising a live deal before both consent and completion — and did not escalate to RECO.
Had the buyer been unsatisfied with the brokerage’s response, the next step was a RECO complaint, with outcomes ranging from a written warning that stays permanently on the registrant’s file up to a Discipline Committee fine of up to $50,000 for the individual agent. And there was never a way to make the exposure disappear quietly: RECO’s own guide is explicit that a brokerage cannot ask a client to sign away their right to complain, or to withdraw a complaint already made, in exchange for a resolution. The only actual fix was never posting the deal before consent and completion in the first place — there was no version of “handle it internally and make it go away” available after the fact.
Before completion, disclosing price or terms needs both parties’ written consent; after completion, the same price-or-terms disclosure still needs both — the timing shift only changes the rule for “sold” alone, without figures, which needs the seller’s consent before completion and the buyer’s consent after. The written consent itself must be clear and state both the date it takes effect and the date it expires — a blanket, undated “yes, you can post about it” from months earlier does not automatically cover a specific caption written after the fact.
The test is not whether a dollar figure literally appears in the post — it is whether the post could reasonably be used to determine one. Anything that would let a reasonably informed neighbour back into the sale price from public information — the listed asking price, plus “over asking” language — is functionally disclosing the price, consent or not.
Related reading: deceptive marketing practice, defined the Code of Ethics, defined a related compliance failure, on the same file
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
