Anonymised, illustrative composite. An Ottawa salesperson called an expired listing the same evening it dropped off MLS®, offered an unsolicited opinion of what the home was really worth, and asked why it hadn't sold — two moves that, under TRESA, can matter more than the phone-call timing that was the original worry.
At a glance
A listing expired at midnight after 91 days on market with no accepted offer. A salesperson at a competing brokerage had the address flagged in a CRM as a prospecting target and called the seller at 7:40 p.m. the same evening — technically the listing had just expired, but the outgoing brokerage's for-sale sign was still on the lawn.
On the call, the salesperson said the home had been priced wrong from the start, offered a number roughly $40,000 below the expired list price as “what it's actually worth in this market,” and asked the seller directly why they thought it hadn't sold. The seller was noncommittal on the call but mentioned it, unhappily, to the outgoing agent a few days later.
Two separate rules were in play, and only one of them was about timing. The call itself, at 7:40 p.m. on a weekday, sat comfortably inside the CRTC's permitted telemarketing hours of 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. — so the call's clock time was never the actual exposure.
The real problem was what happened once the seller answered. Since TRESA took effect, “there is no equivalent to a customer or a customer agreement” in Ontario — a real estate agent is either representing someone under a written agreement or dealing with a self-represented party, with nothing in between. And under Bulletin 2.7, specific conduct creates an implied representation agreement with no signature required, including “advising potential sellers what their home may be worth or soliciting confidential information from a consumer about their motivation to buy or sell a property.”
The salesperson did both in one call: gave an unsolicited valuation opinion, and asked why the home hadn't sold — a direct probe into the seller's motivation. Under Bulletin 2.7, that combination is exactly the fact pattern the rule is written to catch.
The expired list price had been $739,000; the salesperson's verbal figure on the call was roughly $700,000, offered with no comparative market analysis prepared or shown. The listing had carried 91 days on market with no accepted offer before expiring.
The outgoing brokerage's representation agreement, on ordinary holdover terms, still protected its right to a commission on any sale to a buyer it had introduced during the listing term — a separate question from whether the new salesperson's call itself was proper, but one that made the complaint land harder once filed.
The decisive fact was not the hour of the call but its content. Had the salesperson confined the first call to a scheduling request — asking only whether the seller would be open to a market conversation, with no valuation opinion and no motivation question — no implied representation agreement would have arisen, because the conduct list in Bulletin 2.7 turns on giving advice or soliciting confidential information, not on the bare fact of a first contact.
The complaint from the outgoing brokerage argued, in effect, that the call had already begun functioning as representation before any formal engagement, written agreement, or disclosure of representation status had occurred — the exact gap TRESA's elimination of the customer category was built to close.
The new brokerage's broker of record required the salesperson to send the seller a written follow-up clarifying that no representation relationship existed from the call, and to route any further contact through a proper representation agreement before offering any further opinion of value. The seller ultimately listed with neither brokerage, choosing a third agent instead.
The complaint did not proceed to a discipline hearing, but it cost the salesperson the lead entirely and produced a documented compliance note in the brokerage's file — the kind of record that compounds if it happens twice.
For the FSBO variant of the same implied-representation trap, see a for-sale-by-owner approach that drew a complaint, and for what actually changed under TRESA, the registrant-facing summary.
The tell was the two questions asked in the same breath: what it's worth, and why it didn't sell. Either one alone is a normal prospecting instinct. Together, on a first call to someone with no representation agreement in place, they are precisely the conduct Bulletin 2.7 names as creating implied representation — a relationship the salesperson had not intended, was not prepared to service with the fiduciary duties that attach automatically, and could not simply talk back out of once asked.
A short call is enough to see how AI-assisted first-touch scripting keeps early outreach on the right side of TRESA.
