An anonymised composite: the listing agent’s own sister wanted to buy the seller’s home. Why the fix was never about whether the agent could be trusted — it was about which disclosures RECO requires before anyone can find out.
At a glance
A seller listed a $685,000 home with an Ottawa-area brokerage, working with a designated representative under a standard Seller Representation Agreement. Three weeks into the listing, the agent’s sister — who had been house-hunting independently, unconnected to the listing — saw the property online and asked her sibling to represent her in making an offer on it.
This was not a garden-variety multiple-representation question. RECO Bulletin 3.4 defines a person “related” to an agent to include “a relative by blood, marriage, or adoption of the agent or the agent’s spouse or child” — a sister qualifies without question. The bulletin’s property interest rule applies whenever an agent “knows or ought to know of an interest in the property that the client is considering buying or selling” held by a related person, and requires disclosure “to the client and every other person making or receiving an offer,” made “as soon as possible” and before any offer is made. Separately, the duties the agent owes the seller under Bulletin 3.5’s conflicts-of-interest sequence were also engaged, since a sibling’s interest in the sale price is exactly the kind of thing that can compromise an agent’s ability to negotiate hardest for the seller.
The listing carried a standard 2.5% commission: 2.5% of $685,000 is $17,125. No part of this case turned on the amount — it turned entirely on who was allowed to negotiate that price on whose behalf, and what had to be disclosed, and to whom, before anyone could.
RECO’s Bulletin 3.4 addresses a closely related fact pattern directly: “the agent is representing their parents in the sale of their home” — and states that in that scenario “the agent could not represent a buyer in the trade” because “multiple representation requires a neutrality that is not possible in this situation.” The same logic reaches a sibling on the buy side of the agent’s own listing: the agent could disclose the sister’s interest and continue representing the seller, but could not also become the sister’s designated representative on the same transaction. Bulletin 3.5’s four-step sequence — disclose, advise independent advice, verify understanding, obtain consent — still had to run for the seller before the agent could take any further step, even the one step permitted: continuing to represent the seller while the sister proceeded through someone else.
Had the agent simply represented both sides quietly — assuming family loyalty made the conflict manageable — the exposure would not have been a mispriced sale so much as an unmanageable one: no written disclosure on file if the seller later felt short-changed, no independent advice on record, and a transaction a discipline proceeding could unwind on the facts alone, since RECO’s own guidance already says this exact shape of conflict cannot be resolved by consent. The seller’s protection was never going to be the agent’s good intentions; it was the paperwork proving the conflict was disclosed before it mattered.
The tell was procedural, not personal: the moment the sister said “can you represent me,” the answer needed to be no before it was anything else, with the disclosure to the seller drafted the same day. Waiting to see whether the sister actually wanted to make an offer — treating the conversation as informal until an offer was real — is exactly the gap Bulletin 3.4’s timing rule closes: disclosure is due “as soon as possible” the agent knows of the interest, not once an offer exists to disclose.
The agent declined to represent the sister and referred her to a colleague at a different brokerage the same week. The property-interest disclosure went to the seller in writing, describing the relationship and the fact that the sister was a prospective buyer; the seller acknowledged it and confirmed, in writing, wanting the agent to continue as listing representative. The sister’s offer, negotiated by her own agent with no relationship to the seller’s side, was one of two received and was not the one accepted — the seller took a competing offer $6,000 higher. Nothing about the outcome turned on the family relationship; everything about whether it could survive scrutiny did.
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