Anonymised, illustrative composite. A Hamilton salesperson mailed a “just sold on your street” flyer naming the exact address and closing price of a neighbour's home two doors down. The neighbour hadn't agreed to any of it, and the rule that decided the complaint was not privacy law — it was RECO's own advertising bulletin.
At a glance
A salesperson farming a residential street wanted a stronger hook than a generic “homes are selling fast” postcard. Two doors down, a house had just closed. The salesperson pulled the registered transfer price from a public land-registry search — a legitimate, publicly available record — and printed a flyer for the rest of the street reading “123 [Street] just sold for $612,000 — find out what your home is worth,” mailed to roughly 60 addresses.
The salesperson had no connection to that sale at all — not the listing agent, not the buyer's agent, just a neighbour to the deal. The reasoning was that the price was already public record, so repeating it in marketing carried no separate risk.
RECO's advertising rules do not treat public availability of the number as the test. Bulletin 5.4 states the rule for advertising a sold property without qualification: brokerages and agents “must not include anything that could reasonably be used to… Identify a specific property, unless the owner of the property has consented in writing; or Determine any of the contents of an agreement of purchase and sale, including the price, unless the parties to the agreement have consented in writing”.
The bulletin sets out a consent matrix by timing: after completion, naming the property needs the owner's written consent, and naming the price on top of that needs both the seller's and the buyer's written consent, with the consent itself required to state the date it takes effect and the date it expires. None of that consent existed here — the salesperson had never contacted either party to the sale.
The bulletin's framing covers “advertising” broadly, not just MLS®-style sold listings — a farming flyer mailed to the street is advertising in exactly the sense the rule addresses, whether or not the salesperson had any role in the transaction it describes.
The flyer went to roughly 60 addresses on the street. The price quoted, $612,000, was accurate against the public land-registry record — the complaint was never about the number being wrong, only about it being disclosed without consent.
No consent had been sought from either the seller or the buyer of the neighbouring home before the flyer went to print, and none existed retroactively once the complaint was filed.
The complaint did not need to establish that the price was false, or that anyone was harmed financially — only that Bulletin 5.4's written-consent requirement had not been met before a specific property and its sale price were disclosed in advertising. Public availability of the underlying registry data is beside the point the bulletin actually tests: whether the parties to that agreement consented, in writing, to having its contents used in someone else's marketing.
A general privacy framing (whether the price was “personal information” under PIPEDA) was a secondary consideration here, but the operative rule that actually resolved the complaint was RECO's own advertising bulletin, which reaches the conduct directly and does not require proving the information was non-public.
The salesperson's broker of record required the campaign stopped and a written apology sent to the affected homeowner, with future farming flyers restricted to aggregate, non-address-specific market commentary unless a specific seller's written consent was obtained in advance for that property.
The complaint was resolved without proceeding to a RECO discipline hearing, closed on the brokerage's own corrective action and the apology. The salesperson's farming campaign continued using neighbourhood-level statistics instead of individual addresses and prices.
For the sign-in-sheet side of the same privacy question, see a complaint about an open house sign-in sheet, and for the geographic-farm mechanic itself, the glossary entry.
The tell was treating “the number is public somewhere” as equivalent to “the number is mine to repeat.” Bulletin 5.4's rule is not a secrecy rule about hidden data; it is a consent rule about using a specific transaction — anyone's transaction — in advertising. A land-registry search is a legitimate research tool for understanding a market; it is not, on its own, a licence to name that address and figure in a flyer to the rest of the street.
A short call is enough to see how AI-assisted market content stays inside RECO's advertising rules by default.
