Anonymised, illustrative composite. A Mississauga salesperson required every open-house visitor to write down name, phone number and email before entering, then loaded the whole sheet into a drip-marketing tool the same evening. The complaint that followed split into two separate questions, governed by two separate rules.
At a glance
A salesperson hosting a well-attended open house posted a sign at the door: “Please sign in to view this listing,” with columns for name, phone, and email, and no visible option to view the home without providing all three. Roughly 35 people signed in over the two-hour open house. That evening, every entry was imported into the salesperson's CRM and enrolled in a standing five-email nurture sequence introducing the brokerage's other listings.
One visitor, who had signed in reluctantly because the sheet appeared to be a condition of entry, began receiving marketing emails within two days and had not been told, at the door or afterward, that the information would be used that way. After the second email they asked to be removed; after a third arrived anyway, they filed a complaint.
Two different rules governed two different moments in this story, and the complaint required separating them. RECO's Bulletin 7.6 governs whether and how an open house is run: it recommends, as one example among several risk-reduction steps, “the registering of attendees,” but the bulletin does not prescribe mandatory sign-in, ID checks, or a standardized privacy protocol — it is offered as a practice, not a rule the salesperson was required to follow, and it says nothing at all about what may be done with the names collected.
That second question — what may be done with the data — is governed by PIPEDA, not RECO. PIPEDA's core principles require, among other things, identifying purposes and obtaining consent for the collection and use of personal information, and limiting collection to what is needed for the identified purpose. A sign-in sheet framed as an access condition for viewing a listing identifies one purpose — managing entry to the property — and says nothing about a second, different purpose: enrolling every visitor in ongoing marketing.
Making the sheet mandatory for entry, without disclosing the marketing use, meant the visitor's information was collected for one stated purpose and used for a materially different one they were never told about and never had a chance to decline.
Roughly 35 visitors signed in over the two-hour open house; all 35 were imported into the five-email nurture sequence the same evening, with no distinction made between visitors who had shown buying interest and those who were simply neighbours or looky-loos.
The complaining visitor received two emails before requesting removal and a third after that request, the gap between the request and the third email being the specific detail that turned an awkward marketing choice into a formal complaint.
The two rules pointed in the same direction from different angles. Bulletin 7.6 meant the salesperson could not defend the mandatory sign-in as a RECO-required procedure — it was a choice, not a compliance obligation, so there was no regulatory cover for making it a condition of entry. PIPEDA meant that even a voluntary sign-in, once collected, could not be repurposed into marketing without disclosure and a real opportunity to decline — and a request to stop, once made, has to be honoured, which the third email failed to do.
Neither rule required the salesperson to abandon sign-in sheets altogether. What both rules together required was disclosure at the point of collection — telling visitors, in plain terms, that signing in also meant being added to a marketing list unless they opted out — and prompt handling of any removal request once made.
The brokerage revised its open-house sign-in template to make entry unconditional on signing in, and added a checkbox with a specific consent line for the marketing use, separate from any entry or safety purpose. The complaining visitor's contact was permanently suppressed from the CRM, and the salesperson's compliance contact reviewed the remaining 34 records for anyone who had similarly not consented before the next send.
No RECO complaint accompanied the privacy complaint, since the sign-in practice itself was not a RECO violation — the exposure ran entirely through PIPEDA's consent and purpose-limitation principles, resolved through the brokerage's own corrective process rather than a regulatory finding.
For a related consent question working the other direction — a sold price rather than a name and number — see a farming flyer that named a neighbour’s price. On what counts as personal information in the first place, the glossary entry.
The tell was collapsing two separate questions into one form. “Who may enter the open house” and “who may be marketed to afterward” are different decisions with different rules behind them — RECO's practice guidance for the first, PIPEDA's consent principle for the second. A sign-in sheet that answers both with the same signature, and discloses only the first purpose, has quietly skipped the consent step for the second.
A short call is enough to see how AI-assisted intake separates entry logistics from marketing consent by default.
