A Mississauga seller received six offers, told her agent to disclose only the number to competing buyers, and one of the losing buyers later asked RECO to confirm that number was accurate.
At a glance
A Mississauga seller listed her home and, within the first weekend, held six offers. She told her agent in writing that she wanted buyers to know competition existed — to keep the process moving — but did not want any offer’s price or terms shared with the others. Her agent structured the process around that instruction: buyers were told a number existed and, on request, exactly what that number was, and nothing more.
One losing buyer’s agent had heard only a vague verbal reference to “multiple offers” before the deadline and, after losing, suspected the actual count had been inflated to pressure a higher bid. This is precisely the situation TRESA’s offer-disclosure framework is built to answer, and RECO’s own Information Guide states the rule with unusual precision: “Buyers in Ontario who have made an offer on a property are entitled to know the number of competing offers. Sellers choose how much other information, if any, they want to share about the offers they receive.” A buyer who never actually submitted an offer — someone who merely inquired or walked away before writing one — has no equivalent entitlement.
The widely repeated version of this rule — that TRESA “opened up” offer disclosure generally — overstates what actually changed. Content stays firmly within the seller’s control, and the Guide is specific about a hard limit even where a seller does authorize sharing dollar figures: “personal or identifying information contained in offers cannot be shared” under any circumstances.
Six offers received; one number disclosed to each of the losing buyers on request; zero prices or terms shared between competing buyers at any stage.
The buyer who inquired with RECO had made a genuine offer and was therefore qualified to ask — RECO’s own enforcement page is explicit that “RECO does not accept inquiries related to the number of competing offers from any other person.”
RECO’s independent verification confirmed six — the same number the listing agent had already disclosed — closing the inquiry with no discrepancy and no complaint escalation.
RECO describes its own verification process in concrete, replicable steps: it will “request that the seller’s brokerage confirm the number of offers that were received by the brokerage and conveyed to the seller,” then independently review documentation, review anything the requesting buyer supplied, and contact involved parties before reporting a finding. Where the confirmed number contradicts what a buyer was told, RECO treats that as a formal complaint rather than closing the file quietly.
None of this reaches the content question. A buyer’s own agent may tell competing buyers that other offers exist and invite their best terms, but treadstonelaw’s independent confirmation of the same rule is blunt: “revealing the specific price or terms of any one buyer’s offer to another buyer is not permitted without that buyer’s consent.” The seller in this file never gave that consent, so the process stayed number-only throughout, exactly as instructed.
RECO’s inquiry closed with the count confirmed and no discrepancy found. The seller accepted the highest offer among the six; the losing buyers never learned what any other offer actually contained, which is what her written instruction called for from the outset. The listing agent now documents a seller’s content-disclosure decision in writing at the start of every multiple-offer file, specifically so a later RECO inquiry — which any losing buyer who made an offer is entitled to trigger — has a clean paper trail to confirm against.
The tell for the losing buyer was a vague verbal reference — “several offers” — rather than a specific number given before the deadline. That vagueness is what prompted the RECO inquiry, not any actual wrongdoing; the count turned out to be accurate. For a listing agent, the lesson runs the other way: giving the exact number promptly and in writing to every qualifying buyer who asks, rather than a soft descriptor, is what prevents a clean file from ever attracting a RECO inquiry in the first place.
Related reading: the glossary distinction between multiple representation and simply representing one side of a multiple-offer file, and a related file where a deadline — not a disclosure choice — decided the outcome: an irrevocable that expired during the drive.
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