A courtier immobilier is a real estate broker licensed by the Organisme d'autoréglementation du courtage immobilier du Québec (OACIQ) to trade in real estate on behalf of clients under Quebec's own brokerage regime.
Becoming a courtier follows a specific path that the OACIQ describes directly: a candidate must “complete a mandatory basic training activity accredited by the OACIQ,” “pass almost a six-hour entrance examination developed by the OACIQ,” and then “apply for a brokerage licence.” The OACIQ calls the resulting licence its “seal of approval, certifying that the broker is competent and able to carry out your transaction successfully.”
The licence does not end at issuance. The OACIQ oversees courtiers on an ongoing basis — it reports 3,528 prevention interventions carried out in 2023 as part of that oversight, alongside the mandatory continuing education program every licensee must maintain to keep the licence valid. Quebec's civil-law brokerage regime is genuinely distinct from the common-law provinces, and its detailed statutory text is not reliably citable here, so specific transaction rules should be confirmed directly with the OACIQ rather than assumed from another province's practice.
A courtier is not automatically independent: most work under an agence immobilière, which carries its own separately-licensed agency executive officer responsible for supervising the agency's courtiers — a structure without a direct equivalent among the broker-of-record and managing-broker titles used in the rest of Canada.
A buyer moving from Ontario to Quebec assumes their new real estate contact is a “real estate agent” in the informal sense used elsewhere in Canada. In Quebec, the correct, licensed title for that person is courtier immobilier, and the firm they work for is an agence immobilière — distinct terms with their own OACIQ licensing path, not simply a French translation of English-Canadian job titles.
See also: Agence immobilière, explained in English · Broker of record: the name on the licence.
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