British Columbia’s Real Estate Services Act names the managing broker as the individual who “acts for the brokerage for all purposes under this Act” — British Columbia’s own title for what Ontario calls the broker of record.
BC’s Real Estate Services Act (RESA, SBC 2004, c.42) sets four licence levels at s.5: the entity-level brokerage licence, and three individual levels — managing broker, associate broker, and representative. BC is the only province in this hub’s research that uses “representative” as the statutory title for the front-line licensee, rather than agent, salesperson or associate.
Section 6(2) is the operative provision: the managing broker “acts for the brokerage for all purposes under this Act,” and is responsible for “the control and conduct of the brokerage’s real estate business, including supervision of the associate brokers and representatives who are licensed in relation to the brokerage.” Section 7 requires a licensee to be engaged by a single brokerage and bars accepting remuneration from any other source, and s.2.1 establishes the Superintendent of Real Estate as the statutory licensing authority — BCFSA performs day-to-day regulation, but the Act’s own licensing-authority office is the Superintendent.
Naming this role varies province to province, and “broker of record” is not a safe generic term to use for all of them: Ontario uses broker of record, Alberta and Nova Scotia simply say broker, New Brunswick calls the role manager (while confusingly naming the brokerage-level licence itself the “Agent’s Licence”), and Manitoba splits it between broker and authorized official. BC’s managing broker sits in that same family of roles under its own statutory name.
One gap worth stating rather than guessing past: RESA’s own text does not spell out continuing-education specifics or a dual/designated-agency framework the way Ontario’s TRESA bulletins do. Section 10(b.1) defers CE content to “the educational requirements specified by the superintendent” under rules made under s.130, and BCFSA — the regulator that would publish those rules — returned a blocked page on every path tried while researching this hub. That is a sourcing gap, not a finding that BC has no such rules.
Say a representative at a Kelowna brokerage is later found to have misrepresented a material fact to a buyer. Because s.6(2) puts “the control and conduct of the brokerage’s real estate business” on the managing broker by name, a regulatory review of the brokerage’s supervision looks first at what the managing broker did or should have done — a distinct question from the representative’s own licence exposure, and the reason a BC brokerage cannot legally operate without a managing broker in place.
See also: registrant: the word RECO uses for you and TRESA: what changed for a registrant.
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