An SPIS is an optional Ontario form in which a seller answers questions about a property’s condition — and RECO’s own bulletin frames the agent’s duty as disclosing that one exists, not vouching for its contents, which is a materially different thing from a mandatory disclosure form.
RECO Bulletin 3.1 does not use the acronym “SPIS” at all, but it covers the same document by description: a seller’s agent must “disclose its existence” to every buyer who expresses an interest and provide it upon request. Notice what that obligation is actually about — existence and access, not accuracy. RECO frames the SPIS as something that may or may not exist for a given listing, never as a mandatory step every seller completes. That framing is why a growing number of listing agents now advise sellers to skip the SPIS altogether: filling one out badly creates a paper trail of potential misrepresentation with no legal requirement forcing its existence in the first place.
Declining to complete an SPIS does not touch a seller’s separate, real disclosure obligations. A latent defect — one that would make the property unfit for habitation, dangerous, or not apparent to reasonable inspection — still has to be disclosed whether or not an SPIS exists. So does a known material fact and, per RECO’s own guidance, a stigma is a conversation the agent should still be having with the client. An SPIS is one possible vehicle for that disclosure; it is not the disclosure duty itself, and its absence is not a shield.
A seller on a century home with a documented history of basement flooding tells their agent they’d rather not complete an SPIS — understandable, since the form invites a written record the seller might get wrong under pressure. The agent is right to let them decline it: nothing in RECO’s bulletin makes it mandatory. But the flooding history is a latent defect regardless of any form, so the agent still needs to see it disclosed to any buyer who expresses interest, in writing, separately from whether an SPIS ever gets filled out. Treating “no SPIS” as “no disclosure obligation” is the mistake — they are two different duties that happen to share a form.
See also: material and latent defects, patent defects and stigmatized property.
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