A listing can go off-market three different ways — suspended (paused, with intent to resume), terminated (the representation agreement ends before its stated expiry), or expired (it simply runs past the expiry date) — and only two of those three are governed by Ontario’s registrant rules directly.
Termination and expiry both trace straight back to the representation agreement itself. RECO requires that agreement to state “all circumstances when the agreement can be terminated” before it is signed — so what counts as a valid termination is whatever that specific agreement says, not a standard RECO trigger list.
Expiry is simpler on its face: the agreement’s expiry date “must appear prominently on the first page,” and duration is negotiable — “it can be in place for a day, a few weeks, or months” — with no minimum or maximum RECO sets. But an expired listing is not necessarily a closed financial matter: a holdover clause can let the brokerage “collect fees even when the transaction happens after your representation agreement expires,” and there is no standard or minimum holdover period — it is negotiable per agreement.
“Suspended” status is a different layer entirely: it is a real estate board’s own MLS status, not something RECO’s representation-agreement rules or the TRESA discipline framework define. Which circumstances let a listing go suspended, and whether relisting resets its days-on-market count, is set by each board’s own MLS Rules — check the specific board a property is entered on rather than assuming one national rule applies.
Say a seller’s representation agreement runs 120 days — a figure this particular agreement sets, not a standard length — with a 60-day holdover clause, also this agreement’s own figure. The listing expires on day 120 with no accepted offer, and its public MLS status becomes “expired.” If a buyer the registrant introduced during those 120 days signs an agreement of purchase and sale on day 150, the seller can still owe commission under the holdover clause even though the public listing has shown “expired” for a month.
See also: exclusive listing, defined and lockbox and the showing log it creates.
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