A listing that was accurate the day it launched can become misleading two weeks later without a single word changing — a status shift, a price change, a photo that's no longer current. The duty to fix that doesn't stop at launch.
Key takeaways
It's tempting to treat “is this listing accurate” as a question you answer once, at launch, and move on from. RECO's own bulletin on advertising online rejects that framing directly: “brokerages and agents must be diligent and ensure that everything they say online is current, accurate, and does not misrepresent facts. Any statement about the services that consumers can expect or about the qualifications of an agent must be factual and verifiable.” (RECO Bulletin 5.3) “Current” is doing real work in that sentence — it's not just about what was true when you wrote the copy, it's about whether it's still true every day the listing stays live.
The same principle sits underneath the federal standard. The Competition Act's prohibition reaches a representation “that is false or misleading in a material respect” without qualifying when that representation was made. (s.52) Take a hypothetical: a listing describes a finished basement as recently renovated, and that's accurate the day it's written. If a subsequent inspection turns up water damage that changes whether that description still holds, the representation doesn't get to coast on having been true once — it needs correcting.
The point in a listing's life where accuracy most often slips is the status change — conditional, then firm, then closed — and this is exactly where the sold-property consent matrix from RECO's Bulletin 5.4 comes back into play, because posting or updating status information triggers the same written-consent questions the original sold announcement did. Advertising a property as sold before completion needs the seller's consent; after completion, the buyer's; adding price or terms needs both, regardless of timing, and “the consent must be clear and include the date on which the consent takes effect and the date on which the consent expires.” (RECO Bulletin 5.4) A listing page that quietly flips from “Active” to “Sold” without that consent question having been asked again isn't a wording problem — it's the same unanswered consent question the launch-day sold post would have needed, just triggered later in the listing's life instead of at the start.
Bulletin 5.3 explicitly extends this duty to agent and brokerage profiles generally, not just individual listings: agents “must actively maintain and regularly update profiles on social media and professional networking sites,” with the bulletin's own example being an agent who transfers to a different brokerage and has to promptly update every profile that still names the old one. (RECO Bulletin 5.3) A listing page and an agent's own bio are both subject to the same “keep it current” standard, and a stale one on either doesn't become safer just because nobody's flagged it yet.
A lot of listing distribution runs through platforms an agent doesn't directly control — syndication feeds, a brokerage's own site builder, third-party portals. RECO's bulletin addresses this directly: “if a brokerage or agent advertises on a website that is managed or operated by a third party and has no control over the speed with which published information is updated, the brokerage or agent must ensure that the operator can process change requests promptly. The use of a third-party to manage or operate a website does not exempt the brokerage or agent from ensuring the currency and accuracy of the information they share.” (RECO Bulletin 5.3) In practice, that means knowing how fast each platform you syndicate to actually processes a correction before you need one, not discovering it's slow the first time a status change goes stale on a feed you don't log into daily.
Treat a status change, a price change, or a material fact becoming known (a flood, a new easement, a zoning change) as a trigger to run the same review the listing got at launch: is the status accurate, does anything now require a fresh written consent, and is every platform the listing is syndicated to actually reflecting the update. A listing that goes conditional on a Friday and doesn't get its status corrected across every syndicated feed until the following week is carrying a materially inaccurate public representation for those days, even if nobody typed a single new word.
Say a listing accepts an offer on a Tuesday, conditions are removed the following Monday, and the deal closes three weeks later. Under the diligence standard, the status should move from “Active” toward “Conditionally Sold” once the offer is accepted, and toward “Sold” only once the appropriate written consent is actually in hand — not automatically the moment the calendar hits closing day, since the consent question is what actually authorizes the public status update, not the closing date itself. If consent hasn't been obtained by closing, the honest interim state is not advertising “Sold” with identifying details at all until it has been, even though the deal itself is done. The listing's public status and the transaction's actual legal status are two different clocks, and the first one is only allowed to move as fast as the consent paperwork does.
RECO's rule is framed as diligence and currency rather than a fixed number of hours, but the standard is active maintenance, not periodic cleanup — treat a known status change as something to correct as soon as practicable across every platform the listing appears on, not on whatever schedule is convenient.
It's yours in the sense that matters here — using a third party doesn't exempt you from the currency-and-accuracy duty, so the fix is confirming the vendor can process change requests promptly, not treating their speed as outside your control.
Whether it stays up is a separate business decision from what it's allowed to say — if it stays live, the same sold-advertising consent rules on identifying the property, the parties, or the price still apply to it, indefinitely, not just in the days right after closing.
It is enforceable as an offence, not just guidance. TRESA makes it an offence to contravene any section of the Act or its regulations, carrying on conviction a fine of up to $50,000 or imprisonment of up to two years less a day (or both) for an individual, and up to $250,000 for a corporation. (TRESA s.40(1), s.40(3)) A listing left stale after a known status change sits inside that exposure, not outside it.
A quick audit across your syndicated platforms is faster than finding out from a complaint.
