Toronto Real Estate Board Asked Realtors To Stop Posting Online Sales Data For Public View

Going forward, determining home selling is not going to be that easy for Toronto’s customers. This week, as many as three real estate brokers have decided to block customers’ online access to latest final home sales prices — information that eventually helps both buyers and sellers value a property’s actual worth in the market. These three brokers are the latest ones to obey the Toronto Real Estate Board’s (TREB) decision that doesn’t want brokers to give away home sales information to customers over Internet.

A real estate broker, Fraser Beach termed this “bad news” through his company’s flagship site. Fraser described how the real estate business received countless expressions of appreciation from an ever-growing list of subscribers, almost approaching 30,000. But due to the recent developments, things would look completely different. Hence, he further added, “So we are temporarily suspending the email distribution of our Toronto Homes Sold report until there is more clarity in the legal issues involved.”

Zoocasa, touted as Canada’s largest real-estate database, said it would stop publishing in-depth housing data, respecting the TREB’s latest decision. “The sharing of this data has been a small part of our customer offering,” said Darryl Mitchell, Zoocasa’s broker of record, he further added that that the website’s actual aim is to match home buyers and sellers with agents to provide that information.

So far, the arrangement is TREB gives real estate agents the access to recent relevant sales data and prices that they can share with their personal clients. However, the board cautioned that the agents couldn’t openly float information over the Internet. In fact, TREB sent a strict warning letter to the brokers in February this year, besides threatening them to deny access to other vital real estate data.

Another realtor, Ara Mamourian of Spring Realty said, “We’d prefer to be able to provide all the information we could to consumers, including sold data, because we believe our value has gone beyond being just gatekeepers for MLS information,”

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