As real estate professionals, you are constantly in direct contact with the public. CREB^® is not in constant contact with the public, nor is RECA. It’s a simple fact that underscores why your response is so critical.

We all know that any attempt to confuse a consumer or withhold important information is highly unprofessional. Last fall, when RECA decided to make some “clarifications” around their requirements on how teams advertise themselves, on the surface a lot of this made sense.

The minutes from RECA’s regular council meeting on Oct. 17 reference a report by RECA’s registrar, which must have registered a high enough degree of concern that the needs of a significantly confused public had to be addressed. I haven’t seen the Registrar’s report, and as far as I know, it has not been shared, so we are left to consider our own experiences with the consumer to assess their degree of confusion.

From CREB^®’s experience, while we don’t track consumer complaints or concerns, we have encountered confusion from the public around who the broker is, especially when a team is involved. Have these instances been sufficiently concerning for me to reach out to RECA on behalf of CREB^® and express a concern in this regard? No.

In my previous career as a REALTOR^®, I led a team and had a similar experience in about 2008. As a busy REALTOR^® who was also very involved as a volunteer in organized real estate, I was on top of what was happening in our business. Imagine my surprise when I received a letter of warning from RECA advising me that an ad I ran in CREB^®News (as our weekly newspaper was called then) did not properly emphasize the name of my brokerage in relation to our team branding.

It seemed very odd to me that CREB^® would accept an ad that was offside, but it quickly became apparent that this new interpretation was also news to the professionals who put together our newspaper.

I was required to comply with the new interpretations within a transition period at a cost of several thousands of dollars, thus correcting a problem that no consumer had ever expressed to me.

After becoming compliant, no consumer later commented that it helped them understand who my broker was at the time. All this effort had no impact on me, other than some unexpected expenses. About a year later, RECA must have reached the same conclusion, when it was announced they had returned to their previous interpretations for “clearly indicated”— a right-touch approach to regulatory enforcement . . . I guess.

If we can agree that any degree of public confusion is something that must be prevented, then as professionals we can look at what solutions are available to solve this problem. Rather than requiring similar or same sizing of the broker name and branding, maybe a specific statement of the brokerage in a consistent manner would be more effective?

Everyone knows the legal fine print serves a legal purpose in other regulated advertising. Why not require that every advertisement have a legible line at the bottom that states the name of the brokerage? If an industry professional decides to use their brokerage branding, perhaps as part of a cooperative advertising effort, so be it, but the brokerage line at the bottom would still be required to establish a consistent approach.

Was this solution considered? We don’t know.

If this is all news to you, read the last two editions of The Regulator or click on this link to RECA’s background. You can also click here to view their advertising examples from the presentation by RECA’s Real Estate Practice Advisor, Doug Dixon, on March 7 at CREB^®’s Broker Summit. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments section below. Or, better yet, directly to RECA.

Some may agree with RECA, that this is a logical modification to advertising rules for teams. Others see this as a prescriptive and unnecessary step backwards. It has also been described as an example of RECA overstepping their mandate.

In fact, these advertising “clarifications” appear to meet the definition of red tape—“excessive regulation or rigid conformity to formal rules that is considered redundant or bureaucratic and hinders or prevents action or decision-making. It is usually applied to governments, corporations, and other large organizations”.

Does all of this feel like red tape? Yes, it does to me.