Toronto Real Estate Board chief executive officer John DiMichele says he has seen evidence of brokers’ remarks about homeowners being posted online.
DiMichele says brokers’ remarks often include notes about times when young children are home alone and information about homeowners with hearing impairments who require visitors to be extra loud when knocking on the door.
DiMichele says realtors are not allowed to post such details online and that this type of information is not included in a recent feed of home sales numbers that TREB recently made available to its members.
DiMichele says the violations are so concerning that TREB has been writing to realtors who posted sales data online prior to TREB’s release in an effort to determine the source of the data and how brokers’ remarks are being published.
His remarks come weeks after the Supreme Court of Canada decided not to hear a case where TREB was fighting to prevent home sales data from being posted on realtors’ password-protected websites.
TREB had argued for seven years at three judicial bodies that allowing the data to be released would create privacy and copyright concerns, but the Competition Bureau insisted keeping the numbers under wraps was anti-competitive and stifled innovation.