Realtor website privacy policy

Yes. A realtor website collects personal information the moment it has a contact form, and Canadian privacy law attaches obligations to that collection whether or not a policy exists — the policy is simply where you prove you know what you’re doing. Under PIPEDA, and under provincial regimes like Quebec’s Law 25, a site gathering names, emails, phone numbers, saved searches, or visitor accounts needs to say what it collects, why, and who sees it. We generate these pages for every tenant site on our platform, so what follows is the working checklist, not theory. (General information, not legal advice.)

The law that applies to you

PIPEDA — the federal private-sector privacy law — governs personal information handled in commercial activity across most of Canada, and real estate practice is squarely commercial. British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec have their own substantially similar private-sector laws that apply within those provinces. Quebec’s Law 25 is currently the strictest of the set, with requirements phased in through 2024: a designated privacy officer, consent that is clear and granular, and breach reporting with real penalties behind it. If your marketing reaches Quebec residents, its higher bar is the sensible default. In every regime the core duties rhyme: collect with consent, use only for the stated purpose, safeguard, and answer for it.

What a realtor site actually collects

More than most agents think. The obvious layer: lead forms, showing requests, valuation requests. The quieter layers: visitor accounts and saved searches, favourites, analytics and advertising scripts, embedded maps, and — on sites with a gated sold-data section — VOW registrations, where board rules require you to keep access records. Your policy has to describe all of it honestly, which is why the first step is an inventory of what your site and its vendors store, where. If your platform can’t answer “where does a lead-form submission physically live,” that’s a vendor question to escalate.

What the policy must actually say

The durable skeleton: what you collect, the purpose for each category, the legal basis (consent, mostly), who it’s shared with — your brokerage, your website platform, your CRM, analytics providers — how long you keep it, how you protect it, how someone can see or delete their information, and who to contact. Add the VOW-specific disclosures if you display sold data: terms-of-use acceptance, credential handling, and board-mandated access logging. Plain language beats legalese in every regulator’s guidance — a policy is compliant when a reader can understand it, not when it sounds expensive.

Privacy policy is not your only legal page

Three separate obligations get conflated. The privacy policy covers data handling. Consent capture at your forms is a CASL matter — an unchecked marketing checkbox and a consent record, detailed in can I email leads under CASL. And VOW sites need enforceable terms of use as a board condition, not a legal nicety. A complete realtor site carries all three, consistent with each other: the policy describing what the forms promise, the forms doing what the policy describes.

Who answers for it: you and your brokerage

Regulators and boards treat the brokerage as accountable for its registrants’ public surfaces, so a fleet of agent sites with mismatched, outdated, or missing policies is an organizational risk concentrated on the broker of record — the same pattern as advertising compliance, covered in brokerage website compliance. The structural fix is the same too: generate the legal pages from the platform, keep them current centrally, and reserve human review for the exceptions. On BrokerFold sites, privacy, terms, and the VOW disclosures ship with the site and update platform-wide — the version of compliance that doesn’t depend on every agent remembering law school they never attended.