RECO advertising rules for websites

Ontario’s advertising rules for registrant websites reduce to four obligations, enforced by RECO under TRESA: identify yourself by your registered name with the correct descriptor; identify your brokerage clearly and prominently; publish nothing false, misleading, or deceptive; and get consent before identifying parties to a transaction. The rules apply to your website and your social media identically, and both you and your brokerage are on the hook for a featured agent’s pages. What follows is the checklist version an agent can actually run against a live site — educational, not legal advice; confirm specifics with your broker of record or RECO.

The checklist, in complaint-frequency order

1. Brokerage identified, clearly and prominently. The number-one compliance failure. The brokerage’s registered name must appear so it can reasonably be noticed and understood — sitewide header or footer placement is the practice standard, and RECO’s online-advertising guidance treats every page of a website as advertising, not just the homepage. A personal-brand site that reads as brokerage-free until the fine print is the classic complaint trigger.

2. Your name, exactly as registered, with the right descriptor. The name on the site must match your RECO registration, accompanied by a permitted descriptor for your registration class. TRESA’s 2023 changes updated the descriptor menu (including regulated use of “real estate agent”), which is precisely why hard-coding an old title into a logo ages badly. Nicknames and team brands can appear — but never instead of the registered identity.

3. Nothing false or misleading. This covers fabricated or unverifiable claims (“#1 agent”), misleading imagery, and any implication that you listed or sold a property you didn’t. Superlatives need substantiation you can produce; awards need to be real, current, and attributable. If a claim would need an asterisk to survive a complaint, it doesn’t belong in the hero section.

4. No identifying transaction parties without written consent. Sold prices, client names, address-plus-outcome pairings — the compliant routes are written consent, or aggregate statistics that identify no one, covered in can I publish market statistics.

Where sites get caught: the details

• Teams: a team name may headline, but the brokerage and the registered individuals stay identified — a team presented so it reads as its own brokerage is a violation on its face.
• Ads and landing pages: a lead ad, a single-property page, and a Facebook boost each count as advertising on their own. The identification rules ride along into every format; cropping the brokerage out of the mobile layout is still a failure.
• Third-party platforms: profiles you control on portals and directories are your advertising too. The audit perimeter is “everywhere you promote your trade,” not “my domain.”

Platform note, stated factually

Identification is a template problem before it is a compliance problem: a site whose header and footer carry registrant and brokerage identity by default cannot forget them on page 40. That is how BrokerFold templates are built, and it is one of the criteria Ontario realtor websites are judged on in our stack — the marketing side of the same coin sits in real estate marketing in Canada. Whatever platform you use, run the four checks above on your live site quarterly; rules and descriptors change, and your website does not update itself.