Texting leads: consent (CASL)

Short answer: promotional texting without consent is exactly what CASL prohibits. The law covers any commercial electronic message — SMS included — so a text promoting your services needs the same footing as a marketing email: consent you can prove, identification of who is sending, and a way out that works. But the word doing the work in the question is “consent,” because a lead who contacted you has usually given you a form of it, temporarily. Knowing which texts are covered, and which clock you’re on, is the whole game. (General information, not legal advice.)

The test is the message, not the medium

CASL applies to commercial electronic messages: anything whose purpose includes encouraging participation in a commercial activity. A text that pitches — new listing, free evaluation, open house invite — is commercial. A text that serves — answering the question they asked, confirming Thursday at six, sending the address they requested — is you doing your job, and responding to someone’s inquiry is not spam in law or in sense. Most agent texting is actually the second kind. The trouble starts when a contact database becomes a broadcast list.

The consent you probably already have, and its expiry

An inquiry — a lead form, a listing question, a request for information — creates implied consent under CASL, and for inquiries the window is about six months. An existing business relationship, such as a client who transacted with you, extends implied consent to about two years from the triggering event. Express consent, freely given and recorded, is the only kind that doesn’t expire on its own. The same clocks govern email, and the fuller treatment in can I email leads under CASL applies to your phone verbatim; what changes with SMS is how personal the channel feels — which raises the complaint risk when you get it wrong, not the legal standard.

What a compliant commercial text carries

Identification and exit. The recipient must be able to tell who the message is from — you and your brokerage, with contact information reachable somewhere obvious — and must have a working unsubscribe, which for SMS is conventionally reply-STOP. An opt-out is senior to everything: once someone stops, that number is done for marketing regardless of any consent window still notionally open, and honouring it late is its own violation. Character limits are not a compliance exemption; if the required information can’t fit, link to it.

Cold texting: the answer nobody wants

Texting numbers you bought, scraped, or collected without any inquiry is the plainest CASL violation available, and it’s also the version recipients report. There is no “first text is free” provision. If a lead vendor hands you phone numbers, the consent question transfers to you along with them: what exactly did those people agree to, when, and can the vendor produce the record? If the answer is vague, the numbers are radioactive. The related practice question — whether texting even outperforms other channels for nurture — is covered honestly in SMS marketing for realtors.

Make the record automatic

CASL puts the burden of proving consent on the sender, which turns compliance into bookkeeping: when consent arose, how, what kind, and when it lapses. Nobody maintains that by hand across a real database, and the failure mode is invisible until a complaint makes it visible. The structural fix is a CRM that gates sends on consent — one record per contact per channel, expiry tracked, opt-outs permanent, and every automated message checked against the gate before it leaves. Then texting becomes what it should be for an agent: a fast, personal channel for people who actually asked to hear from you.