What is implied consent? (CASL)

Implied consent is the permission CASL infers from an existing relationship rather than from an explicit yes. It comes in two main real-estate flavours with two different clocks: an inquiry about your services gives you roughly six months, and an existing business relationship — a client who transacted with you — gives you roughly two years from the triggering event. Both expire on their own, which is the property that separates them from express consent and the property agents most often miss. (General information, not legal advice; the CRTC’s CASL guidance is the primary source.)

The two clocks

Six months for an inquiry: someone asked about a listing, filled in your form, requested a valuation. Two years for an existing business relationship: someone bought or sold with you, or contracted your services, measured from the event. During an open window you may send commercial electronic messages — with full identification and a working unsubscribe, the mechanics detailed in can I email leads under CASL — and when the window closes, the permission is simply gone, however warm the relationship felt. Express consent is the contrast: freely given, recorded, and durable until the person withdraws it. One kind of consent is a subscription; the other is a countdown.

What starts each clock in practice

Map your actual lead sources against the categories. A website lead-form submission is the textbook inquiry — six months. A listing question over portal messaging, a market-report request, an open-house sign-in: inquiries. A closed purchase or sale: an existing business relationship, two years from closing. A business card collected at a party starts nothing — proximity is not a relationship in CASL’s taxonomy. And fresh qualifying activity starts fresh windows, so an engaged contact’s permission rolls forward while a silent one’s quietly runs out. The same clocks govern texting, where the stakes of misreading them are covered in texting leads and CASL consent.

Why this is the most misapplied idea in real estate marketing

The standard failure is treating a form fill as a lifetime subscription: the lead enters the database in March, and the database keeps mailing them for years. Every message after the window closes is sent without consent, and the burden of proving consent existed sits with the sender — a position you cannot argue your way out of without records. The second failure is inverted: agents who half-know the rule and stop mailing legitimate contacts far too early, wasting windows they lawfully held. Both failures have the same cure — knowing the category and the date for every contact instead of guessing.

What implied consent never covers

Purchased lists head the list: whatever relationship the list vendor had with those addresses, it is not a relationship with you, and no implied-consent category transfers by invoice. Scraped contacts, harvested addresses, and “everyone in my phone” fail the same way. The full definition of a commercial electronic message and the rest of the statute’s machinery live in the CASL glossary entry; the short version is that if you cannot name the event that created your permission and the date it happened, you do not have permission.

Run the clocks in software, then convert

Implied consent is date arithmetic across hundreds of contacts, and date arithmetic is what computers are for. The workable pattern: a consent record per contact — kind, source, date, expiry — and a send gate that checks it before any automated message leaves, which is how a CASL-aware CRM turns the law into infrastructure. Then use each window for its real purpose: while implied consent is open, earn express consent with an honest ask and an unchecked checkbox. A database where every active contact holds durable, recorded permission is the compounding asset; the timer kind is just how you get there.