CASL

CASL — Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation — is the federal law governing commercial electronic messages: email, texts, and direct messages sent to promote a business. In force since 2014, it requires three things of every message: consent from the recipient before you send, clear identification of who is sending, and a working unsubscribe mechanism. For a realtor, nearly every lead follow-up email is a commercial electronic message, which makes CASL an operating condition, not a legal footnote.

How consent works

CASL recognizes two kinds. Express consent — a checked box, a signed form, a recorded yes — is durable and never lapses on its own. Implied consent is situational and expires: an existing business relationship, such as a past client, carries it for about two years; a simple inquiry carries it for about six months. Two practical consequences follow. First, timing matters — a lead from last spring may already be outside the implied window. Second, evidence matters, because if a complaint lands, you must show what consent you held, from where, and when. Penalties are administrative and can be severe, up to the millions for organizations, and the CRTC does enforce.

What it means for an agent’s follow-up

Consent should be captured where the lead is born: on the registration form, the listing inquiry, the home-valuation request. From there it needs to live somewhere queryable — which is the honest argument for a real estate CRM that stores consent source and date on every contact and knows when an implied window has run out. BrokerFold’s platform records consent at visitor signup for exactly this reason. The dangerous pattern is the opposite one: a spreadsheet of addresses with no memory of where any of them came from.

Common confusions

CASL is not just an anti-blast law — a single email to a single person can violate it. Buying a lead does not buy consent to email them; the consent question follows the person, not the invoice, and the details matter enough that we cover them in buying real estate leads in Canada. And an unsubscribe link is not optional courtesy: every commercial message needs one, working, honoured promptly.