Ontario Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk speaks during a news conference at Queen’s Park in Toronto on Dec. 4, 2019.Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press
Ontario’s Auditor-General says the province’s real estate regulator has been ineffective in policing the multibillion-dollar residential property industry.
In a report released on Wednesday, Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk found the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) does not adequately ensure that the industry complies with the regulations and has failed to do enough to protect consumers.
Topping the Auditor-General’s list of concerns was the fact that RECO does not fully inspect real estate brokerages on a timely basis. The Auditor-General found that 27 per cent of registered brokerages have never been fully inspected.
As well, the Auditor-General said RECO does not have a consistent process to assess those applying to be realtors and who say they have a criminal history. The report looked at a sampling of 25 professionals who had disclosed a criminal conviction or charge and found that RECO had approved 20 of them and did not provide any documented reasoning for why it did so.
RECO was also criticized for how it deals with ethics violations in real estate transactions. The report said the average fine imposed on realtors was often below the amount of the commission they earned in a transaction, and said the fine could be viewed as a cost of doing business instead of a “sufficient deterrent to future misconduct.”
RECO said it is committed to developing a plan that will address the Auditor-General’s concerns. RECO’s response was included in the Auditor-General’s 51-page report. Under the province’s real estate act, every real estate brokerage, broker and realtor must be registered with RECO.
The Auditor-General identified a host of other shortcomings ranging from RECO’s failure to track and analyze complaints, which would help it identify and address systemic problems, to a lack of protocols to ensure that students do not cheat on virtual real estate exams.
The report said one glaring lack of enforcement occurs after RECO inspectors discover a brokerage is violating rules. The regulator rarely follows up “to confirm that the brokerage has addressed the violations,” the report said.
The report also noted that RECO does not have a process to inspect whether real estate professionals are complying with anti-money-laundering laws.
“It is probable that money laundering is occurring undetected in Ontario’s real estate market,” Ms. Lysyk said in a press release accompanying the report.
During the pandemic real estate boom, blind bidding was heavily criticized for contributing to the spike in home prices when properties sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the listed price.Lars Hagberg/The Canadian Press
Realtors and brokers are required to report suspicious and large cash transactions to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), which monitors money laundering.
But over the past five years, when more than one million Ontario properties worth $760-billion were sold, hardly any transactions were reported to FINTRAC. The federal agency received no reports of large cash transactions from 2017 to 2020. Only last year, which was a record period for home sales, FINTRAC received 18 reports of large cash transactions, according to the Auditor-General.
The report recommended that RECO work with FINTRAC to share information. It also recommended that RECO update its procedures to ensure that brokerages’ reporting obligations are properly reviewed.
RECO said it had already begun to “explore opportunities” to share information and collaborate with FINTRAC.
Over all, the Auditor-General had 25 recommendations for RECO and the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery, which oversees the regulator. In the report, both RECO and the ministry said some of the recommendations would be addressed next year when the province’s new real estate rules go into effect.
That law includes a purported change to an opaque real estate sales tactic known as blind bidding, where competing buyers in a multiple-bid situation do not know what others are offering to pay for a home.
During the pandemic real estate boom, blind bidding was heavily criticized for contributing to the spike in home prices when properties sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the listed price.
The real estate industry has repeatedly defended the practice as giving homeowners choice. The new law, which comes into effect in April, includes a provision that will allow the homeowner to disclose the competing offers. However, homeowners are already allowed to sell their homes via an open auction.
The Auditor-General report recommended that RECO work with its overseeing ministry to gather data on which sellers choose an auction process.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
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