Realtors and prospective buyers alike will soon be able to glean a little more insight into competing offers on a property as the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) announced Wednesday morning the official Canada-wide rollout of the REALTOR.ca open offer system.
The new program will see real-time offer tracking show up on a property’s REALTOR.ca listing page, but exactly how much information is displayed about the offers will vary depending on both seller preferences and location.
With real estate being regulated at the provincial level, the availability of offer information will vary from province to province. “It will only be available on listings where Realtors, by way of their seller’s consent, opt to display offer details on REALTOR.ca, as permitted by provincial regulations,” a CREA spokesperson tells STOREYS. In Ontario, for example, the Real Estate Brokers Act prohibits realtors from revealing the dollar amount of competing offers, but in British Columbia, this information can be made available.
There will also be voluntary opt-in levels of transparency within the open offer tracking, brought about via a partnership with Australian property technology company Openn. In an interview with STOREYS in June, Openn’s Director of Operations for North America, Eric Bryant, explained that sellers will not be required to reveal the offer price amounts on their property, but they will have the option to do so.
“As our first entry into Canada, we are thrilled to launch in partnership with CREA, to help Canadians navigate the challenges of the property transaction process through near real-time data tracking and feedback,” said Duncan Anderson, President of Openn NA. “Now, more than ever, we are seeing the significant impact and disadvantages that blind bidding creates due to lack of transparency throughout the entire bidding process. By partnering with CREA and leveraging their online platform, it marks an exciting step toward a more efficient and equitable real estate landscape.”
The program also requires that all offers be submitted by a realtor, who will have to specifically sign up for Openn’s service.
The Canada-wide rollout follows what Openn describes in a news release as “a successful pilot program in 2022 in select Canadian markets.” When asked where the pilot took place, Openn tells STOREYS that the pilot ran in two markets, “one with an Ontario real estate board and one with a BC real estate board” from November 2022 to February 2023, but were unable to provide details on which specific boards those were.
What Openn did disclose, however, is that the pilot didn’t use actual live listings “because the product was not ready through most of the pilot stage.”
“Openn used a testing box to get feedback while the product was being advanced,” the company said. No numbers were available on how many test runs were done, and Openn noted it was “a small group” of agents who were involved.
Interestingly, in a REALTOR.ca blog post dated January 15, 2023, the CREA-owned website said the pilot program would be rolling out “over the next few weeks.”
Realtor.ca
When CREA was asked when and where the pilot occurred, STOREYS was directed to speak with Openn as CREA does not “have that information.” “From CREA’s end, we were more concerned with integration with REALTOR.ca and provincial regulations (e.g. what details of the offer can be displayed in which province),” the CREA spokesperson said.
Written By
Laura Hanrahan
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Laura has covered real estate in Toronto, New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles. Before coming to STOREYS as a staff writer, she worked as the Toronto Urbanized Editor for Daily Hive.
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.
