Compliance and advertising standards.

1Who holds the licence: it's never RealViu

DDF® access is permission-based and runs top-down. Your brokerage opts in through CREA's Member Portal; only then can it grant its agents permission to participate. If a brokerage hasn't opted in, its agents can't use DDF® at all. There's no workaround, which is why we ask about board and brokerage status before onboarding anyone.

RealViu's own role is Technology Provider: a company that signs a data access agreement with CREA to operate a site on a participant's behalf. The participant, your brokerage, remains responsible for the site's compliance, and we never ask for or hold your DDF® or board credentials; we're provisioned under our own Technology Provider agreement instead.

Your brokerage must have opted in to the relevant feed (National Shared Pool and/or Member Website Feed, or your board's own feed such as PropTX) before we can pull any listing data.

2Member vs. National Pool sites aren't interchangeable

DDF® distinguishes a Member Website (shows only your own or your brokerage's listings) from a National Pool Website (shows other participants' listings from the shared pool). The rules diverge sharply:

On National Pool pages, RealViu branding is automatically suppressed from the listing content itself. A "Built with RealViu" badge sitting alongside pooled listings would be a violation, so the templates are built not to show one there.

3What appears on every page

These display requirements are enforced by the site template, not left to memory:

• The "Powered by REALTOR.ca" logo on every listing page, linking directly to that listing on REALTOR.ca.
• The listing brokerage's name, visible without clicking a link, and CREA's supplied watermarks on listing photographs.
• An MLS® and REALTOR® trademark statement on every page, consistent with CREA's Trademark Policy.
• The name of the controlling brokerage or salesperson, and the brokerage's logo, prominent enough that a visitor understands who's responsible for the site.
• MLS® and REALTOR® written in full capitals with the ® symbol everywhere they appear, including alt text and meta descriptions.

4How the platform stays compliant

• 24-hour refresh. Every site refreshes listing data at least once every 24 hours, and anything no longer current is removed.
• Activity reporting. Listing activity on Member and National Pool sites is reported through CREA's Analytics Web Service API.
• Permitted uses only. Listing data is used to display your own sites and marketing for your own listings. Never for AI training, market-report generation from pool data, resale, or analytics products.
• Anti-scraping. Rate limiting and bot detection run on every site, with logs reviewed regularly and suspected scraping reported to the board or CREA.
• Open for audit. Sites are never placed behind a password or staging gate that would block a board, association or CREA compliance review.
• Clean offboarding. If an account cancels or a feed is revoked, cached listing data and images are purged, not just unpublished.

5Boards vary by region

DDF® gives national breadth from one credential, but it only carries the fields boards choose to send, and not every brokerage opts in, so coverage in any given city can be incomplete. In Ontario, boards including TRREB distribute listings through PropTX rather than (or in addition to) DDF®, which needs its own credentials. We describe DDF®-based coverage honestly: as listings from participating brokerages, not as a complete feed of every listing in a market.

1A website is advertising

Under TRESA, "advertising" covers any notice, announcement or representation directed at the public that promotes a brokerage, agent or their services, in any medium, expressly including websites and social media. Every RealViu site is advertising, and the client's broker of record shares responsibility for what it says.

2Identification requirements

• The brokerage name must appear clearly and prominently, using the exact name registered with RECO, together with the descriptor "brokerage" or "real estate brokerage."
• An agent's name must match their RECO registration. Short forms and nicknames aren't permitted.
• Only permitted terms are used for a person's role: real estate agent, salesperson, or broker. Never "realtor" as a generic job title.
• Sites collect the registered brokerage name, registered agent name, RECO registration number and permitted term at signup, and render them into a locked footer block that a client can restyle but not delete. That is the single guardrail that prevents the most common violation.

3Sold listings and consent

Advertising can't identify a specific property or a party to a transaction, or reveal the contents of an agreement, price included, without the relevant consent, given in writing with an effective and expiry date. That's why a "Sold, over asking" gallery is a consent-gated feature on RealViu sites, not a toggle you flip on: adding a sold listing requires a written-consent attestation with effective and expiry dates, the entry auto-unpublishes at expiry, and sale price, days-on-market and over-ask figures each require their own consent attestation.

4Claims must be accurate and verifiable

TRESA prohibits false, misleading or deceptive statements, and RECO's standard is stricter than a simple truth test: a statement that's true but vague where clarity is needed can still count as inaccurate.

• Comparative claims ("#1 in the neighbourhood") must be truthful, supported by verifiable facts, with the basis stated.
• Volume or activity claims ("$50M sold") must explain how the figure was measured.
• Awards and honours need a source, date and relevant detail.
• Promises and offers ("free staging") must state their conditions, or say where the full terms are.

Our templates use labelled, sourced fields for stats and awards rather than bare numbers, so a client filling them in is nudged toward a compliant claim by construction.

5REALTOR® is a trademark, not a synonym

CREA's Trademark Policy requires REALTOR® to refer only to a CREA member, always in full capitals followed by the ® symbol. The same discipline applies to MLS®, and it applies to our own site copy and templates too.

6What enforcement looks like

RECO's response scales with the problem: a written warning, orders to correct or remove advertising, mandatory education, conditions on registration, and, through the Discipline Committee, fines reported in 2026 at up to $50,000 for agents and $100,000 for brokerages, with suspension, revocation or prosecution in serious cases. A typo usually ends in a correction; a pattern of misleading claims or unauthorized sold posts gets expensive. Figures change. Confirm current maximums with your own counsel before relying on them.

1There's no B2B exemption

Canada's anti-spam law (CASL) governs commercial electronic messages, email and SMS alike, and applies to business outreach exactly as it does to consumer newsletters. The trigger is the recipient's location: if a message is accessed by a computer in Canada, CASL applies, regardless of where the sender is. Consent must exist before the first message; you can't email someone to ask for permission to email them.

2Consent bases, and how long they last

3What every message must carry

• Sender identification: legal name, a valid physical mailing address, and a phone number, email or web address.
• A clear, working unsubscribe mechanism in the body of the message, not buried in headers.
• The unsubscribe stays functional for at least 60 days, and requests are honoured within 10 business days.

This applies to every message in a sequence, not just the first, and it applies to the messages your own site sends on your behalf, through contact forms, listing alerts and newsletter tools. RealViu's templates carry sender identification and a working unsubscribe by construction.

4Our consent ledger

CASL puts the burden of proof on the sender. If consent can't be shown, it didn't exist. We keep a documented consent record for every contact, tied to how and when consent was obtained, and we automatically block a send once its consent basis has expired.

5Exposure

The CRTC can impose penalties of up to $1 million per violation for individuals and $10 million for corporations, with directors and officers personally exposed in some cases. Real settlements tend to be smaller but still material. Reported cases have ranged from the low tens of thousands into the low millions, and the underlying violations are usually mundane: a missing unsubscribe link, a recycled list with no consent record, a sender name that doesn't match the business.