Increased transparency of home sales information is underway

Home buyers are now expected to have access to home pricing information. This is after The Supreme Court of Canada decided nearly a month ago to junk Toronto Real Estate Board's (TREB) long-standing appeal, which fought against the public disclosure of its home sales prices, broker commissions and pending sales.

The Ottawa Citizen reported that this was a ground-breaking move for the entire country's real estate industry, not just Toronto.

“This has significant ramifications across Canada,” said John Andrew, a professor of real estate in the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University. “[The information] should be freely available. It should all be there within a week or two of the transaction happening.”

Andrew foresees that this will pave the way to the listing of recent and historical sales values on websites that anyone can view and navigate. He further explained that in cases where a conditional offer has been placed on a home, the transaction should be reflected on the system without exposing buyers' personal information.

TREB has been trying to evade the order of transparency from the Competition Bureau since 2011.The real estate board argued that uploading such data online would violate consumer privacy and copyright.

The bureau, meanwhile, said that TREB's way of doing things restrained competition and hampered digital innovation.

At present, the standard practice of homebuyers interested to find out a home information is to directly seek it from agents.

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