The Supreme Court of Canada will not hear the Toronto Real Estate Board’s appeal of the decision to uphold the Competition Tribunal’s ruling that the board, by not including sold and other data in its virtual office website (VOW) feed, had engaged in anti-competitive acts.
The decision means that the tribunal’s order of June 2016 stands. TREB must provide VOW feeds with all of the “disputed data”, which includes “archived data, with respect to sold and pending sold homes, withdrawn, expired, suspended or terminated listings and offers of commission to brokers who represent the successful home purchaser,” according to the order.
The board can “not preclude or restrict its members’ use of the information in the VOW Data Feed on any device (including but not restricted to computers, tablets or smartphones), but TREB may limit members’ use to being directly related to the business of providing residential real estate brokerage services.”
Some brokerages say they will begin providing the information to clients immediately.
“The Toronto Real Estate Board respects the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to not grant leave to hear TREB’s appeal,” says TREB CEO John DiMichele in a statement. “The order of the tribunal will come into effect in 60 days time, unless it is modified. As noted by the Supreme Court of Canada, of the approximately 600 leave applications submitted to the court each year, only about 80 are granted. The possibility of succeeding in getting an appeal heard is in general remote. The court’s role is not to correct errors that may have been made in the courts below. Rather it grants leave only where its decision is likely to have an impact on society as a whole.
“TREB believes personal financial information of home buyers and sellers must continue to be safely used and disclosed in a manner that respects privacy interests and will be studying the required next steps to ensure such information will be protected in compliance with the tribunal order once that comes into effect,” says DiMichele.
TREB has consistently argued that releasing the information violates client’s privacy rights and its own copyright of the information. But the Competition Bureau maintained that the board wanted to control the information available, to the detriment of brokerages that wanted to explore innovative business models and provide more data to the public.
“Today’s ruling is a decisive victory for competition, innovation and for consumers. By removing TREB’s anti-competitive restrictions, home buyers and sellers in the GTA will now have greater access to information and innovative real estate services when making one of the most significant financial decisions of their lives,” says Matthew Boswell, interim commissioner of competition, in a statement.
The dispute between TREB and the Competition Bureau dates to 2011.
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