To help you sell, buy or lease real estate, REALTORS®, brokerages and real estate boards need to collect, use and disclose some of your personal information. This page provides you with information about, and obtains your consent to, such information handling practices.
Definitions
Personal information means any identifiable information about you, including your name, address, phone number, financial information and may include information about your property (such as listing and selling price, lease rate, listing term, etc.).
REALTOR® means a member of a real estate board, and REALTORS® are also typically licensed under the Real Estate Services Act. Brokerage refers to the real estate company where your REALTOR® is licensed. The boards are the real estate boards of which the brokerage and the REALTOR® are members. The Multiple Listing Service® (MLS®) System comprises a computerized database of real estate listings and sales, operated by the boards in conjunction with The Canadian Real Estate Association.
How is my personal information collected?
Most personal information will be collected directly from you through the contracts and other documents you fill out (e.g., Multiple Listing Contract, Contract of Purchase and Sale, Offer to Lease, seller’s Property Disclosure Statement) and through discussions you have with your REALTOR®. Some information may be collected from other sources such as government departments and agencies (e.g., Land Title Offices, BC Assessment), financial institutions and mortgage brokers.
To whom may my personal information be disclosed?
Your information may be disclosed to (or may be accessible by) the boards and their staff and members, other REALTORS® and their clients, government departments and agencies, financial institutions, legal advisors, service providers, the British Columbia Real Estate Association, the Real Estate Council of British Columbia, The Canadian Real Estate Association and members of the public, for the purposes described below.
Not all of your information will be accessible to each of the above-mentioned entities. For example, once the listing term has ended, the general public will not have access to your information, unless it is otherwise available through public registries (e.g., Land Title Offices, BC Assessment).
Why is my personal information collected, used and disclosed?
Your personal information may be collected, used, and disclosed for some or all of the following purposes:
- To allow members of real estate boards (including REALTORS® and appraisers) to appraise your property.
- To list/market your property on the MLS System.
- To market your property through any other media (both print and electronic).
- To help you locate a suitable property to buy or lease
- To facilitate the purchase and sale or lease transaction (by cooperating with financial institutions, legal advisors, and government departments and agencies).
- To allow the boards (including REALTORS®) to compile current and historical statistics on sales and property prices and lease rates, and to conduct comparative market analyses. Information about your property will be retained in the MLS System for these purposes after your property has sold or leased or your listing has expired (if you are a seller/landlord) and after you have purchased or leased your property (if you are a buyer/tenant).
- To enforce codes of professional conduct and ethics for REALTORS® (by cooperating with real estate boards, the British Columbia Real Estate Association, the Real Estate Council of British Columbia, The Canadian Real Estate Association and other regulatory bodies).
- To comply with legal requirements and to act pursuant to legal authorizations.
The above-mentioned collections, uses and disclosures are a necessary part of your relationship with your REALTORS®.
Will my personal information be collected, used and disclosed for any other purposes?
Your personal information may also be collected, used and disclosed for the following additional purposes:
- Your REALTOR® may communicate with you in future to determine whether you require additional real estate services.
- Your REALTOR® may communicate with you to provide information about other products or services that may interest you.
- Other REALTORS® may communicate with you to determine whether you require additional real estate services.
- The boards, REALTORS® and survey firms on their behalf, may communicate with you to determine if you wish to participate in surveys
These additional purposes are optional. If you do not want your personal information used or disclosed for any of these purposes, please contact your REALTOR® or your REALTOR’S® board’s privacy officer
Contact information for all BC real estate boards can be found at the British Columbia Real Estate Association website or telephone (604) 683-7702.
Usage Details, IP Addresses, Cookies, and Other Technologies
As you navigate through and interact with our Sites and Services, we may automatically collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns, including without limitation:
- Details of your visits to our sites, including traffic data, location data, logs, and other communication data and the resources that you access and use on the sites.
- Information about your computer and Internet connection, including your IP address, operating system, and browser type.
The information we collect automatically is statistical data and does not identify any individual. It helps us to improve our Sites and Services and to deliver better and more personalized future services by enabling us to do things such as:
- Estimate our audience size and usage patterns.
- Store information about your preferences, allowing us to customize our Sites according to your individual interests.
- Speed up user searches.
- Recognize you when you return to our Sites.
- Provide better services in the future.
The technologies we use for this automatic data collection may include:
- Cookies (or browser cookies). A cookie is a small file placed on the hard drive of your computer. You may refuse to accept browser cookies by activating the appropriate setting on your browser. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our Sites. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you direct your browser to our Sites.
- Flash cookies. Certain features of our Sites may use local stored objects (or Flash cookies) to collect and store information about your preferences and navigation to, from, and on our Sites. Flash cookies are not managed by the same browser settings as are used for browser cookies. For information about managing your privacy and security settings for Flash cookies, see Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information.
- Web beacons. Pages of our the Sites and our emails may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs, pixel tags, and single-pixel gifs) that permit us, for example, to count users who have visited those pages or opened an email and for other related website statistics (for example, recording the popularity of certain website content and verifying system and server integrity).
We do not collect personal information automatically, but we may tie this information to personal information about you that we collect from other sources or you provide to us.