‘I brought you a buyer’: How agent language undoes the SRP disclosure

The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.

When TRESA arrived in December 2023, the ministry killed the word “customer.” The reasoning was sound. Under REBBA, the distinction between client and customer confused the public, and confusion in a fiduciary relationship is dangerous. So the self-represented party (SRP) replaced the customer, a person who is not a client of any brokerage and who receives no services, opinions or advice.

Language is conduct

Two and a half years later, I want to ask an impolite question: did the customer actually die, or did we just stop saying the name? Here is an example of how I often hear agents talk to and about sellers and landlords (and I suspect that you do, too): “I brought my seller a self-represented buyer.” “I brought a tenant to the landlord; the tenant was self-represented.” That language is common, and language is conduct. RECO Bulletin 2.7 is explicit that a representation agreement can be written, oral or implied. And that implied representation arises the moment an agent begins providing services, opinions or advice to any person without a written agreement. It clarifies that even where the SRP has signed the disclosure-to-self-represented-party acknowledgement form, conduct that contradicts the disclosure can still create an implied representation.

What ‘bringing’  implies

Now consider what “bringing” someone actually means. It means the agent found them, showed them properties and helped them toward the successful completion of this transaction. That is the vocabulary of agency. If the agent represents the seller, they did not bring a buyer to the seller; they showed their client’s listing to a stranger. The moment they frame themselves as the active party procuring the buyer, they are describing services rendered to the person the paperwork says they do not serve.

And nobody says “I brought you a buyer” for free. The phrase is almost always a remuneration claim. Under TRESA, entitlement to remuneration is captured in a representation agreement, and brokerages are prohibited from entering into agreements with self-represented parties to provide assistance or to charge for it. Many agents tell me that when they bring a self-represented party, they either get the full commission or more than they would have received had they represented only the seller. The agent claiming they brought the SRP is claiming the very relationship the SRP form denies exists. They want the commission logic of representation while disclaiming their duties. That was the concern with the customer relationship. Have we buried the word and kept the arrangement?

Leasing: where the imbalance is worst

Nowhere is this clearer than in leasing. Rentals are full trades under TRESA, subject to the same guidelines, forms and prohibitions, but the culture treats them as “lesser transactions,” often staffed by the newest registrants with the least trading experience. Consider this: an unrepresented tenant responds to a listing, and the landlord’s agent walks them through the application, tells them what to offer and coaches them on the paperwork. That tenant understandably believes the agent is helping them. Tenants are often younger, lower income and under time pressure, which means the power imbalance the SRP disclosure exists to cure is at its worst precisely where the disclosure is least likely to be given.

The missing enforcement record

Here is what should trouble us most. I went looking for the enforcement record on all of this, and the silence was the story.

To the best of my ability, I couldn’t find one. RECO’s published regulatory actions are busy. Fines for unverified square footage, unauthorized lockbox access, trust account failures and undisclosed multiple representation. The leasing files are there too: one agent was referred for arranging leases without the client’s knowledge and diverting rental funds; another for arranging a lease for someone who did not own the property. But as far as I can determine, over two and a half years, not one published decision has prosecuted the SRP framework itself. No fine for advising an SRP. No penalty for a missing disclosure form. No finding of implied representation.

There are two ways to read that silence. The first is that compliance is excellent. However, nobody who has worked in a FSBO or a rental market believes this. The second is that the violation is invisible to its victim. The SRP who received helpful advice from “their” agent does not know a rule was broken. They got the same ambiguity in service that the old “customer” received; there is no discernible difference and no clarity in communication between the unrepresented party and the represented party, and the harm looks like service. The seller or landlord on the other side closed the deal. RECO’s complaint-driven model cannot see a violation in which every participant walks away satisfied. Helpfulness generates gratitude, not complaints. The complaint-driven model isn’t activated unless a deal collapses and the SRP discovers, at the worst possible moment, that nobody owed them anything.

Conduct, not paperwork

The SRP acknowledgement form does not determine the relationship. Conduct does. And our industry’s habitual language keeps confessing to relationships the paperwork denies. If Phase 3 wants to finish what TRESA started, it should stop waiting for complaints that will never come and start auditing the file where the confession is already written: the one where an agent adjusted their remuneration because they “brought” a self-represented party they claimed they never represented.

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