On Closer Inspection: We are more than the sum of our parts

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

On Closer Inspection with Dixie Lee MacDonald— a second look at the rules, language, and habits of Ontario real estate. MacDonald is a sales representative and a real estate educator with various organizations. She has spent 16+ years in residential resale — and even longer reading the fine print. 

Ask a new registrant in Ontario who they answer to and watch the hesitation. Is it RECO who registered them? Their brokerage who employs them? Their local board who runs their MLS? OREA, who advocates at Queen’s Park on their behalf? CREA, who stewards the trademark on the very word the public uses for all of us? The honest answer is all of them, and the more honest answer is that the pieces grew up separately, and no one designed how they would fit together.

Rooms without a hallway

I have practised residential resale in this province for more than 16 years, in the Toronto market and now in Prince Edward County and the Quinte region. In that time, I have come to see our industry less as a single structure and more as a collection of well-built rooms with no hallway connecting them. Each organization was founded for a genuine purpose, at a particular moment, to solve a particular problem. Each has served its members faithfully within its boundaries. The organizational divisions or rooms were never a plot. They were how things were built, one at a time, over a century.

Take the tour. A regulator whose mandate is consumer protection, not member representation. A provincial association whose mandate is advocacy, not regulation. A national association responsible for professional identity, operating two floors removed from daily practice. And beneath all of it, the local and regional boards, each with its own MLS rules, forms, preferences and organizational culture, each shaped by the geography and history of its own membership. A member in Belleville and a member in Ottawa hold the same registration under the same act. They can still have meaningfully different experiences of what this industry expects of them. Not because anyone intended that outcome. Because no one ever stood back far enough to see the whole building.

The consumer doesn’t see this architecture. The consumer sees one industry. So, when a practitioner behaves badly in Windsor, the reputational bill arrives in Thunder Bay. If one organization takes a public position, the public assumes we all hold it. We are judged as a whole even as we exist as parts, and that discrepancy is not anyone’s fault. It is everyone’s inheritance.

The costs we have stopped noticing

These strict divisions, or separate rooms, have costs we have stopped noticing because we have lived with them so long that we assume “what is” “must be,” and that is a failure of imagination. Duplicated dues for overlapping services. Professional development calendars that teach earnest but inconsistent interpretations of the same legislation. Amalgamation conversations that consume years of volunteer goodwill, not because the volunteers lack vision but because the structures they serve didn’t encourage integrating. 

Data sharing agreements negotiated slowly and carefully between neighbouring boards whose members already cooperate on transactions every single day. The practitioners have always found the hallway. The buildings were just never built with one, and there are quieter costs — the one I think about most as an educator. When responsibility is scattered across many mandates, hard questions have no natural home. Standards belong to the regulator. Advocacy belongs to the association. Data belongs to the board. Professional identity belongs to everyone, which in practice means no single organization naturally owns it. This is not deliberate evasion. It is the predictable result of mandates drawn narrowly and honoured honestly. Each organization is doing its job. The whole is not anyone’s job.

Not a merger, and not more of the same

I must be careful here, because the easy version of this column would call for one big merger, and I do not believe that is the answer. Local knowledge matters. A board that understands rural waterfront severances or northern housing stock serves its members in ways a centralized office never could. The rooms exist for good reasons. The problem is not that we have parts. The problem is that a century of separate construction has left us without a shared floor plan, and renovating a way of being that old is genuinely hard. It asks organizations to act beyond their mandates, spend beyond their budgets and trust beyond their walls. We should not pretend that is a small ask.

To be clear, this is not an argument that we are undertrained. The education that brings a new salesperson to registration in this province is more than adequate, and RECO offers continuing education well past that point. What is missing is not more of the same. It is something different in kind.

TRESA gave us an opening. A new act, new obligations, new language, a genuine moment to explain to the public what representation means and why it matters. (TRESA: Facts a seller has a legal obligation to disclose, 2023) Much of that interpretive work has landed with individual brokerages, individual educators and individual columnists, each filling the space in their own way. That was not neglect. It was each separate organization speaking to its own audience through its own channel, and the joint public conversation belonged to no one in particular.

What a hallway would look like

So, what would a hallway look like? It might look like an umbrella course offered from outside the organizations altogether, delivered at the brokerage level, focused on the ethical interpretation of the legislation and the day-to-day dilemmas, misunderstandings and confusion that practice produces, addressed as they unfold rather than in the next scheduled curriculum revision. Delivering it through brokerages is essential because brokerages need to begin assuming more responsibility for education, and particularly applied ethics, after registration. This involves harmonized data standards adopted because practitioners need them. And it means each organization asking one new question at the planning table: what does the profession require from us that our mandate does not yet name? Where is public distrust strongest, and which everyday behaviours is it springing from? How can we address this? None of that requires a merger. All of it requires the parts to see themselves as parts, which after a hundred years of standing alone is harder than it sounds, and more necessary than ever.

We tell buyers that a house is more than a collection of rooms. We reassure sellers that a transaction is more than a price. We are fluent, professionally, in the language of wholes. The public already treats us as one profession. The invitation now, for every organization that serves this industry, is to step into the hallway and meet the others there. Not because anyone failed. Because the building is finally ready for one.

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