Competition Bureau deal opens Centris real estate data to Quebec brokers

Tashi Farmilo

Access to Quebec’s Centris real estate database is set to widen under a consent agreement between the Competition Bureau and the Association professionnelle des courtiers immobiliers du Québec (APCIQ), announced on October 15 by the Gatineau-based federal agency. The bureau concluded that the association and its subsidiary, Société Centris, had abused their dominant position under the Competition Act by not providing members with an automated data feed and by restricting how brokers could use the information.

Those practices likely discouraged new services and weakened competition between brokerages, the bureau said. The association must now supply members with a feed carrying the full range of details brokers rely on, such as what a home sold for, its earlier listings and its physical features. The deal is legally binding for 10 years. It has been registered with the Competition Tribunal, which means it can be enforced in the same way as a court order.

The APCIQ, a non-profit group that represents more than 15,000 brokers and agencies, signed the agreement and made its own announcement on October 15. The association said the changes will give clients more market information through their brokers and allow agencies to build new tools and services.

Centris serves Quebec brokers much as MLS does in other provinces, and its full database is off limits to the public. Until now, brokers could look up records through an online portal and post listings on their own websites, but they could not transfer the data automatically into their own software. A feed makes that possible. The bureau pointed to uses such as side-by-side property comparisons, automatic alerts for clients, pricing estimates, charts of market activity and websites that tell buyers and sellers more than they can learn today.

Jeanne Pratt, who leads the bureau on an interim basis, said real estate data is “crucial to some of the most important decisions Quebecers make when purchasing a property.” She said wider access would encourage new services, strengthen competition and help consumers make better choices.

The bureau’s investigation into the association lasted more than three years. The Federal Court first compelled the association on February 15, 2023, to hand over files and written answers, and a second order followed in 2025.

The case follows a similar dispute between the bureau and the Toronto Real Estate Board, now called the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. The Competition Tribunal ruled in 2016 that the board’s rules, which stopped agents from offering clients historical sales figures and other data on password-protected websites, were anticompetitive. Appeal courts upheld the decision, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the case in 2018. Since then, the bureau said, most large real estate boards across Canada have opened up access to their data, while Quebec brokers went without the automated feeds common in many other markets.

The association expects to introduce the changes over the next year. Chief among them are what it calls virtual offices, password-protected sites run by brokerages that let prospective buyers and sellers look up some market data, including past sales, and handle parts of the brokerage process online. The APCIQ said the rollout would be carried out with Quebec’s Real Estate Brokerage Act and the province’s privacy law, commonly known as Law 25, firmly in mind.

“This agreement will make a new platform, virtual offices, available to clients within their relationship with their real estate broker,” said Pierre-Olivier Simard, chair of the association’s board. “It is the result of several years of effort to put in place a solution adapted to Quebec’s reality, particularly given that Quebec’s laws are more restrictive than in the rest of Canada, notably regarding the protection of personal information.”