Your agents fill the forms. The brokerage is what gets penalised.
Every FINTRAC penalty issued to the real estate sector has been issued to an entity, never to an agent. The name on the notice is the brokerage.
Real estate is the most penalised sector in the country.
Penalties against real estate businesses in FINTRAC's public notices, out of 80 across every sector. More than banks, casinos and securities dealers combined.
The median real estate penalty. Half were smaller than this, and the smallest was $22,770. These are not headline numbers aimed at national firms.
Notices citing three or more violations at once. A penalty is almost never one mistake on one deal. It is a program that was not there when the examiner looked.
Counted from FINTRAC's public notice of administrative monetary penalties, which carries a rolling five year window. Independents, numbered companies, project marketers and franchise offices are all on the list.
Two notices, and the difference between them is the whole problem.
One brokerage had no program. The other had a program and missed a single transaction. Both were expensive, and only one of them is about forms.
- No written policies and procedures tailored to the business
- No documented assessment of money laundering risk
- No written, ongoing training program
- No documented review of the program's effectiveness
- Account numbers missing from all ten receipt of funds records examined
Four of the five citations are the compliance program itself. Not one of them is about an identification form being filled in wrongly.
- One violation, graded Very Serious: failure to file a suspicious transaction report
- Client information that was difficult to verify
- Foreign buyers and funds from high-risk jurisdictions
- Rapid changes of property ownership
A single transaction, and every red flag FINTRAC lists was visible in the file the brokerage already held. Nobody joined them up in time.
A drawer full of completed forms is evidence of intake, not of a compliance program.
Identification records are one obligation out of several, and they are the one the industry has already solved. The notices are written about the others.
Collected is not checked
Software that flags a blank field still leaves a person opening every file to decide whether what was entered is right. At a hundred deals a quarter that is a job, and it is usually the broker of record doing it at night.
A manual is not a risk assessment
A document written once describes a business as it was that week. The Act asks whether your assessment reflects your actual clients, products and geographies now, and whether you applied it.
A course is not a training record
The examinable artifact is not the course. It is the record of who took it, when, how it was delivered and what it covered, for every person including part-time and contract staff.
Every two years is not continuous
An effectiveness review performed every twenty-four months tells you what was true on one day. The twenty-three months in between are where the notices come from.
When there is no mortgage, your brokerage is the only party with a FINTRAC duty.
FINTRAC's obligations attach to the brokerage regardless of how the purchase is financed. What changes without a lender is who else is looking.
| Party | Reports to FINTRAC | Looks at the buyer's funds |
|---|---|---|
| Your brokerage | Yes | Yes |
| The lender | Not in the deal | Absent |
| The closing lawyer | No, exempt | Yes, and files nothing |
| The title insurer | Yes, since October 2025 | Underwrites title, not funds |
| The buyer's own bank | Yes | Sees a wire, not a purchase |
Lawyers were placed outside the regime by the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada (AG) v Federation of Law Societies of Canada, 2015 SCC 7. Corporate buyers are more than three times as likely as individuals to purchase without a mortgage, and that is the profile described in the Century 21 Heritage notice above.
We take the checking off your compliance officer.
Keep whatever your agents already use to capture identification. We work behind it, on the file the brokerage has to defend.
Every record reviewed, not sampled
Our systems read every completed file for the fields an examiner tests, including the receipt of funds records that account numbers go missing from, and tell your officer what is incomplete while the deal is still open.
A risk assessment built from your deals
Derived from the transactions you actually closed, the clients you actually took on and the geographies they came from, and rebuilt as those change.
Training records that stay current
Who has been trained, when, on what, and who is overdue, across every agent and every administrator, without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.
The review, running continuously
The effectiveness review stops being an event you prepare for. It becomes the state of the program on any day an examiner asks, including today.
What we will never do is decide for you. Whether a transaction is suspicious, and whether to report it, stays with your compliance officer, and the record shows it was theirs.
Find out what an examiner would find in your brokerage.
Twelve questions, about a minute. Your gaps, and one thing to do about each this week.
It runs in your browser. There is no email gate, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask for it at the end.