A quick note before we start: this is general information to help you ask the right questions, not legal advice. Your brokerage's compliance team and the official fightspam.gc.ca guidance are the final word.
What CASL covers
CASL applies to commercial electronic messages: email, texts and direct messages that encourage someone to do business with you. A just-listed blast, a monthly market update, a "thinking of selling?" note and a holiday card with your listings in it all count. A one-to-one email about a deal you are already working on together generally does not need marketing consent, because it is part of that transaction.
To send a commercial message you need three things:
- Consent, either express or implied, that you can prove.
- Identification: your name, the business you send on behalf of (your brokerage), a mailing address, and a phone number, email or website.
- A working unsubscribe that you honour within 10 business days.
The penalties are real: administrative monetary penalties of up to $1 million for an individual and $10 million for a business per violation, according to the CRTC. And if a complaint comes in, the burden of proving consent is on the sender, not the recipient.
Express consent vs implied consent
Express consent is a clear yes: someone ticks an unticked box, signs a form that asks, or tells you they want your updates. It does not expire until they withdraw it. A pre-ticked box is not express consent.
Implied consent comes from a relationship, and it runs out:
- A purchase, sale or lease with you: implied consent for two years from the transaction.
- An inquiry or application (asking about a listing, a showing request, an open house sign-in): implied consent for six months from the inquiry.
- A referral on its own gives you no consent at all. You can send one message that names who referred you, and that is it until the person agrees.
The trap for most agents is the clock. Your database is full of people who were warm leads two years ago and buyers from 2022 whose implied consent has quietly lapsed. Email them a market update and you are sending without consent.
Where Realtors usually get caught
- Importing a spreadsheet of past contacts and emailing all of them, with no record of where each one came from.
- Open house sign-in sheets with a pre-ticked "send me updates" box, or no record of what the sheet said.
- Treating a referral as permission.
- Unsubscribes that are honoured in one tool but not in another, so the person keeps getting your drip emails.
- A newsletter footer without a mailing address or the brokerage name.
What a CASL-ready CRM should do for you
Whatever CRM you use, ask whether it does these things on its own, without you remembering to:
- Store each contact's consent type, where it came from and the date, and work out when implied consent expires.
- Refuse to send a campaign to anyone without valid consent, checked at the moment of sending, not just when you built the list.
- Add the identification footer and an unsubscribe link to every marketing email, every time.
- Honour an unsubscribe immediately, everywhere: campaigns, drips and bulk email.
- Keep a history of consent changes you could show a regulator.
How Keyvera handles it
Full disclosure: Keyvera is our product. We built CASL into it because a CRM that leaves consent to memory leaves the risk with the agent. Here is what it does today:
- Every contact carries a consent status (express, implied, none or unsubscribed), the basis for it and the date. Pick the basis, such as "Asked about a property" or "Bought, sold or leased with you", and Keyvera works out the expiry: six months for an inquiry, two years from closing for a client. Express consent never expires.
- Implied consent shows an "expiring soon" badge on the contact 30 days before it lapses, and lapsed contacts drop out of campaign audiences on their own.
- Campaigns, drips and automations check consent for every contact. A campaign also checks again for each batch as it sends, so an unsubscribe that arrives mid-send is respected. People without consent appear as skipped, so you can see who was left out and why.
- Every campaign email has a footer you cannot switch off: your name, your brokerage, its mailing address, your email and phone, and an unsubscribe link. A campaign will not start until the brokerage address is filled in.
- Unsubscribing takes effect the moment someone confirms, not in 10 days. It stops their drips, adds the address to a do-not-email list and covers every contact in your workspace with that address. Mail apps get a one-click unsubscribe header too.
- The open house sign-in records the visit as an inquiry, and its opt-in box is never pre-ticked. When a visitor ticks it, the exact wording they saw is saved with their consent.
- Closing out a deal moves your clients to two years of implied consent from completion, without overwriting express consent or an unsubscribe.
- Importing a spreadsheet? Consent and opt-out columns are recognised, including kvCORE's. If the file has none, you choose one answer for the whole import, and "Not sure yet" is the default rather than a guess.
- Group texts leave out anyone without consent, add "Reply STOP to opt out", and a STOP reply unsubscribes the contact.
- Every consent change is written to the contact's timeline with who made it, so the history is there if you ever need to show it.
One thing it does not do is decide for you whether a one-to-one email is commercial. Personal emails from your own Gmail or Outlook are not consent-checked, because most are about a deal in progress. If the person has unsubscribed, Keyvera asks you to confirm the email is about their own transaction before it sends.
A five-minute CASL check for your database
- Count how many contacts have no recorded consent at all. That is your risk number.
- Find past clients whose closing was more than two years ago. Ask for express consent in person or by phone (an email asking for consent counts as a commercial message itself), and record their answer.
- Check your open house sign-in form: unticked opt-in box, clear wording, and a copy of that wording kept.
- Send yourself your own newsletter and read the footer: name, brokerage, mailing address, contact details, unsubscribe.
- Unsubscribe from your own list and see whether every tool you use stops emailing you.
Want to see how it works in practice? The live demo on our home page runs with sample data, and our guide to the best real estate CRMs in Canada compares how other tools handle CASL.