Every profession has a constitution; a silent contract about who decides what. In real estate, ours was never debated in parliament or signed into law. It evolved quietly, clause by clause, until code replaced ink. 

You can see it in the systems we log into, the rules they embed and the rituals that follow. It governs without ever being named; a living document we inherit but no longer author. 

Over the past several years, new technologies, leadership shifts and branding debates have revealed just how far that constitution has drifted from its original intent.  

What follows isn’t a history – it’s an excavation and, I hope, the beginning of a rewrite. 

I. The illusion of control 

Every morning, Realtors log into the systems that decide what they can say, how they can say it and how visible their work will be. 

We call it technology, but it’s governance by another name; a rulebook written in code instead of bylaws. 

This is about power, and how quietly it moved out of reach. 

Each field, validation rule, and search filter enforces policy in ways few members ever see. 

We think we’re entering data; we’re actually performing compliance. 

The platforms we use don’t just reflect the profession; they define it, and somewhere between the first upload and the latest system migration, control slipped. 

Organized real estate still speaks the language of democracy, but its constitution has already been rewritten inside the software. 

II. From representation to ritual 

Boards were never meant to be monuments. They were tools built by practitioners to solve shared problems. But over time, the procedure became the product. 

Today, most boards operate less like professional communities and more like small parliaments. Quorums small enough to fit in a classroom can amend bylaws for tens of thousands of members. Proxy stacking concentrates control. Consultations are staged after decisions are made. 

This isn’t malice; it’s muscle memory. Every cycle inherits the same playbook: stability first, scrutiny second. “Continuity” becomes “competence.” “Dissent” becomes “disloyalty.” 

And soon, the process itself becomes proof of purpose. 

When power becomes insulated, accountability fades. What follows is a ritual in the absence of reform. 

The ritual looks busy: new logos, new task forces, new vendor contracts. 

But motion isn’t evolution.

Outside, the species looks unchanged.  

III. From bylaw to backend 

Governance didn’t die; it migrated into software. 

Every time a listing rejects an input because a field doesn’t exist, that’s regulation. 

Every time Realtor.ca decides which properties rise to the top of a search, that’s policy. 

Every automatic warning, every hard stop, every required field, every “invalid value” message is a digital descendant of a forgotten committee motion. 

But unlike those committees, code doesn’t interpret intent. It enforces outcomes. 

When a provincial prop-tech collective expanded its MLS infrastructure through subscription agreements in 2024 (a shift that brought most Ontario boards into a unified subscription framework), decisions about listing standards and data structure effectively moved from volunteer committees to contract clauses. 

And when its leadership quietly changed earlier this year through an internal governance realignment, oversight of Ontario’s core MLS infrastructure shifted again. 

No member referendum. No public notice. Just a new slate, appointed internally.   

That’s not scandal. It’s system design. 

Governance didn’t fail; it changed medium.   

Realtors still carry the liability for every misstep the system allows or forbids. 

If an input error misrepresents a property, the board doesn’t face the client. The agent does. The brokerage shoulders the risk. Yet neither has meaningful authority over the infrastructure that defines compliance. 

That’s the quiet inversion of power: the governed held accountable for rules they no longer write. 

IV. Paying to be governed

Membership used to buy representation. Now it buys access. 

Realtors pay dues to boards. Boards pay vendors to manage the systems. Vendors, in turn, enforce compliance frameworks that determine how Realtors work. 

It’s a closed loop of authority without ownership. 

At the national level, the same pattern repeats. CREA licenses the trademarks and operates Realtor.ca; the public face of the profession. 

Yet the listings feeding it come from local systems governed by independent contracts, each with its own structure and rules. 

The result is a federation of dependencies: members finance everything but control nothing. 

Sold as modernization, this consolidation resembles enclosure more than efficiency. 

When Realtor.ca was restructured into a for-profit subsidiary, the move was practical but symbolic. 

It marked the moment the profession’s most visible asset became a product. 

Belonging turned into a business model and representation became a side effect. 

We stopped belonging to the system when the system learned to bill us for belonging. 

V. The relevance test: What is a board for? 

If access to data is all we value, then the question isn’t whether boards are broken; it’s whether they’re still necessary at all. 

Only one board in Ontario owns the technology. The rest are tenants, licensing the systems they claim to govern. 

They administer dues, hold meetings, and issue statements, but their primary role is custodial: collecting money on behalf of platforms they don’t control. 

As a couple of writers have recently debated, the Realtor identity itself is under review. 

Some call the name baggage, tied to NAR’s scandals and American dysfunction. 

Others defend it as a badge of honour, a symbol of professionalism and trust hard-won over decades. 

I would argue that both sides miss the point. The word isn’t the issue. The structure beneath it is. 

If governance and accountability collapse, even the most sacred title loses meaning. 

The brand can survive scandal; it cannot survive structural irrelevance. 

The Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA)-led call for Ombudsman oversight of the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) exposed that hollowness. 

It sounded bold, but misunderstood the law it invoked. 

The Ombudsman Act excludes self-regulating professions. 

If boards truly want to end self-regulation, they should say so. 

If they don’t, then the campaign misled the very members who fund it. 

Realtors didn’t connect with that letter because it wasn’t written for them. 

It was written to look responsive. It was a performance of relevance, not an act of it. 

VI. The ROI of representation 

If advocacy is the last defense of organized real estate’s layered structure, then it’s fair to ask: what’s the return? 

Every Realtor measures productivity and cost-per-lead.  

But the organizations that preach professionalism can’t quantify their own value. 

OREA’s own disclosures show millions spent annually on advocacy and communications, yet no member-facing metrics explain outcomes or savings. 

In business, unmeasured value isn’t value. It’s overhead. 

The loss of the OREA College exposed that vacuum. 

Education once gave OREA purpose: a tangible service tied to competence. 

When that mandate moved to the regulator, what remained was advocacy without measurement. 

And advocacy without measurement is faith, not strategy. 

Would we, knowing what we know now, voluntarily build a system that compels every Realtor to join an association, fund mandatory insurance and underwrite lobbying whose outcomes we can’t audit? 

If this system didn’t already exist, could you convince anyone to invent it? 

If we built a system today, we would not build this system. 

VII. The case for a controlled burn 

That doesn’t mean demolition. It means renewal. 

The first boards were grassroots cooperatives: small, voluntary networks built on trust and reciprocity. 

They created order before law. Their purpose was cooperation, not control. 

Over time, that cooperative impulse hardened into hierarchy. 

What began as a network of peers became a lattice of dues, committees and closed sessions. 

We now call that professionalism, but is it? 

The future doesn’t need to abolish boards; it needs to release them. 

As one industry commentator recently wrote, even Microsoft now behaves like a startup, forced by AI to relearn how to innovate. 

Real estate could do the same, not by chasing disruption but by rediscovering ownership. 

Innovation without consent isn’t transformation. 

Sunsetting legacy structures isn’t destruction; it’s hygiene. 

A controlled burn clears what it is that protects structure over service. 

The replacement need not be ideological. 

Imagine a platform cooperative: a Realtor-owned, technology-driven utility where brokerages and agents hold real stakes. 

Policy would be ratified by digital referendum. 

Vendor contracts would expire automatically unless renewed by member vote. 

Data standards and governance would be transparent by design. 

Boards that survived such a transformation wouldn’t have to defend their relevance. 

They have already proven it. 

VIII. The constitutional moment 

Every profession has a constitution: an unwritten agreement about who decides what. 

Ours has been rewritten without consent. 

Control migrated from members to boards, from boards to associations, and from associations to vendors. 

Elections continue, meetings occur, minutes are approved, but democracy isn’t procedure. 

It’s consent. 

When governance moves into code, consent becomes a checkbox. 

When advocacy drifts into performance, representation becomes branding. 

When boards mistake data for trust, the profession loses both.   

This isn’t a technical crisis, it’s constitutional.  

The choice ahead is stark but simple:   

1. Continue the drift and let governance consolidate in the hands of those who own the tools. Or;  
2. Reclaim authorship and rebuild from the ground up, guided by the same cooperative instinct that once defined the Realtor. 

If we built organized real estate today, we wouldn’t replicate the layers. 

We’d design a single, accountable, member-governed institution: transparent, data-competent and morally literate. 

IX. The path back to purpose 

Boards were never meant to be monuments. They were instruments built to serve those who work in the field, not to rule over them. 

We still need cooperation. We still need shared data, clear standards and public trust. 

But those don’t require the architecture we’ve inherited. 

They require will, imagination and consent.   

If organized real estate still believes it exists to put members first, it must prove it. Not with statements, but with structure. 

If access is all that defines membership, the public will soon ask what defines the Realtor. 

Our constitution isn’t in Ottawa or Toronto. It lives in the collective consent of those who practice. 

The system won’t rewrite itself. 

Brandon Reay

Brandon Reay brings a multifaceted background in real estate practice, policy, and governance. Before stepping into brokerage leadership, Brandon spent several years in organized real estate, contributing to strategic initiatives and advocacy efforts with CREA and OREA, and various Chambers of Commerce. His work has included shaping housing policy, supporting regulatory reform, and improving REALTOR® engagement across the country.

Brandon’s approach blends hands-on brokerage experience with a systems-level understanding of how policy, market forces, and professional standards intersect. He is known for helping professionals navigate evolving market conditions and advocating for higher standards within the industry. In addition to his leadership role at RE/MAX Hallmark Realty Group, he remains an active REALTOR® focused on agent development, business strategy, and client service.

Brandon regularly contributes commentary on market trends to media outlets and industry publications and has served as a spokesperson on housing issues in Ottawa. He is also a frequent speaker at real estate events, offering data-driven insights on brokerage strategy, professionalism, and the future of the industry.

He holds a Master of Business Administration from the Sprott School of Business. Brandon lives in Ottawa, where he remains closely involved in local policy discussions on housing affordability and real estate governance.