What the set shows
The recovered decisions run from 2003 to 2018 and carry $994,750 in penalties across the 137 where an amount could be read from the document. The middle of that distribution sits at $6,000; the range runs from $1,000 to $25,000. Nothing in this paragraph is an estimate — every figure is computed from the documents themselves each time this page is built.
The more consequential fact is not in the numbers. It is that a person checking an older matter today finds nothing, because the regulator's copies are no longer served. A discipline finding is a public act, made public deliberately, and for these 144 matters the public part now depends on a charity in San Francisco having taken a copy.
Penalties
Grouped by the amount ordered, across the 137 decisions where the document states a figure.
- 47Under $5,00034% of penalties read
- 49$5,000 to $9,99936% of penalties read
- 35$10,000 to $19,99926% of penalties read
- 6$20,000 and above4% of penalties read
Read these as what they are: the penalties in the decisions that happen to have been archived, not a survey of Ontario real-estate discipline. A set assembled by what a web crawler captured is not a random sample, and it should never be described as one.
Why this page names nobody
This site does publish named records. It does so one at a time, after a person has read the decision, written it up in plain language, and written to the registrant to tell them the record exists and offer a reply we publish unedited.
Publishing 144 names off an automated read would be a different act. The protection this site relies on — official documents only, a notice to the subject, an unconditional right of reply — works at the pace a person can actually read and write. It does not work as a bulk operation, and a protection that exists only on paper is not one.
These are also decisions the regulator itself chose to stop publishing, some of them more than twenty years old. That choice deserves weight even where we do not adopt it. Keeping the documents so the record remains checkable is a different thing from putting 144 people's names back onto the open web in an afternoon.
Method and limits
- Where they came from. RECO's decisions were published at a public directory on its own website. The directory no longer resolves. 155 documents were recovered from the Internet Archive, of which 144 are discipline decisions, 8 are appeals and 3 are conviction records. Board election packages, advertising guidelines and policy documents recovered from the same directory are excluded: they are not decisions.
- The files are unaltered. What is held are the bytes the archive holds. Each document's original address and capture date are recorded, so anyone can retrieve the same file independently rather than taking our word for it.
- The dates are cross-checked. RECO named these files by decision date. That date is compared against the date printed inside the document; agreement is recorded and disagreement flags the record for a person. An unlabelled date in a decision can be a hearing date, a service date or a payment deadline, and guessing between them is how a records site publishes something false about a named individual.
- 20 of the 144 could not be read reliably by the automated pass and are counted here but excluded from the figures that depend on the unreadable field. They are reported rather than dropped so these totals can be reconciled against the recovery manifest.
- This is not every RECO decision. It is what was archived. Decisions never captured by a crawler are simply absent, and there is no way to know how many those are.
Requesting a document
If you are researching a matter, writing about one, or are a person named in a decision who wants their own copy, the contact form reaches the editor and we will send the document. Journalists, regulators and academic researchers can have the whole set.
If you are named in one of these decisions and want to say something about it, we publish replies unedited and attach them to the record. If any document has been misattributed, show us and we correct it within two days with a dated note. We take no payment from anyone to remove, alter or soften a record, in any circumstances.