The Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) has launched a new elective continuing education course to help Ontario real estate professionals better understand the Professional Liability Insurance Program, their obligations, and the role the program plays in consumer protection.
Through consultation with the sector, RECO identified insurance as an area where registrants would benefit from additional targeted education. The course provides an overview of the three types of coverage under the program, Errors and Omissions, Commission Protection and Consumer Deposit, and covers registrants' insurance obligations under the Trust in Real Estate Services Act, 2002 (TRESA), including scenarios that demonstrate how the program applies in practice.
By law, every registered real estate professional in Ontario must carry professional liability insurance. The requirement is intended as a consumer protection measure, ensuring financial safeguards are in place when a consumer experiences a loss resulting from a registrant's error, negligence, or other covered circumstances. The program also provides coverage to registrants for certain insured losses and claims.
RECO's model is unique among Canadian real estate regulators. British Columbia mandates its own equivalent through the Real Estate Errors and Omissions Insurance Corporation (REEOIC), a special-act corporation that provides E&O coverage to roughly 30,000 licensees in that province, but Ontario remains the only province offering commission protection insurance and social engineering fraud coverage alongside its E&O and consumer deposit coverage.
The annual insurance fee for Ontario registrants has held at $500 per registrant since 2022, a cost RECO describes as competitively priced relative to other provinces despite the program's broader scope.
The launch comes roughly a year after RECO's Professional Liability Insurance Program was tested by the collapse of iPro Realty, in which co-founders were alleged to have diverted trust account funds meant to hold client deposits and agent commissions. RECO froze iPro's trust accounts, allowed in-progress transactions to close, and by December 2025 confirmed no consumer deposit had gone uncompensated, with roughly $5 million in consumer deposit claims paid out by that point. In January 2026, RECO approved 100% payouts of all eligible commission protection claims for affected agents, drawing on the program's insurance stability fund to cover the shortfall.
In response to the iPro matter, RECO has also introduced a mandatory annual financial filing requirement for all Ontario brokerages, effective October 1, 2026, requiring brokerages to report on trust assets, liabilities, and unclaimed trust monies, with further monthly trust reconciliation reporting planned for 2027. Against that backdrop, the new insurance education course adds a registrant-facing layer to that broader effort, and it is in this same spirit of strengthening the system from the ground up that RECO is also revisiting how continuing education itself is delivered.
Beyond its immediate focus on insurance, the launch represents an early milestone in RECO's broader education modernization effort. As continuing education continues to evolve, RECO is exploring opportunities to strengthen learning outcomes, and the course includes a mandatory assessment that learners must successfully complete to earn credit, a new feature intended to generate insights that will help inform RECO's wider work on modernizing regulatory education.
Jean Lépine, RECO's Administrator and Acting CEO, said professional liability insurance is much more than a registration requirement. "It plays an important role in maintaining trust and confidence in Ontario's real estate services sector," he said. "This course provides practical education that helps registrants better understand their responsibilities, how the program works, and the important role it plays in consumer protection."
RECO is a not-for-profit corporation established in 1997 to regulate real estate agents and brokerages to protect consumers in Ontario's real estate services sector, and administers TRESA.
For an industry still working through the fallout of the iPro matter, the new course signals that RECO sees registrant understanding of the insurance program, not just brokerage-level financial oversight, as part of rebuilding confidence in how Ontario protects real estate consumers.
