Choosing a brokerage CRM in Canada
A brokerage buyer guide covering FINTRAC record keeping, PIPEDA, seat management and offboarding — plus a straight account of what Realtor Desk does not do.
A brokerage has obligations an individual agent does not, and most of them land on record keeping. Realtor Desk is a single-agent CRM and is not a brokerage system today. This page is what we would check if we were buying one.
What we do not do, first
Realtor Desk has no brokerage model. No organization layer, no seats, no roles beyond a single account, no deal or commission oversight, no agent onboarding or offboarding, and no FINTRAC workflow. The pricing page marks FINTRAC workflows and SAML SSO as roadmap, and that is accurate.
If you are buying for a brokerage, we are not the product. The rest of this is the checklist, and it is genuinely useful whoever you buy from.
Record keeping is the brokerage-shaped problem
FINTRAC obligations for real estate include client identification and record retention, and the practical question for software is whether records can be produced years later by someone who was not there when they were created. Ask any vendor: what exactly is retained, for how long, who can export it, and what happens to it when the agent who created it leaves.
Nothing about buying software discharges those obligations. A vendor that tells you their product makes you FINTRAC compliant is telling you something that is not true about any product.
Privacy, at brokerage scale
Under PIPEDA the brokerage is usually the organization accountable for personal information its agents collect. That makes two questions load-bearing: where the data is hosted, and whether you can extract or delete a specific client’s record on request without a support ticket. Ask to see the export, not a description of it.
Offboarding is the question to ask twice
Agents move. The moment one does, you need their client records to remain with the brokerage, the handover to be doable in an afternoon rather than a project, and the consent history to travel with the contact rather than be lost with the account. Most platforms answer this badly and very few answer it in their marketing, so put it in writing during evaluation.
Common questions
For individual agents
That is who Realtor Desk is built for. $149 CAD a month, bilingual, hosted in Canada.
Is Realtor Desk a brokerage CRM?
No. There is no organization layer, no seats, no roles and no FINTRAC workflow. It is a single-agent CRM, and the pricing page marks FINTRAC and SSO as roadmap.
Does any CRM make a brokerage FINTRAC compliant?
No. Software can help you keep and retrieve records; the obligations remain the brokerage’s. Treat any claim of compliance-by-purchase as a reason to look harder at the vendor.
What should we ask about record retention?
What is retained, for how long, who can export it, and what happens when the agent who created it leaves. Ask for an actual export during evaluation rather than a description of one.
Who is accountable under PIPEDA?
Generally the organization that collects the personal information — for a brokerage, that usually means the brokerage rather than the individual agent. Confirm where data is hosted and how a deletion request is honoured.
Why publish this if you do not sell to brokerages?
Because the questions are hard to find written down, and a page that says "not us, here is what to ask" is more useful than one that pretends otherwise.