Texting Leads in Canada: Consent, Quiet Hours and STOP

Texting is the fastest way to reach a lead. It is also the channel with the most rules attached, and the one where getting it wrong is expensive rather than embarrassing.

This is a plain-language summary, not legal advice. If you are running texting at volume, have your brokerage's counsel look at your process.

Consent comes first

Canada's anti-spam legislation is about commercial electronic messages, and text messages count. You need consent before you send one.

The good news for most agents is that a buyer who messages you about a listing and asks a question has given you implied consent to reply. That is the ordinary case, and it is fine.

Where it gets thinner is a list you bought, a contact you met once at an open house two years ago, or a lead you are texting for the first time months after they went quiet. Implied consent expires. Assume it has.

Record it, do not remember it

The requirement is not just that consent existed. It is that you can show it existed — when, and on what basis.

That means the record lives in your system rather than in your memory. If someone asks in eighteen months why you texted them, "they enquired about a listing on the 4th of March" is an answer. "I'm sure they did" is not.

STOP has to work, permanently

Every commercial text needs a working way to opt out, and it has to be honoured promptly and permanently.

Two things to know:

• Deleting your own opt-out record does not un-block anyone. Carriers keep their own list, and once a handset has texted STOP to a number, only that handset texting START clears it.
• "Permanently" means permanently. A contact who opted out two years ago has still opted out.

Hours matter too

There is no single national quiet-hours rule for texts the way there is for calls, but the sensible standard is the calling one: nothing before 9am or after 9:30pm in the recipient's local time, and tighter at weekends.

A text at 11pm is not illegal in the way an 11pm cold call is. It is still the message that gets you reported, and reported is the outcome the rules exist to produce.

What to build in

• Consent recorded per contact, with the date and the reason
• STOP honoured automatically, and treated as permanent
• A quiet-hours window that holds even when a message is queued outside it
• Your name and brokerage in the message, so nobody has to guess who is texting

Automation makes all four easier, not harder — a system does not forget the quiet hours at 10:47pm the way a person does.