Members supporting clients involved in selling a business may face instances where the address of the property must remain confidential.

It’s one of many unique elements of trading in commercial, to keep the operating address out of public view to allow businesses to carry on without the risk of disrupting the business or causing staff to leave.

CREB^® recognizes the importance of commercial members being able to list the property with businesses on the MLS^® System and supports the Pillar 9™ function to hide the address of their business address, should their sellers not want to make that information public.

Listings have been brought to CREB^®’s attention because fake addresses are being used on commercial listings. While this might have been the workaround allowed many years ago, we now have technology that helps our listing agents to avoid using fake addresses and embrace the ability to hide the addresses.

The steps below allow listing agents to prevent a business’s address, legal description and map location from appearing on the MLS® System and other IDX, VOW sites.

• Edit the listing in Pillar 9™ OnePlatform and select the Business tab.
• On the Business tab, set Display Business Address to No.

When our members list a commercial property and elect to hide the address, a map pin will still be required. However, the mapping information also remains hidden.

Even though the addressing information will be hidden, inputting the real addressing information on the MLS^® System is still important. There needs to be some identifying information that connects the MLS^® listing with the service agreement that supports it. Furthermore, publishing fake information on the MLS^® System isn’t the professional standard we want to measure ourselves against. Our members can elevate the image of a REALTOR^® by keeping false information out of public domains like realtor.ca.

We encourage all listing agents with properties displaying fake addresses to take some time, update their listings to input the correct address, and use the Pillar 9™ feature to keep the address hidden.

We appreciate the listing agents already utilizing the feature that allows address information to be hidden and supports our practice standards. Thank you!