Before You Hand Off Your Ontario Rental: Which Jobs a Helper Can Do Without RECO Registration, and Who May Represent You at the LTB

Take the landlord’s year one job at a time, from the listing to the hearing room, and see which rulebook decides who is allowed to do each one for you.

I’m Arthur Zhao, a real estate broker in Toronto.

The version of this question I see most often starts with a list. An owner who is about to be away for a year, or who simply doesn’t want to do it anymore, sits down and writes out what the rental actually needs: list the unit, show it, pick someone, sign the lease, collect rent, get the furnace fixed, chase a late payment, and, if it ever comes to that, deal with the Landlord and Tenant Board.

Then they hand the whole list to one person: a property manager, a friend who lives nearby, a brother-in-law who is good with paperwork.

The problem is that Ontario doesn’t treat that list as one job. The early items are governed by the Trust in Real Estate Services Act, 2002 (TRESA), the middle items are mostly your own obligations under the Residential Tenancies Act, and the last items are governed by the Law Society Act. The person who can lawfully do item one is not automatically the person who can lawfully do item eight.

So rather than talk about “managers” in general, I’ll walk the list in order and, for each job, say who can do it for you and which provision says so.

Job 1: Advertising the unit and showing it

TRESA defines a trade broadly. Under s.1(1) it includes a transaction in real estate by “lease, rental or otherwise”, and also “any act, advertisement, conduct or negotiation” in furtherance of it. Posting the listing and walking applicants through the unit are squarely the kind of activity that definition reaches.

The general rule in s.4(1) is that you need to be registered to trade. But s.5(1) then lists people who don’t, and four of them matter to a landlord:

• You. s.5(1)(h) covers a person acting on their own account in respect of their own interest in real estate.
• A registered brokerage, obviously.
• Your own full-time salaried employee acting for you, under s.5(1)(f). s.5(2) adds that an independent contractor is not an employee for this purpose, so a contractor you pay by the job is not covered by (f).
• Anyone who trades “solely for the purpose of arranging leases to which the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 applies”, under s.5(1)(j). That clause came into force on December 1, 2023.

That last one is the reason a friend can post your apartment and show it without a RECO registration. Two qualifiers belong next to it. First, the word is solely: the exemption is tied to arranging residential leases, not to real estate work generally. Second, s.5(1) opens with “Subject to such conditions as may be prescribed”. The main TRESA regulation, O. Reg. 567/05, prescribes only one exemption in its exemptions part (s.37, the Public Guardian and Trustee, under clause (k)), and I didn’t see conditions attached to clause (j) there. I have not gone through every TRESA regulation, so I won’t tell you it is unconditional.

Job 2: Choosing the tenant and signing the standard lease

Screening and negotiating with an applicant is part of arranging the lease, so the same s.5(1)(j) reasoning carries through, as long as the unit is one the RTA actually applies to (more on that below).

The signature is a different matter. Ontario’s standard lease is required for most residential tenancy agreements signed on or after April 30, 2018. The province’s own guide to it says: “All landlords and tenants listed in section one (parties to the agreement) must sign this section.” The guide does not describe an agent signing in the landlord’s place, and I won’t fill that gap with a guess.

What the guide does offer is a practical route for an owner who is far away: the landlord and tenant “can sign the lease electronically if they both agree”. It also says the landlord must give the tenant a copy within 21 days after the tenant signs. If your helper is handling the paperwork, that 21-day copy is your obligation even when they’re the one with the tenant’s email address.

Job 3: Collecting rent and arranging repairs

This is the part most people picture when they say “property management”, and it is also the part the statutes say least about directly. TRESA’s exemption list doesn’t mention rent collection or maintenance coordination by name. Whether a particular manager’s work amounts to a “trade” depends on what that manager actually does, and the text doesn’t give a one-line answer for routine management. I’m not going to give you one either.

What the RTA is clear about is whose duty the building is. s.20(1) says “A landlord is responsible for providing and maintaining a residential complex, including the rental units in it, in a good state of repair and fit for habitation”. You can delegate the phone calls to the plumber. The statute still names the landlord.

Job 4: Serving notices such as the N4

Notices are where the rulebook starts to change. Look at the signature block of the LTB’s current N4 (version 2026/09): it lets the form be signed by the Landlord or a Representative, and the “Representative Information” section asks for the representative’s LSO Number, meaning a Law Society of Ontario licence number.

That field tells you how the Board expects representation to look. Whether a manager filling in your N4 is, by itself, providing a legal service is not something the Law Society Act answers cleanly. Its definition in s.1(5) is broad (“conduct that involves the application of legal principles and legal judgment”), but I would not call an individual notice either way. The safer working assumption is that the closer a document gets to an LTB file, the more you should treat it like the next two jobs.

Job 5: Filing an application with the LTB

Once there is a proceeding, the Law Society Act is specific. s.1(6) counts selecting, drafting or completing “a document for use in a proceeding before an adjudicative body” as providing legal services. s.1(7) goes further and treats “determining what documents to serve or file in relation to the proceeding”, and when, where or how to serve or file them, as representing a person in the proceeding.

So the person who decides what goes into your application and gets it filed is, in the statute’s terms, already representing you. The question of who may do that is the same question as who may stand up at the hearing, which is the next job.

Job 6: Mediation and the hearing

According to the LTB Rules of Procedure (2026), Rule 7.13: “Parties may be self-represented, represented by a person licensed by the Law Society of Ontario, or by an unlicensed person where permitted by the Law Society Act and its regulations and by-laws.”

The “permitted” unlicensed people are listed in Law Society By-Law 4 s.30. Three of its items are the ones landlords ask about:

• Item 1, in-house: an individual employed by a single employer that is not a licensee, who provides the legal services only for that employer and for no one else.
• Item 4, friend or neighbour: someone whose occupation isn’t legal services, acting only for a friend or neighbour, in not more than three matters per year, with no compensation expected or received.
• Item 5, family: someone whose occupation isn’t legal services, acting only for a related person within the meaning of the Income Tax Act, with no compensation expected or received.

Two consequences follow from the wording. A property management company’s employee appearing for the company’s landlord client does not, on the text, meet item 1: that item is limited to acting for the employer itself. And a manager can’t rely on By-Law 4 s.28, paragraph 2, which deems people acting in the normal course of a non-legal occupation not to be practising law. It expressly carves out “representing a person in a proceeding before an adjudicative body”.

The mediation rules then add an authority layer. Under Rule 9.2, whoever attends a case management hearing for you must be able to take part in all of it, “including the ability to agree to a settlement or to obtain instructions about settlement”. Under Rule 13.3, you can skip mediation itself only if your representative meets one of its three conditions, the first being that they have filed a written agreement signed by you authorizing them to mediate and settle.

The two unpaid routes under By-Law 4 s.30, side by side

Before you hand over the keys

Sorted by the person each item concerns: