Personal Real Estate Corporation Business Address in Canada (PREC under RECO in Ontario and BCFSA in British Columbia)

Key takeaways

• A Personal Real Estate Corporation (PREC) is a separate statutory entity vehicle that exists only for licensed real estate agents — created in Ontario by the Trust in Real Estate Services Act, 2020 and Ontario Regulation 536/20, and in BC by the Real Estate Services Amendment Act, 2020 and BC Regulation 184/2021. A PREC is not the same vehicle as a Professional Corporation under the Regulated Health Professions Act or the Law Society Act.
• A PREC's registered office must be a physical street address inside the province of incorporation (Ontario or BC) under the Business Corporations Act of that province. P.O. Boxes are not accepted, and a commercial street address in Canada Post Unit/# format satisfies both the registry's registered-office field and the regulator's address-of-record field.
• A PREC has at least three address surfaces: the provincial corporate registry (OBCA or BCBCA), the regulator (RECO in Ontario or BCFSA in BC) through the agent's licensee portal, and the sponsoring brokerage's office under which the PREC and the controlling individual licensee continue to trade. The brokerage's written consent is part of how a PREC operates in practice.
• The CRA Personal Services Business (PSB) risk is the part most PREC how-to summaries skip. A PREC that earns commission essentially as the controlling agent's incorporated employment can lose access to the Small Business Deduction and face Personal Services Business tax treatment — the address choice does not change the PSB analysis, but it sits alongside the structural decisions that do.

Short answer

A Personal Real Estate Corporation is a corporation a licensed real estate agent in Ontario or British Columbia incorporates to receive the commission income their licence generates. It is created under the same provincial Business Corporations Act as any other corporation in that province (OBCA in Ontario, BCBCA in BC), but it is recognised as a PREC only because a 2020 Ontario statute and a 2021 BC regulation specifically authorised real estate licensees to receive remuneration through a corporation they control. The PREC's registered office must be a real physical street address inside the province — never a P.O. Box — and the same address is used on the agent's RECO or BCFSA licensee portal as the PREC's address of record. A Canada Post Unit/# format commercial address satisfies both fields.

The harder questions are entity-level rather than address-level. A PREC is not a Professional Corporation in the Regulated Health Professions Act sense — different statute, different regulator, different shareholder rules, and a different name convention. A PREC trades through its sponsoring brokerage rather than as a stand-alone licensed entity, which is why the brokerage's written consent and the brokerage's office address sit alongside the corporation's registered office on most agent files. And a PREC that looks structurally like the controlling agent's incorporated employment can attract Personal Services Business treatment from the CRA regardless of which address is on the Articles.

What a PREC is — and what it is not

A PREC came into existence on different statutory dates in Ontario and BC, and the two regimes are close cousins but not identical.

• Ontario authorised PRECs through the Trust in Real Estate Services Act, 2020 (the Bill 145 amendments to the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act, 2002), with the operational rules in Ontario Regulation 536/20 — Personal Real Estate Corporations. The regulation defines an "equity shareholder" condition (the controlling registrant under the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act, 2002 is the sole voting shareholder), permits family members to hold non-voting shares, requires the corporation to be incorporated under the OBCA, and conditions registration on the controlling registrant continuing to be registered with RECO through the sponsoring brokerage.
• British Columbia authorised PRECs through amendments brought in by the Real Estate Services Amendment Act, 2020, with the operational rules in BC Regulation 184/2021 — Personal Real Estate Corporation Regulation under the Real Estate Services Act. The BC regime similarly requires the controlling individual licensee to be the sole voting shareholder, permits non-voting shares to be held by specified family members, and requires the licensee to remain licensed with BCFSA through the related brokerage.

What a PREC is not, in either province:

• Not a Professional Corporation under the Ontario Business Corporations Act Part XIII or the BC Business Corporations Act Part 5 Division 5 — those regimes apply to physicians, lawyers, accountants, dentists, engineers, and a closed list of regulated health and professional services. Real estate agent licensing in Canada was not added to the Professional Corporation list when PRECs were created; instead, the legislatures created a parallel statutory vehicle inside the real estate services statutes. The naming conventions, shareholder rules, and regulator pathways differ. For the Professional Corporation side, see Professional Corporation Business Address in Canada.
• Not a stand-alone licensee. A PREC does not get its own real estate brokerage licence. The licence remains with the individual real estate agent — the controlling registrant in Ontario or the related licensee in BC — and the PREC receives the commission income that the licensee earns while trading through the sponsoring brokerage.
• Not a Real Estate Brokerage. A brokerage in either province is a separately licensed entity with its own statutory obligations and trust-account rules. A PREC is owned by an individual agent who trades through a brokerage; the brokerage is a separate corporation owned and licensed under a different part of the same statute.

The most common point of confusion in first-page guidance is treating PREC and PC as synonyms because both are professional-flavoured single-shareholder corporations. They are not. The statutes are different, the regulators are different, and the share-ownership rules are different in detail. A careless summary that calls a PREC a "Professional Corporation" is mixing two regimes that were drafted to do related but distinct things.

Which regulator approves the PREC, and which does what

The two provinces moved real estate regulation through quite different agencies in the same period, and getting the regulator names right matters because the wrong agency name on a filing or a marketing piece is the kind of detail RECO or BCFSA notices.

A note on agency naming. The BC Financial Services Authority took over real estate regulation in British Columbia from the former Real Estate Council of British Columbia and the former Office of the Superintendent of Real Estate. References to "BCREC" or "BC Real Estate Council" in older PREC guides are out of date — BCFSA is the regulator that registers PRECs and that maintains the licensee portal where the PREC notification is filed. In Ontario, RECO is the registrar and is distinct from the Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA) — OREA is an industry association, not the regulator.

Where a PREC needs an address — and where each address goes

A PREC sits on at least three address surfaces from day one, and on a fourth and fifth surface depending on how the agent operates.

The corporate registry side of the rule is identical to any other Canadian small corporation:

• Ontario PREC under OBCA: The Articles must specify a registered office located in Ontario. The street address — not just the municipality — is required, and a P.O. Box is not accepted.
• BC PREC under BCBCA: The Articles must specify a registered office in BC that is accessible during business hours for record delivery and inspection. A P.O. Box is not accepted.

A commercial street address in Canada Post Unit/# format from a commercial mailbox provider satisfies the registered-office requirement on the OBCA or BCBCA side. Toronto Auteur addresses work for an Ontario PREC; Vancouver Auteur addresses work for a BC PREC. The single hard constraint is jurisdictional alignment — an Ontario PREC cannot use a Vancouver address as its registered office, and a BC PREC cannot use a Toronto address, because OBCA and BCBCA each require the registered office to be inside their own province. That same address is what the agent enters on the RECO or BCFSA licensee portal when notifying the regulator that the PREC has been formed.

The brokerage-records surface is the one most first-page summaries skip. A PREC trades through the sponsoring brokerage rather than independently, and the brokerage's compliance file for the agent typically carries the PREC's name, address, and corporate documents alongside the agent's own licensee record. The address on the brokerage file should match the registered office on the Articles and the address of record on the licensee portal — three surfaces, one address, propagated cleanly.

The brokerage consent and trade-through structure

A PREC does not advertise listings in its own name independently of a brokerage. In both provinces, the licensee continues to trade through a sponsoring or related brokerage, and the brokerage agrees in writing to pay the agent's earned commission to the PREC instead of paying it personally to the agent. The agreement is sometimes called a remuneration agreement, a PREC consent letter, or a similar brokerage-specific document depending on the brokerage's internal forms.

The mechanics that follow from that structure:

• The brokerage's office remains the licensed real estate brokerage premises and is the address shown on signs, listings, and public-facing materials for the brokerage itself. The brokerage's address is not the PREC's address — they are separate, even when the agent works out of the brokerage's office every day.
• The PREC's registered office is the corporation's own address under OBCA or BCBCA, used on the Articles, on the CRA Business Number, and on the licensee portal entry for the PREC. A commercial street address in Canada Post Unit/# format works on this surface regardless of whether the agent works from the brokerage's office, from a home office, or from a shared workspace.
• The agent's personal licence address is a separate field on the licensee portal that exists whether or not the agent has a PREC, and it continues to attach to the agent personally rather than to the PREC.

A common configuration in practice: the brokerage shows its own brokerage office address on listings; the PREC carries a virtual commercial address as its registered office and CRA address; the agent's personal licensee address is the same virtual commercial address so that all incoming regulator and CRA mail flows through a single monitored mailbox. The brokerage consent is documented in the brokerage's file for that agent and is updated if either the brokerage or the PREC changes.

CRA Personal Services Business risk — the part most PREC guides skip

A PREC is treated as a corporation for tax purposes — it files a T2 corporation income tax return and is generally eligible for the Small Business Deduction on active business income at the lower combined federal-and-provincial corporate rate. That is the part that motivates many agents to incorporate a PREC in the first place: a corporation that earns the commission can retain after-tax dollars at the SBD rate for reinvestment or for deferred personal distribution, instead of all of the commission flowing onto the agent's personal T1 in the year earned.

What the standard "incorporate a PREC and save tax" framing routinely understates is the Personal Services Business rule in the Income Tax Act. A corporation is a Personal Services Business if, broadly, the individual providing the services on its behalf would reasonably be regarded as an employee of the person receiving the services but for the existence of the corporation, and the corporation does not have more than five full-time employees. A PSB is denied the Small Business Deduction and the general rate reduction, and faces an additional federal tax that, combined with provincial rates, brings the effective federal-and-provincial tax on PSB income well above the headline corporate rate that PREC marketing materials cite.

The PSB analysis turns on the substance of how the agent operates inside the brokerage relationship — degree of control over how the work is done, ownership of tools, ability to subcontract, financial risk of the agent's own activity, integration with the brokerage's operations — and on the facts the CRA can reconstruct from contracts, payroll records, and the brokerage's reporting. A PREC that looks structurally like a single-person incorporated employment is the textbook PSB risk profile, and the corporate veil of the PREC alone does not change that analysis.

Separately, a PREC whose assets are mostly passive investments — for example, a PREC that accumulates retained earnings into a portfolio of marketable securities — can over time look like a Specified Investment Business rather than an active business for SBD purposes on the investment portion of its income. The SBD interaction with Specified Investment Business income is governed by a separate set of Income Tax Act rules and is part of what an accountant typically reviews when a PREC's retained-earnings investment portfolio grows.

The address on the Articles does not change either analysis. The PSB and Specified Investment Business questions are structural and factual, and the right time to look at them is before the PREC is incorporated, not after the first T2 has been filed. For the corporation tax side of address mechanics in general, see Holding Company Business Address in Canada; for the PSB-adjacent question of incorporated independent-contractor work, see Independent Contractor and Consultant Business Address in Canada.

Order of operations — incorporating a PREC and getting the address right the first time

A PREC's incorporation and registration steps run in a specific order, and agents who file pieces out of sequence usually find themselves redoing one or more of them at the regulator side.

1. Determine the location of the registered office. The address chosen on day one is what will appear on the Articles, on the licensee portal, on the brokerage consent, on the CRA Business Number, and on advertising. A real Canadian street address inside the province — Ontario for an OBCA PREC, BC for a BCBCA PREC — in Canada Post Unit/# format is the format that satisfies every surface.
2. Confirm the legal name format with the regulator's naming conventions. PREC names typically follow a registrant-name pattern with the corporate designator the OBCA or BCBCA require. The brokerage and the regulator generally expect the agent's name to be recognisable in the PREC's legal name.
3. File the Articles of Incorporation with the Ontario Business Registry (for an OBCA PREC) or BC Registries (for a BCBCA PREC). The registered office on the Articles is the address chosen at step 1.
4. Obtain the sponsoring brokerage's written consent to pay commission through the PREC. Each brokerage has its own internal form; the consent typically references the PREC's legal name, the registered office, and the controlling registrant or related licensee.
5. Notify the regulator — RECO in Ontario through the registrant portal, BCFSA in BC through the licensee portal — that the PREC has been formed, attaching the Articles, the brokerage consent, and the PREC's address of record.
6. Register the PREC with the CRA for a Business Number, GST/HST account, and payroll account if the PREC will pay the agent a T4 salary. The mailing address on the BN file is the PREC's registered office.
7. Open the PREC's business bank account. The bank's KYC workflow will ask for the Articles, the directors register, beneficial-ownership information for shareholders with a 25% or greater interest, and a void cheque or pre-authorised debit form for the brokerage to deposit commission into. For the bank-account side of the workflow, see Opening a Business Bank Account in Canada with a Virtual Address.

A virtual address from Auteur fits cleanly at step 1, propagates through every subsequent step, and gives the brokerage, the regulator, the CRA, and the bank the same Canada Post Unit/# format address for the PREC from day one. If the agent later changes brokerages, the PREC's registered office and the address of record on the licensee portal stay the same; only the brokerage consent is redrawn with the new brokerage.

Where Auteur fits in the Canadian PREC address landscape

Auteur is Canadian-owned, with Toronto and Vancouver commercial addresses sized for the two provinces where PRECs exist as a statutory vehicle. The address format follows Canada Post Unit/# convention, which is what the OBCA registered-office field, the BCBCA registered-office field, the RECO registrant portal, the BCFSA licensee portal, the CRA Business Number file, and most brokerage consent forms expect on the address line.

Three things to confirm before a PREC uses a virtual address on every surface:

• Province alignment. Ontario PREC → Toronto address. BC PREC → Vancouver address. OBCA and BCBCA both require the registered office to be inside their own province.
• Brokerage consent. The sponsoring brokerage is the entity that pays commission to the PREC; the brokerage's internal compliance team typically reviews the PREC's address of record alongside the Articles when granting consent.
• PSB and SIB analysis. The address choice does not affect the Personal Services Business or Specified Investment Business analysis under the Income Tax Act. Those questions belong with an accountant before the PREC is incorporated, not after.

Reserve a Toronto or Vancouver address and the same address goes on the Articles of Incorporation, the RECO registrant portal or the BCFSA licensee portal, the brokerage consent, the CRA Business Number registration, and the PREC's business bank account from the day the PREC is formed.

FAQ

What is a personal real estate corporation?

A Personal Real Estate Corporation (PREC) is a corporation a licensed real estate agent in Ontario or British Columbia incorporates to receive the commission income their licence generates. It was created in Ontario by the Trust in Real Estate Services Act, 2020 with operational rules in Ontario Regulation 536/20, and in BC by the Real Estate Services Amendment Act, 2020 with operational rules in BC Regulation 184/2021. The PREC is incorporated under the same provincial Business Corporations Act (OBCA or BCBCA) as any other corporation, with the controlling registrant in Ontario or the related licensee in BC as the sole voting shareholder. The PREC does not get its own real estate brokerage licence; the licence remains with the individual agent, and the agent continues to trade through a sponsoring or related brokerage that agrees in writing to pay commission to the PREC instead of personally to the agent.

What does PREC mean after a name?

"PREC" after an agent's name signals that the agent has incorporated a Personal Real Estate Corporation under the provincial real estate services statute (the Trust in Real Estate Services Act, 2020 in Ontario or the Real Estate Services Amendment Act, 2020 in BC) and is receiving commission income through that corporation rather than personally. The corporate name itself follows the agent's name plus a corporate designator the OBCA or BCBCA require ("Inc.", "Ltd.", "Corp.", or the BC equivalent), and the agent's licence — the individual real estate licence — continues to attach to the agent personally. The PREC sits alongside the licence rather than replacing it.

How do you incorporate a PREC?

The steps in order: (1) choose the registered office address inside the province — Ontario for an OBCA PREC, BC for a BCBCA PREC, real street address in Canada Post Unit/# format, no P.O. Box; (2) confirm the corporate name follows the agent-name plus corporate-designator pattern the OBCA or BCBCA require; (3) file the Articles of Incorporation with the Ontario Business Registry or BC Registries; (4) obtain the sponsoring or related brokerage's written consent to pay commission through the PREC; (5) notify the regulator — RECO through the registrant portal in Ontario, BCFSA through the licensee portal in BC — attaching the Articles, the brokerage consent, and the PREC's address of record; (6) register the PREC with the CRA for a Business Number, GST/HST, and payroll if the PREC will pay a T4 salary; (7) open a business bank account in the PREC's name. The address chosen at step 1 propagates through every subsequent step, and an Auteur Toronto or Vancouver address satisfies the OBCA or BCBCA registered-office requirement and the regulator's address-of-record field at the same time.

Bottom line

A Personal Real Estate Corporation is a separate statutory entity vehicle that exists only for licensed real estate agents in Ontario and British Columbia — created by the Trust in Real Estate Services Act, 2020 and Ontario Regulation 536/20 in Ontario, and by the Real Estate Services Amendment Act, 2020 and BC Regulation 184/2021 in BC. It is not a Professional Corporation under either province's Professional Corporation rules; it is its own thing, governed by the real estate services statute and registered through RECO in Ontario or BCFSA in BC, while the agent continues to hold the individual licence and trade through a sponsoring or related brokerage.

The address rule is the most predictable part of the picture. The PREC's registered office under OBCA or BCBCA must be a physical street address inside the province, in Canada Post Unit/# format, never a P.O. Box; that same address is what the RECO registrant portal or the BCFSA licensee portal expects on the PREC's address-of-record field, and what the brokerage carries on its consent file for the PREC. A Canadian-owned virtual Toronto or Vancouver address from Auteur covers every surface — the Articles, the regulator portal, the brokerage consent, the CRA Business Number, and the PREC's business bank account — in the same format from day one.

Reserve a Toronto or Vancouver address before the Articles are filed, so the PREC's registered office on the OBCA or BCBCA file, the address of record on the RECO or BCFSA licensee portal, the address on the brokerage consent letter, the CRA Business Number, and the business bank account all carry the same Canada Post Unit/# format Canadian street address from the moment the PREC comes into existence.

If you are first deciding between federal, Ontario, and BC incorporation for any small corporation — PREC, Holdco, or otherwise — the federal vs Ontario vs BC incorporation comparison covers the jurisdiction question that sits underneath the PREC-specific rules. If the PREC is paired with a holding company for retained-earnings investment, see Holding Company Business Address in Canada for the Holdco-side address chain.