Privacy & legal

What this site collects

A count of page views and how quickly pages load, and nothing that identifies you. This site sets no cookies, carries no advertising pixels and loads no third-party scripts. The fonts are served from this site rather than fetched from another company. Three things are written to your browser's own storage, described further down, and none of them is sent anywhere: the homes you save, the homes you have looked at, and the last search you ran.

The page-view count is Vercel Web Analytics, which runs on this site's own domain rather than someone else's, uses no cookies, and does not build a profile of you or follow you to other websites. It tells us which pages people read and where they arrived from. It went on when the site launched, because replacing a website that had been online for years without being able to tell whether anyone still found it is not a responsible way to run one.

Alongside it, Vercel Speed Insights measures how long a page took to draw on the device that asked for it, which is how we find out that something is slow on a phone before you have to tell us. It is served from this domain in the same way, sets no cookies and records timings rather than anything about you.

One honest caveat if you go looking. A different website used this address until September 2026, and it did set cookies, including Google Analytics. If you visited it, those may still be sitting in your browser under this domain. They are not ours, nothing here reads them, and clearing site data for ellisrealty.ca removes them for good.

What is loaded from somewhere else

Three things, and every one of them is a picture or map data rather than a script. None can run code on this page or write anything to your browser, and none is sent your name, your email address or anything you have typed here. Each does carry what any request for a file carries: the address your connection comes from, and which page asked for it.

Listing photographs are served by the Canadian Real Estate Association from ddfcdn.realtor.ca rather than copied onto this site, because the display rules for MLS® content require the photographs to be shown as supplied. So on any page showing homes for sale, your browser requests those images from CREA and CREA can see that request, in the same way it would if you opened the listing on REALTOR.ca.

The maps draw their tiles from OpenFreeMap, a free map service that needs no account and no key. A map is never loaded with the page: it waits until it is close to the part of the page you are on, and where a map would fill a phone’s first screen it waits for you to tap. So a visit that never brings one into view never reaches that service at all. When one does load, OpenFreeMap sees a request for the squares of map being drawn.

The strip of recent Instagram posts on the home page shows the team’s own photographs from Instagram’s image service, because the addresses Instagram gives out for them expire and are reissued. Those images load from Meta, which can see the request the same way the two above can.

Every other request your browser makes on this site goes to this site. The report described next is sent by this site’s own server rather than by your browser, which is what keeps that sentence true.

Telling CREA that a listing page was opened

The rules this site agrees to in order to show MLS® listings ask it to report when one of the team’s own listing pages is opened, so that the REALTOR® and the brokerage who listed the home can see where it is being seen. That report carries three things: the listing’s own number in the feed, a random identifier your browser makes for itself, and the network address your request arrived from, which CREA uses to work out roughly where in the world the home was looked at. No name, no email address, no account, and nothing you have typed into this site.

Your browser never talks to CREA to do it. The page tells this website, and this website’s server makes the report. The random identifier exists so that opening the same home twice is not read as two different people looking at it. It names a browser rather than a person, it is not connected to anything else you do here, and clearing your browser data removes it.

It is not switched on. Making the report needs a number that CREA issues for the listing feed, and the team does not have it, so today no identifier is created, nothing is written to your browser for this and nothing is sent to CREA. This section is here because the code is, and the sentence you are reading is written by that code rather than by hand, so it cannot go on telling you the wrong thing once that changes.

The forms, and where what you type goes

The contact form, the valuation request and the intake form submit to this website, which emails your details to the team. The sending is done by Resend, an email delivery service, which handles the message in transit on our behalf. A form message is not stored here and no copy is kept: what you sent exists in the team’s inbox, the same as any email you had written yourself. Saving a listing alert is the one thing this site does store, and it has its own section below.

If email delivery is ever unavailable, the form falls back to opening a draft in your own mail app instead. In that case nothing reaches this site at all, and you can see for yourself that nothing was sent until you send it.

The intake form also offers to copy the summary to your clipboard. That is the same information you submitted, put in your hands as well as ours, so you keep a record of what you asked for.

What you type into a search box

The listings search matches most of what you type without asking this site anything: addresses, streets, communities, MLS® numbers and neighbourhoods are all matched inside your browser, from the list of homes it has already been given. Descriptions are the exception. There are hundreds of them and they are far too long to send to a phone, so words like “workshop” or “ocean view” are sent to this site, which searches the descriptions and sends back the list of homes that match.

So those words do leave your device. Nothing here writes them to a database or files them against you, and they arrive with no name and no account attached, because this site has neither. Like every request to any website they pass through the server’s ordinary logs, and the answer is held in a cache for ten minutes so the same words asked again are not looked up twice. That cache is keyed on the words and holds nothing about who asked.

The address box on the property records page, and the same box on the page about what your home is worth, also send what you type to this site, and this site passes it on to the province’s public assessment service, which is where those records come from. Nothing about that search is kept here afterwards and no copy of it is held.

If you ask for the homes nearest you

The listings search can sort by distance from where you are. It only ever asks for your location when you press that control, and your browser then asks you, not us, so nothing happens unless you agree twice. If you say no, the rest of the search works exactly as before.

If you say yes, the position is used to order the results and to print how far away each home is. It is held in the page while you are on it and goes when you leave. It is not written to your browser’s storage, not sent to this site, and not included in a search you save for email alerts.

The calculators and the quiz

The mortgage estimate, the closing-cost estimate and the community fit quiz all run entirely inside your browser. The numbers you enter and the answers you pick never leave your device and are not visible to us.

When you do email or call

Whatever you send arrives in the team's inbox and is used to reply to you and to provide the service you asked about. It is not sold, traded, rented or passed to anyone else for their own use. Records connected to a transaction are kept because a brokerage is required to keep them.

If you would like to know what the team holds about you, or want it removed where there is no obligation to keep it, ask erin@ellisrealty.ca and we will deal with it.

Links away from here

This site links out to the team's Facebook and Instagram pages. Those are run by Meta under its own policies, and what happens once you are there is not something this site controls.

REALTOR® and MLS® trademarks

The trademarks REALTOR®, REALTORS® and the REALTOR® logo are controlled by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) and identify real estate professionals who are members of CREA. The trademarks MLS®, Multiple Listing Service® and the associated logos are owned and administered by CREA.

This website is operated by The Ellis Team at REAL Brokerage, a brokerage or salesperson who is a member of The Canadian Real Estate Association.

Listing content

Listing content on this website is protected by copyright and other laws, and is intended solely for the private, non-commercial use of individuals. Any other reproduction, distribution or use of the content is forbidden, including commercial use, screen scraping, database scraping, and any other activity intended to collect, store, reorganize or manipulate the data on these pages.

What stays on your device

The Save control on a listing keeps that home in your own browser’s storage, on that phone or computer only. Nothing about what you save is sent to this site or to us, and clearing your browser data removes it. There is no account.

The listings page keeps the last search you ran in the same place, so that when you come back it can offer to pick it up where you left it. What it keeps is the search itself: the community, the price and bedroom limits, any features you ticked, any words you typed into the search box, the outline of any area you drew on the map, and the short label the page shows for all of that. It is replaced by your next search and cleared when you press Clear. This record is never sent to this site, which is a narrower statement than it looks: as “What you type into a search box” above explains, the words themselves are sent while you are searching, and it is the kept copy of them that stays here. Saving a search for email alerts is a different thing entirely, described below, and it is the only one of these that leaves your browser.

Opening a home’s page keeps that home in the same place, so the listings page can offer to show you the ones you have already looked at. It holds the last two dozen, and for each one only what its card already showed you: the address, the community, the asking price, one photograph, the brokerage that listed it and the links to it. The oldest drops off as new ones arrive, nothing about it is sent to this site, and clearing your browser data removes the lot.

Listing alerts, and what saving a search stores

If you save a search on the listings page or a community guide, this site stores it: your email address, the community, budget, bedroom and bathroom limits you chose, the exact wording of the consent box you ticked with the time and the internet address it was ticked from, a random unsubscribe code, and the MLS® numbers already sent to you so the same home is never sent twice. Nothing else, and no name is asked for.

A search saved from the listings page is stored the same way, with two additions. The search’s full query text is kept, which is everything you set on that page and nothing else: the community, the price and bedroom limits, any features you ticked, any words you typed into the search box, and the outline of an area you drew on the map. So is the short label the page shows for it, which is what the email’s subject line says. Alongside each MLS® number already sent to you, the asking price it was sent at is kept, so a later drop can be reported as a drop rather than as the same home arriving twice.

That data lives in a Postgres database run by Neon in a United States data centre, connected to this site through Vercel, and the emails are delivered by Resend. Both act on the team’s behalf and neither is given anything beyond what the message needs. The hourly check on the listing feed keeps a fortnight of its own results there too: how many listings it read and whether the read was complete, with no personal data in them.

These are commercial messages under Canada’s anti-spam law, which is why the box is never pre-ticked and why every email, including the first, carries a one-click unsubscribe link that needs no login and takes effect immediately. Unsubscribing keeps a record that you did, so you are not emailed again. It is also why the wording you ticked decides what you are sent: an email about a home coming down in price is a different message from one about a home being listed, so it goes only to people whose stored consent says price as well.

The site’s own record of asking prices

The MLS® feed carries today’s asking price and nothing about yesterday’s, so a home that came down last week looks exactly like one that was always priced there. Once an hour this site writes down what every active listing is asking, and keeps one small row per home: the feed’s own listing number, the first price it saw and the current one, the dates it first and last saw the listing, the page address the home had on this site, and the community it is in. That is how the “price reduced” figures on the site are worked out.

It does one other thing. Links to homes get texted around and sit in emails for weeks, and the home comes off the market. Because that row remembers the page address and the community, a link to a home that has gone now lands on a page saying so and showing what is for sale in the same town, instead of on a dead end. The home itself is not shown: no address, no photograph and no old asking price, because the site is no longer permitted to display a listing it no longer has.

There is nothing about any person in it. It is a record of homes for sale, not of who looked at them, and it is not connected to anything you do here.

The assistant at /ask

If you use the assistant, what you type is sent to Anthropic, which runs the model that answers it, along with this site’s current listings and market figures. It is not used to train anything and no account or name is attached to it. The exchange is written to this site’s server log so the team can review what the assistant told people, which is a compliance control on a regulated advertising channel rather than a record about you. Do not type anything into it you would not put in an email.

If this changes

Everything above describes the site as it is today. It has changed several times already: live MLS® listings, forms that submit to a server, email alerts and a database behind them, an assistant, and a search that reads your words on the server. Each of those made part of this page wrong until it was rewritten, so the rule is that the page changes in the same step as the site rather than afterwards. The review date at the top is the one to check.