An investigation into a GTA-based real estate company’s mismanagement of nearly $10 million will remain in the hands of the provincial regulator for now, Peel Regional Police told the Star.
Police may be called in at a later date, but some members of the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) told the Star that law enforcement should begin investigating immediately due to the “huge amount of missing public funds” and lingering questions about who is responsible.
“In every other case that we, historically, have witnessed, police were involved immediately,” said Steve Tabrizi, chief operating officer for Re/Max Hallmark, which represents 2,000 agents. Tabrizi has worked in the industry for nearly 30 years.
On Friday, RECO notified Peel police’s fraud bureau of its ongoing investigation into “potential improprieties” within iPro Realty, a company co-founded by Rui Alves and Fedele Colucci.
Alves was on RECO’s board of directors for several years, departing in 2023, according to the regulator’s annual general meeting in May 2023.
RECO’s registrar Joseph Richer said it may take several weeks to complete the investigation, at which point the case may go to the police.
On Aug. 14, RECO announced it was shuttering iPro’s branches by Aug. 19 due to a significant shortfall of $10 million in commission and deposit trust accounts. RECO has since revised the amount missing to $8 million, as funds iPro received for the sale of certain assets were repaid into the trust accounts, RECO told the Star on Monday.
Richer also confirmed that RECO’s most recent audit of iPro Realty took place in late May 2025 and that before that, it had not audited the brokerage, which employed 2,400 agents across 17 offices, since 2021.
“When RECO requested routine pre-inspection information, iPro Realty contacted RECO to disclose the shortfalls,” Richer told the Star on Monday. RECO did not immediately answer a followup question from the Star regarding when they first learned of the shortfall.
The same day RECO announced it was shuttering iPro, its co-founders told staff that a “wealthy private financier” was rebranding their brokerage to iCloud Realty, which would assume the same offices, phone numbers and software as iPro. The brokerage’s agents had a few days to decide if they wanted to transfer to iCloud or move to a different brokerage. If they decided to transfer to iCloud, RECO would assist in the “bulk transfer” of agents.
In an email on Friday, iPro co-founders told employees they “negotiated at length with RECO and secured an agreement with RECO,” and as part of that agreement “RECO would approve a bulk transfer of all iPro agents to iCloud Realty on Aug. 18, so that no agent would lose registration. However, RECO only approved iCloud’s brokerage on Aug. 8, once our agreement with RECO was finalized.”
Provincial business records obtained by the Star show that iCloud was incorporated July 22, 2025.
RECO said that iCloud is registered as a separate brokerage with different owners from iPro listed on the registration, and that the iPro co-founders have been stripped of their licences. It added iCloud had purchased some of iPro’s assets and assumed some of its leases.
RECO has not disclosed how the $8 million went missing from iPro’s trust accounts — and the real estate industry wants answers from their regulator.
Ken McLachlan, CEO of Re/Max Hallmark, said RECO should be holding real estate companies across Ontario to a “higher standard” with more frequent and unannounced audits of corporations.
“This is important stuff we do,” he said. “It’s a very valuable service. We should be held to a higher standard. Is RECO doing that? I don’t think so.”
McLachlan said his company, which logs 24,000 to 29,000 real estate transactions annually, is audited every one to two years. He thinks the regulator should be checking the books of real estate corporations at least every six months.
RECO’s protocol, he said, is to provide a “convenience warning” to brokers before conducting an audit, which McLachlan says poses a public risk.
“If brokerages get a week or two to prepare for things, they clean up,” he said. McLachlan says he’s urged RECO to reconsider this practice.
“I’ve said this to them, ‘Why don’t you just come in and say, ‘I want to see the books.’ That’s the way an audit should be done.”
McLachlan said $8 million in missing trust is an unprecedented sum. In his 40 years, he’s never seen that amount of money declared missing by RECO.
“Cases like this are rare,” Richer said. “In 2023, RECO launched a new, robust, risk-based inspection program which incorporates both risk-based and routine inspection cadence.”
“Brokerages presenting higher risk of consumer harm are inspected more frequently and to a higher degree than brokerages that consistently demonstrate higher levels of compliance.”
GTA-based mortgage broker Ron Butler said that if RECO knew there was a “massive violation” by iPro at least six days before they announced the closure of the brokerage, “that is a story,” as consumers and agents were still continuing to participate in real estate deals for days with a brokerage that had known financial mismanagement.
Butler added that police should be reviewing the documents alongside RECO.
Real estate lawyer Mark Morris said that RECO should be criticized for “not cracking down” on iPro and that setting up iCloud is allowing the brokerage to preserve some of its established business. “They should not have the ability to do this,” he said.
“The fact that the regulator is permitting the transference of iPro’s primary assets, which is their agents, to their chosen brokerage (iCloud), is where it defies belief,” he said.
As of 8 p.m. on Monday, the provincial regulator’s website still showed both Colucci and Alves as “registered brokers” with no conditions or discipline history on their public profiles.
