The first test of the Real Estate Council of Ontario’s new administrator may be figuring out how to pay for promises made by Premier Doug Ford.

Mr. Ford gave a speech on Monday at the Ontario Real Estate Association’s annual conference where he appeared to suggest that realtors who have commission income trapped in iPro Realty Ltd. bank accounts – frozen by court order – will be able to fully recover those funds.

When Canadians ask whether they are getting good value for a home they intend on buying, they are usually focused on the local: the province, city or neighbourhood they want to live in defines their sense of what’s affordable.

The Canadian Real Estate Association collects local sales data from across the country and creates a national benchmark price for the cost of a home, which it releases every month. In October, that price fell to $679,600, down 0.4 per cent from September and down 3 per cent year-over-year.

However, that number includes many kinds of homes in Canada: ownership apartments, detached single-family houses, townhouses, farms, duplexes, the list goes on. And each of those categories have local market pressures that shape the price.

The former registrar of the Real Estate Council of Ontario was contemplating an unusual deal with the principals of iPro Realty Ltd. just minutes after learning of a multimillion-dollar shortfall in consumer trust accounts held by one of Ontario’s largest brokerages.

That was among the findings of a recent report from Dentons LLP to investigate RECO’s mishandling of the iPro situation. It was commissioned by RECO’s board of directors on Aug. 22, the same day that registrar Joseph Richer left the organization.

A Toronto real estate developer says the Ontario government is using a rarely deployed ministerial power on behalf of a global pharmaceutical manufacturer to block plans for a new rental apartment complex.

Tenblock Development Inc. has proposed three residential buildings of 14, 33 and 39 storeys that would replace an existing four-storey apartment building it owns on Steeles Avenue West in north Toronto. The redevelopment site is near a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility owned by Sanofi Pasteur Limited, which employs more than 2,000 people. Sanofi SNY-Q, which is headquartered in Paris and has a large presence in Canada, has a market capitalization of close to $100-billion.