The anatomy of an OREA 801, and the 87 data points hiding inside it

If you’ve written an Ontario purchase offer by hand, you already know the answer to the trick question: “how many pieces of information does Form 801 actually need?” The answer is eighty-seven, give or take a handful depending on condo status and whether your client has a co-buyer.

We count them because automating them is what OfferCopilot does. And to automate a thing, you first have to understand where it comes from.

Where the 87 fields live

The fields on Form 801 come from exactly three places:

1. The listing (≈28 fields)

MLS number. Municipal address. Legal description. Lot frontage and depth. Zoning. School district. Year built. Property type. Bedrooms and bathrooms. List price. Property taxes. Condo status (is it? is it a plan? what’s the unit number? what’s the common expense?). Listing agent name, email, phone, brokerage. Cooperating commission. Possession date. Occupancy. Main photo.

All of this exists on the MLS listing. On realtor.ca, REALM, HouseSigma, condos.ca, Zolo — the same 28 fields, packaged differently.

Every agent in Ontario copies these fields by hand. Every. Single. Offer. Our Chrome extension reads them once, and they flow into the offer.

2. The client (≈22 fields)

Full legal name of each buyer. Current address. Date of birth. Citizenship status. Occupation. First-time buyer status. Under BRA? When? Pre-approval status. Mortgage provider. Approved amount. Interest rate. Rate type. Term. Expiry. Down payment source. Deposit method preference. Buyer intention (primary residence / investment / vacation). Legal relationship between co-buyers.

These are the fields that get retyped the most. They’re on the pre-approval letter, the ID, the signed BRA, the CRM — just never all in the same place, in the same format, at the same time.

3. The deal itself (≈37 fields)

This is where the actual negotiation lives. Offer price. Effective offer price (if rebating to the price). Deposit amount. Deposit holder. Completion date. Irrevocable time and date. Cooperating brokerage commission. Rebate amount. Rebate application method. Included chattels. Excluded chattels. Excluded fixtures. Rental items. Provincial LTT. Municipal LTT (if Toronto). First-time-buyer rebates. HST treatment. Every condition: type, days, deadline, clause text. Every additional term. Every acknowledged disclosure. Buyer’s lawyer name, firm, phone, email, address.

These are the fields you actually think about. An agent writes a good offer by making good calls on these thirty-seven. Everything else is transcription.

Why this matters for automation

If 50 of 87 fields come from the listing or the client — data you already have — then 57% of the offer writes itself, or should.

But the tricky part isn’t the data, it’s the dependencies:

• The completion date drives the condition deadlines.
• The first-time-buyer status drives the LTT rebate.
• The property location drives whether MLTT applies.
• The condo status drives whether you need a status certificate condition.
• The deposit holder drives whether you need deposit-holder contact details.
• The rebate application method drives whether the effective offer price is different from the offer price, which cascades to the LTT calculation.

This is why a template can’t do this. You need a workflow that understands the graph — that when you change the completion date, every condition deadline shifts, every irrevocable time preset recalculates, every dated schedule updates. That’s what the OfferCopilot wizard does.

What automation doesn’t do

It doesn’t write the strategy. It doesn’t know whether a 2% deposit is a signal of a weak client or a smart play on a buyer’s market. It doesn’t know that the listing agent’s real deadline is 9pm even though the printed irrevocable says midnight. It doesn’t know your client’s cousin is the inspector.

Those thirty-seven “deal” fields are where you earn your fee. The other fifty are where the software earns its keep.

That’s the division of labour we’re aiming for.