Licensing Can Change Industry |
The National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) has welcomed a call by Halifax Estate Agents (HEA) to introduce licensing for estate agents in the UK but are they both on the same page?
The call came in advance of the House of Lords report on the Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill, which aims to tackle the issue of compensation for consumers. HEA has apparently mirrored the NAEA's own response to the Bill: that it could in fact go further to benefit consumers and estate agents by addressing the issue of industry regulation.
Peter Bolton King, Chief Executive at the NAEA, comments:
"We have been calling for the government to introduce better regulation of estate agency through licensing for some time now and are delighted that Halifax Estate Agents has come out in support of this view.
"We would stress, however, that we are calling for licensing with a little 'l'. We believe there is no need for the Government to implement complicated and costly new legislation that will only serve to increase the burden of red tape. Regulation need not be difficult to deal with - in fact the structure is already in place within the industry. The NAEA, for example, has a technical qualification that estate agents must take in order to join and all members must abide by the Association's rules of conduct.
"UK estate agency has for a long time been plagued by the actions of a rogue minority, with both consumers and agents suffering as a result. By insisting that estate agents must be a member of an approved professional body before they are allowed to practice, the government could easily and successfully go a long way towards tackling this important issue."
Although these comments from the NAEA seem to support Halifax, we should not confuse the call for licensing with that of making agents become a member of an approved professional body. There already are many agents out there who are members of professional bodies but it is still very debatable if this has helped to clean up the image of the industry. The call for licensing could perhaps follow more along the lines of the US system which involves an agent actually holding a qualification and then having to show a certain amount of industry experience before being allowed to trade for themselves. This may help to discourage people with no former experience from choosing to open up an estate agency and subsequently run it and the industry further into the ground.
The recently introduced BTEC for Residential Lettings and Management by The Guild of Letting Management has shown that it is possible for the industry to create formally recognised qualifications, and so it may only be a matter of time before we are truly able to recognise estate agency itself as a professional industry.
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Posted On
23
February
2007
at
05:34
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