ERCAAN, Shelterz seal pact to checkmate property touts, landlords

Concerned about the plight of sitting and prospective tenants in the hands of people it described as property touts,  over-reaching and exploitative landlords, Estate Rent and Commission Agents Association of Nigeria (ERCAAN) recently entered into partnership with Shelterz Housing Directory Limited to checkmate the unwholesome activities of these individuals.

In this partnership, the housing directory shall be conducting a biometric registration exercise for all estate agents that are operating legally within the country, beginning from Lagos state and listing all trained, certified and ERCAAN-recognized agents online.

The biometric data so collated shall be hosted on an online platform to make the activities of all agents in the country transparent and create a medium for appropriate government regulations.

To this effect, every registered, duly accredited and recognized agent shall possess a unique identity code, as well as an online profile which shall be readily available and accessible on ERCAAN database website. All agents shall be issued an easily verifiable operational licence, with which all their properties shall be listed online for easy accessibility to the public.

By this, the association will be able to claim responsibility for the genuineness of every property so listed as unverified properties and those from unknown or untrusted individuals cannot be listed. Also, on account of the purchase of a listed property, it shall be immediately delisted.

Chinonso Vincent, Shelterz Housing’s Corporate Affairs Manager, in a statement in Lagos at the weekend, disclosed that  his company was in partnership with a training school that would be conducting compulsory training and certification courses for estate agents.

“By this move, getting trained and certified will eventually be a vital criterion to operate as an estate agent in no distant time, as this shall instill professionalism, transparency, honesty and quick service into the system; sanitize the property industry of fraudsters and ultimately protect the interest of the masses while putting an end to several unnecessary costs incurred by individuals during property search”he assured.

 He disclosed further that the registration and verification process would kick off immediately in Lagos as the details of the first batch of registered agents and their property listing shall be released in the first edition of the property directory that shall be launched by Shelterz Housing on October 1, 2016 alongside an awareness campaign that shall be conducted on the same date.

These steps have become necessary as the trust of the populace in estate agents is gradually dwindling, and clients have continually lost their hard earned money to schemers parading the streets in the name of estate agents. Clients now prefer to deal directly with landlords without the need for any third party.

This has not helped the masses either, as countless landlords take advantage of the lapses in the estate agency practice created by quacks to short-change unsuspecting clients, collecting outrageous agency and agreement charges without delivering to the clients who, in most cases, do not enter into any legal agency agreement with them.

This leaves tenants with no one to hold responsible for their gullibility when they eventually get duped by property touts. This kind of landlord-tenant relationship, without a third party, also leaves the landlord with excesses that are not curtailed, and this is why ERCAAN had to rise to the rescue of the masses, in this platform that has been instituted to re-establish the bond between the populace and estate agents by revealing the identity of all estate agents operating in Nigeria.