Licensing, legal oversight will end challenges in estate agency practice – Hatch

Estate agents, people or organisations that act as go-between for prospective tenants and landlords, or link property buyers to sellers in both rental and sales market, are regarded, all over the world, as critical elements of human settlement.

The estate agency practice could, therefore, be said to be a noble enterprise, though one with enormous challenges, especially here in Nigeria where the sane voices of professionals have been drowned by those of charlatans and pseudo-practitioners who swarm the practice.

Ed Hatch, a speaker and teacher on real estate from the US, however, raised some hope for the practice, insisting that licensing agents and creating legal oversights would end the challenges in the practice.

Hatch, who trains all over the world for 5-star hotels, real estate and leadership for big corporations in Singapore, UK, US and South Africa, was the resource person at a training workshop organised by the Nigeria Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV) on the topic ‘Becoming an Estate Agent of Choice Through Effective Personal and Corporate Promotion’.

In his interaction with journalists at the event, Hatch noted that all the world, estate agency problems are the same, explaining that in the US, for instance, there are problems with getting someone to price your property appropriately, justifying the fees and understanding the market properly, etc.

“In many places in the United States, you have to be licensed to sell houses. The National Association of Realtors oversees the behaviour of all estate agents. So, there is a code of ethics. When someone does something that is a bit shady, he risks losing his licence,” he said.

In Nigeria, he advised that everybody needs to understand that they are competing with one another but that there is a decent way of doing business so that they can compete fairly without breaking any of the agency rules or code of ethics.

He stated that the issue of multiple agents listing the same property is common everywhere, pointing out, however, that sooner or later it would go away because a lot more people would be licensed.

“If you are a client and you have a relationship with a licensed agent, you will understand that there is a legal responsibility to that relationship which the client cannot share with more than one person. As soon as this country creates the expectation that estate agents need to be licensed, as soon as that happens, it becomes a legal issue, and you have got the law involved,” he said.

“Once the practice becomes sophisticated, it needs more oversight and when you create the oversight, you also have to create the licensure and the licensee and also the law; and when the law is involved, the problems in the practice will go away,” he added.

In its determined effort to save this practice from itself, give it true meaning and essence, sanitise, regulate and restore pride of place to the professional practitioners, the NIESV formed Association of Estate Agents in Nigeria (AEAN), formally inaugurated it and followed it up with a training workshop for practitioners.

Speaking to journalists at the training workshop in Lagos recently, Chudi Ubosi, chairman of the association’s technical committee, explained that because the practice has become an all-comers affair, the practitioners are now lumped together as fraudsters – people who inflate house rents, collect money from multiple tenants and run away.