Ontario Realtors Calling for Change
Buying a home can be challenging for most young people. Imagine investing all or almost all your life savings on a thing. And eventually you’ll have to hire a professional to find you the ideal home.
Well worry no more, Ontario realtors are probably the most important of those professionals. They work directly with home buyers and sellers facilitating over 200,000 residential home transactions in Ontario every year.
Realtors are easy going and are always interested in building long lasting relationships with clients, but things have been a little sad with them lately.
With reports going around that some realtors are abusing the trust of Ontario’s residents looking to achieve the Canadian dream, realtors are calling for an abrupt stop to these industry rules.
“That’s why leaders in the real estate profession are fighting for higher professional and educational standards. We proposed the idea to Premier Kathleen Wynne and she agreed, announcing a long overdue update to the industry rules”, says Tim Hudak and Ettore Cardarelli, from a column written on the Toronto Sun.
Ontario realtors are calling for changes from the people to make Ontario a leading market in North America. According to them, the Ontario government needs to raise the bar when it comes to getting a real estate licence.
“Firstly, Ontario should make it a lot more demanding for someone to get and maintain their real estate licence. Outdated government policies have meant that it takes longer to get certified as a hair stylist in our province than it does to get a real estate licence. This just doesn’t make any sense in 2017 with a far more complex real estate market and the high value of homes”, said the two.
“Secondly, we need to strengthen the real estate industry’s code of ethics. The code sets out most of the rules and obligations which govern the interactions between agents and consumers. For example, a new code of ethics should ban the use of ‘escalation and clauses,’ a shady practice that is contributing to an overheated market and frustrating consumers in transactions with multiple offers. We also think agents who hold themselves out as experts in commercial real estates or condos, for instance, should have to prove it by taking additional licencing courses- a change that will give consumers more certainty that the professional they’re working with has the right skills and knowledge”, they further noted.
Above all, real estate agents in Ontario needs all the trust and confidence they can get from clients. Buyers need to be sure that when they hire a realtor, everything will be arranged professionally.
