Protecting real estate agents

Real estate selling is a competitive profession. We add over a thousand brokers and agents every year but from among them, only a few get to practice their profession profitably. Unlike before, the recent approval of the Real Estate Service Act (RESA) Law restricts the sale of properties only to licensed real estate professionals to protect buyers from spurious property offerings and prevent against misrepresentation, on the part of the seller, with respect to the terms and conditions of the sale.       

In other words, the broker or his agent is tasked by law to investigate the alienability of a property before it is offered for sale and must, at all times, ensure that the goodwill of the parties involved in the sale. Apart from establishing the needed “due diligence” to consummate the transaction between the buyer and the seller little did we know that the broker and his agent spend their resources to promote and advertise the property of the seller. Usually, they are posted in the newspapers or online. They also participate in exhibits organized by sellers usually developers of mass housing and vertical developments such as condominiums and time shares.    

To represent, therefore, a property owner or a developer is a hard and arduous task. It is also an investment altogether on the part of an agent and his broker. Not too many are able to survive selling real estate because brokers/agents need money to run a campaign to promote their inventories. The harder part is that commissions are only given after the buyer has fully paid the property. The hardest is when agents do not get what is due them after the sale. Even despite a contract of agency, there are sellers that do not honor contracts and just simply tell their agents to bring the matter to court in which the agent cannot do for lack of resources to pursue the case. This is a risk that agents and realty companies have to deal with all the time. 

Despite the professionalization of real estate selling, real estate agents are not treated professionally. I’ve seen agents who have yet to receive their commissions from out of the closed sales they made some two years ago! There are still a lot of developers who come here to Cebu and lure agents to sell their property for them but do not honor their promised incentives. If you ask the agents around you will know this developer -- and yet this developer has the face to flaunt its ambitious project but has no heart or the professional courtesy to stand by its commitment to those who sell their property for them. 

The Philippine Allied Chamber of Real Estate Brokers and Licensed Agents (Philacre) had already made a stand against developers who dodge their promises. Philacre president Anthony Leuterio spoke against these developers and asked everyone to boycott developers who cannot deliver their commitment to their agents. “It’s a question of integrity. Integrity must come from all sides. If they cannot keep their promise to our agents, how can they keep their promise to their buyers?” I think the advocacy now is no longer about professionalization of the agents – sellers have to act professionally especially real estate developers. 

Philacre and real estate boards should serve to protect the interest of their members by ensuring that they are properly compensated based on what’s being told to them during their product orientation seminars. And to bring these abusive developers to court, a lawyer must be provided by them to give teeth to the claims of agents against the abusive sellers.

A law must be advocated also that commissions have to be given no longer than six months and that incentives must be given outright after initial payment has been made.

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