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A sigh of relief for Dubai property buyers
- January 24, 2007, 1:34 pm
People shopping for property in Dubai may breathe a little easier once a new programme, aimed at weeding out unqualified real estate agents, goes into effect tomorrow.
The Dubai Land Department is taking a closer look at the qualifications of real estate agents and firms operating in the red-hot property market.
“The system will try to weed out unqualified and unscrupulous agents from the market place,” said Mohammad Sultan Thani, director of Development and Marketing Administration for the Land Department. “Right now, there are a lot of people, such as housewives or people who just need jobs, who are trying to go out there and broker deals.”
The department will begin by registering real estate firms and, in the second phase, will issue cards to registered brokers within those firms.
While a timeline was unavailable, the Land Department said that eventually only brokers who are licenced by them would be allowed to transact real estate deals.
Thani said untrained and inexperienced brokers may cause problems for Dubai’s booming real estate market.
The registrations process - which involves the screening of individual agents for such things as “good conduct” - will help remove “rogue” agents from the market place, according to Stephane Richet, head of sales for Sherwoods, a Dubai-based independent property consultancy.
Richet said he has encountered several cases of questionable behaviour, mainly in the resale market.
According to Thani, a training programme will be put into place to keep agents qualified, and an advertising campaign will warn consumers that they should not deal with unlicensed agents. Thani said the campaign would start when more agencies had completed the registration process.
Although the Department said that initially it would not be difficult to register a company, since the only major hurdle would be receiving a trade licence from the Ministry of Economy, the Department is planning to issue a code of ethics for brokers.
“It’s not just registering. It’s going to be every year. If we’re getting a lot of complaints, we not going to renew them,” Thani said.
Lisa Mahoney, CEO of local real estate firm Better Homes, said while the new initiative was an important first step, she was still concerned that unscrupulous firms would be able to hire unqualified agents to conduct land deals.
“The Land Department is doing a good job of being aware. They want to bring some quality people into the market and make sure it’s not just people without any qualifications running around making obscene amounts of money,” she said.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t prevent fraud. They’re just checking the companies. It doesn’t ensure the agents are qualified.”
Tomorrow, the Land Department will hold a ceremony for the first 30 real estate firms to be certified under the programme.
Source - Gulf News, Scott Shuey
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