Gary Chua - As Senior Group Divisional Director, Gary Chua leads a team of over 500 Professional Real Estate Sales Managers and Associates to provide quality real estate service to all ERA clients. He states that his mission is “through inspiration, motivation and training to produce successful salespeople”, with the goal of grooming the Team Managers to become the Divisional Directors of tomorrow.
I have been in this real estate industry for 11 years now. Since day one, I’ve heard rumours saying real estate agents will need a licence to operate but it did not materialise until last week. A new statutory board, Council for Estate Agencies (CEA) to regulate estate agents in Singapore comes into operations from last Friday, 22nd Oct 2010.
This aims to raise the professionalism of the real estate agency industry and to enable consumers to better safeguard their interests. CEA is in charge of licensing conditions for estate agents, regulation on the conduct of estate agency work, mechanisms for discipline and dispute resolution, and public education.
The council immediate focus is to prepare the estate agents and salespersons to meet the higher standards of the enhanced licensing and new registration framework. To do that, there will be a code of conduct, ethics and practice for estate agents and salespersons to follow.
The council can subject errant estate agents and salespersons to disciplinary action.
Most full time real estate agents including me welcome this move. This will raise the standard for the whole industry. I have seen many errant agents acting unprofessionally towards clients and fellow cobroke agents. After they got many complaints in one agency, they switched to another agency and continue to do what they used to do. I have even saw one agent changed his name to disguise his past records.
With this regulation, these agents will not be able to do that because they will be registered under one body and complaints will be handled by CEA. CEA then has the power to deal with the agent with penalties such as warnings, fines, suspension or revocation.
With this setup, the numbers of real estate agents will be largely reduced as now it has a higher entry level for new agents and existing agents needs to pass a compulsory exam. I estimate it will drop to approx 20,000 agents from the initial 35,000 agents. Those that are still in the industry will mostly be the full timers and the more professional ones.
It’s been a hectic 2 weeks for me to register my agents with CEA. Now I will take a breather to enjoy my preparation for my marathon in December.
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