End of real estate self-regulation met with resignation

There wasn’t much of an official reaction from the Real Estate Council of B.C. to Premier Christy Clark’s announcement this week that it will no longer be allowed to regulate the conduct of realtors on its own.

But whistleblowers, who were among the first to bring the industry’s failings and unscrupulous activities to the media, leading to a damning report and the provincial government’s move to bring in widespread changes, said plenty.

“We had a chance to do better. The solutions were so easy,” said Re/Max agent Keith Roy. He served on the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver’s professional standards committee for two years before recently feeling blackballed by other members for openly airing his concerns.

“There is resignation and disappointment, but acceptance,” said Roy. “There will be a loss of selfregulation. It’ll be something that is thrown upon us.”

“My impression is that if had we ourselves enacted 80 per cent of (what the report this week recommends), we would have been left alone,” said Roy. “Now, we will have to meet 100 per cent of the (recommendations when they are implemented), but 20 per cent of them will be a bureaucratic nightmare with no impact on consumer protection.

“That part of it will be window dressing. Every time the government takes over, there is more paperwork. This is not something the government wanted to take over. They were very reluctant to do this.”

Roy said an opportunity was missed when stories about aggressive contract assigning and dubious conduct by the owner of New Coast Realty started to emerge. He said the council should have moved quickly to take away the company’s licence. Instead, it imposed a list of conditions under which it could continue operating.

Said Roy: “We could have done it before, but we were too busy selling houses.”

Morning Yu, who was one of the former New Coast agents who spoke to The Vancouver Sun in March about being owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission fees reacted to this week’s news: “It’s great. I hope that government can do more to monitor realty companies.”

Yu is still mostly concerned with being paid her outstanding commissions and said she intends to launch a suit against New Coast next week. “The council could not do anything to help me.”

She has engaged lawyer Wayne Ryan to handle her case. In part, he said, they waited for the release of the report because its details, and the reaction to it, “will assist in our notice of claim.”

Bill Messer is now retired, but in 2012 he acted as the managing broker for New Coast Realty when it was founded by businessman Ze Ye Wu. Wu was forced to step aside from his responsibilities after The Globe and Mail newspaper released an audio tape of him training his agents to pressure home sellers for fast sales at low prices so that colleagues could step in and flip the properties and make a maximum profit for the company.

Not too long into his position, Messer was concerned about the company. At the time, it was mostly about its “handling of rentals and using other realtors to sell properties and taking a fee for it,” recalled his spouse, Donna Messer.

Bill said he tried to go to the council, mainly “to protect ourselves as brokers. I wrote letters. A couple. I talked to them on the phone.”

In the end, the message they got from the council, said Donna, was that it was “probably a good idea for us to get out of the situation.”

They did and have moved on, but for those who are still in the thick of the real estate industry, “there are a lot of problems,” said Bill.

“Any changes will be good. Far too many people have it too easy. “

“As a start, if you increased the education barriers, it would shake out a lot of the players and selfregulation would start to happen on its own.”

In interviews with its lawyers and the company’s recently appointed chief compliance officer, New Coast has repeatedly denied allegations. A statement on its website says: “There were allegations of wrongdoing detailed in some media reports. New Coast Realty and its agents have denied the allegations. The company is co-operating with investigations by the Real Estate Council of British Columbia.”

Meanwhile, real estate boards — which exist to represent agents in different regions of the province — differed from each other in tone with their official reaction.

The Fraser Valley Real Estate Board said it “strongly supports moving forward with the recommendations brought forward” by the independent panel as well as Clark’s announcement to end selfregulation of the industry.

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver said the government’s acceptance of the panel recommendations is a “positive development for the real estate profession. Many of the recommendations address issues that (we have) long advocated for, with the support of our members.”

However, said its president Dan Morrison in a statement: “We take offence to the distorted image presented of our membership this week.”

“The more than 12,800 (agents) in Greater Vancouver were unfairly tarred with a negative brush this week, because of the actions of a few who allegedly failed to act in the best interests of their clients.

“They don’t represent the profession as a whole.

“The vast majority of (agents) are hard-working, knowledgeable professionals who act with integrity.”