Dear Sheila
What’s on your mind? If it’s printable, share it with Letters to the Editor Re: The NAEA Licensing debate
E
ven more confusing in that an individual NAEA member qualified by the Diploma/ Examination route cannot be licensed unless
working for an NAEA licensed firm! However a single office run by a sole principal qualified by experience only who has never gone down the Diploma or Examination route can be licensed. This is the creation of a two tier membership
and frankly without mandatory backing a pointless exercise. The only worthwhile licence is one which means that if the person or firm loses their licence then they lose the right to run an
Dear Sheila, Frankly, who in the High Street
looking to buy or sell a home, gives a ‘tinkers thingy’ what banners we have hanging out of our windows? The public don’t care, they just go on reputation, sold boards and a cheap fee! When Peter Bolton King refers
to taxi companies, do we care about the taxi we order, providing its priced right, and we know the number to ring when it’s late? Unless we have 100 per cent
legislation, of all estate agents, not just those NAEA members, its just another cost or even a tax for being a member. And for those who avoid NAEA
membership, it saves them a few bob, in fact, many hundreds of pounds over the year, a bit unfair? I have been a member since 1967, and, as I have said many times before, where is the value? NAEA has great PR and friends in high places but when to comes to grass roots agency, touting, leaflets, knocking on doors, cheating on offers, misleading the general public, general standard of practice, it’s hopeless. We can’t even clean up our
own act.
So what’s the point? Alan Howick FNAEA Howick & Brooker Partnership Ltd
Dear Sheila, Until there is a punishment for
anyone trading as an ‘Estate Agent’ without qualifications or a licence to trade then it is pointless
22 JANUARY 2011 PROPERTYdrum
estate agency office or to work in the industry – that’s real consumer protection. Unfortunately the NAEA is handing this and
future governments a cop out to let them off the hook of introducing mandatory licensing coupled with minimum standards. The hope that consumers will move their business to licensed firms seems to me a case of living in ‘cloud cuckoo land’. Kind regards, Hugh Dunsmore-Hardy FRSA FNAEA MIoD Non-Executive Director, Winkworth Franchising,
bringing out another piece of paper which will cost yet more money to get. It will not make any difference to those who trade outside the scope of the NAEA. The Minister, Grant Shapps, is just copping out, as usual and the NAEA is just out to make a fast buck. Charles Roebuck
Dear Sheila, I am a letting agent with over
20 years’ experience and I have chosen not to be a member of NAEA or ARLA. (I was previously an estate agent for 10 years, so I have 30 years’ experience in the property business.) There are estate agents all over the country who are members of NAEA and they can start up a lettings branch – whenever they like – without any experience whatsover! But they will appear to be ‘approved’ because they are members of NAEA via their estate agency branch!
Many of these NAEA members
have no qualifications in estate agency – let alone lettings! It was only a few years ago that NAEA required their new members to be basically trained and qualified. The NAEA is full of older estate agency members who simply pay their annual membership fee and do nothing else at all to ‘qualify’ as members.
The old way to become a member was to attend an interview with another local more senior member of NAEA who
asked a few questions and that was it! There are 100s if not 1000s of those members still around and why should they be considered to be more accredited? Sandra Herbert Easylet Letting Agents Ltd, Worthing
Dear Sheila, Did Grant Shapps really say that
or was he spoon fed a sound bite to please NAEA (or NFoPP or whatever they’re called) because the announcement was being made in the Houses of Parliament? Why was it announced there, as
the committee looking into further regulation of estate agents had recently been abandoned having decided it wasn’t necessary/in the public interest?
How many NAEA members
have actually signed up for this extra bureaucracy? I know it was well received by the ARLA members but the Letting side of the business needs all the respectability it can muster. The odd thing about the NAEA
proposal is that one can only have a licensed office if it has a suitably ‘qualified’ person in the office and you can only be a licensed firm if ALL offices are licensed. My own firm has five sales offices, two of which can’t qualify so I can’t see
‘Grant Shapps is copping out; the NAEA is out to make a fast buck.’
! London
the point of confusing the public by joining some and not others. NAEA members are quietly
(so far) fuming at the threat that certain member benefits will be withdrawn from unlicensed members. At the moment the public
don’t ask if you are licensed, they want the highest possible price, the quickest possible sale and the lowest possible fee. Membership of the
Ombudsman Scheme seems more than sufficient ‘respectability’ for most vendors – and they have to be told. Funny old world.
Andrew Milsom Andrew Milsom, Buckinghamshire
Dear Sheila, After 16 years in the advertising
industry (for which, like most business people, I had a degree but no ‘formal’ qualification) advising clients on how to spend tens of millions of pounds of their money I set up my own estate agency in 2005. I have no ‘formal’ qualifications for that either. When I set up I joined the Ombudsman Scheme (then voluntary) and NAEA. I left the NAEA three years later when they told me I would need to do some kind of professional training or leave. I didn’t think twice as the Ombudsman is the thing that has real weight with consumers, the NAEA just being a cosy boys club with the industry’s interests at heart, not that of consumers.
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