Home buyers have relied on the Real Estate Institute to protect them against a few rogue agents when it comes to the single largest and most expensive deal many of us do in a lifetime.
And the Government has relied on the institute to push its own agentsup before the more powerful Real Estate Agents Licensing Board.
Trouble was, the institute could say no. And it did. Often. It hardly referred anyone to the secretive Newmarket-based board.
Associate Justice Minister Clayton Cosgrove says the institute received 507 complaints against agents between 2004 and 2006 but referred only nine to the board. Why didn't every case go to the board, he wanted to know.
I fought for years to even get access to those few rare but crucial licensing board decisions, which were never readily made public.
The institute itself also dished out justice but published only a few obscure lines at the back of its industry journal stating an agency in a numerically zoned region was fined the maximum $750 for breaching a certain numerically prescribed standard. What the public needed to know was which agents were flouting the law, what they had done, how much money was lost, what penalties they were facing and which agents were struck out of the industry, just for starters.
The Government is now proposing to remove the institute's power to take cases to the licensing board. An independent, powerful Real Estate Agents Authority will be created and a disciplinary tribunal will hear cases against agents.
The institute has hit back hard, lodging a door-stopper 402-page submission to the justice and electoral committee. That move stunned those in Parliament closely involved in the planned law change.
But Beehivers say leading agencies such as Harcourts and Barfoot & Thompson lodged submissions just a few pages long which basically endorsed the law reform and called for only a few changes.
