Photo: Contributed
It sounds bizarre, however, on June 15 the government is changing how we and you buy and sell real estate.
After the changes, when we advertise your house for sale and someone calls us, we must advise them to use another realtor. You hire us to sell your home and we will not be able to do that directly.
Most sellers expect their realtor to go out and find a buyer. We really won’t be able to do this without getting someone else involved after June 15. We would have to advertise to find a buyer and them give them to another realtor.
We could treat the interested person as an unrepresented party, but the way the law is changing it will be very risky for that buyer. Also, if you have a relationship with a realtor and you want to buy one of his or her listings, the government is going to force you to use someone else.
Why would the government do this? In its mind, it is to fix a problem with the realtors dealing with both the buyers and sellers.
How big of a problem is this? Less than one-tenth of one percent of the deals in British Columbia last year had problems with dual agency.
So, the government is making a major change to the way the entire province sells real estate—sending the message to consumers that they are too stupid to make an informed decision to fix a problem that is almost non-existent.
Seems logical… but that is just the world according to Bill.
Bill Hubbard is a real estate broker and the owner and broker of a four-office real estate firm in the Okanagan-Shuswap. He has been in real estate for 28 years and has been an owner and broker in Vernon for 20 years. At almost 60 years old he is just as passionate about real estate as the day he started.
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