Malta Developers Association president Sandro Chetcuti has raised doubts that a proposed mandatory course for real estate agents will alone be enough to improve the quality of the sector.
“I don’t get the obsession with having all your certificates before you start working,” he said this morning at the Business Observer breakfast on real estate regulation. “I believe in the university of life; some people with just a university education are the biggest idiots.”
The government’s White Paper on real estate agents, published in January, includes a mandatory three-month, diploma-level training course, for anyone wishing to obtain a licence to work as an estate agent.
Douglas Salt, president of the Federation of Real Estate Agents, said the course would cover the legal and architectural theory that estate agents need, but a lot of “soft training” would still take place in the field, with course lectures held in the evening to accommodate such work.
The course will also include training in property valuation, work that is currently carried out by architects, a proposal which led the Chamber of Architects to warn that allowing real estate agents to evaluate properties could have worrying repercussions on the entire property market.
Mr Salt, however, said this morning that while agencies would be wise to restrict valuation to their more experienced personnel, there was no reason in principle while estate agents should be less qualified than architects.
“An architect’s valuation is ultimately very superficial. What we should be moving towards is a system of chartered surveyors who would maintain an index of prices and have access to a national database, allowing them to give a more in-depth valuation,” he said.
“The whole sector – including architects and estate agents – is becoming increasingly specialist, and this question should be addressed the same way.”
Meanwhile, Janice Azzopardi, a licenced sensara (broker) poured cold water on the White Paper, which she said did not cater sufficiently to buyers and sellers and discriminated unfairly against brokers.
Sensara (brokers) typically act as intermediaries between buyers and sellers, taking one per cent commission from each. Ms Azzopardi said sensara often had a better understanding of properties and broader realities in their specific localities than estate agents, but that the government’s proposals presented too many administrative barriers for them to operate efficiently.
“Remember that this a lot of people’s career; it should be safeguarded not discouraged,” she said.