SOME OF the State’s leading estate agents have not yet signed up to a code of practice drawn up by the Government’s new watchdog for the profession, six months after it was introduced.
Almost 40 per cent of the 2,600 firms and individual agents who have registered with the National Property Services Regulatory Authority have failed to agree to the terms of the code, according to the authority.
The authority last week published for the first time a list of those firms which have agreed to the code. It does not include large firms such as Lisney and Douglas Newman Good.
Other well-known firms such as Sherry Fitzgerald and Felicity Fox were listed on the authority’s website as not having agreed to the code, but told The Irish Times they had signed it. The authority subsequently amended its website.
The authority has written to thousands of estate agents several times since the code was launched by former minister for justice Brian Lenihan last year, after which the acceptance rate increased from 50 per cent in March to 61 per cent now.
The code provides for complaints from the public to be investigated by a disciplinary board. While voluntary at present, it will become statutory when new legislation formally setting up the authority is passed, probably early next year.
The authority’s chief executive, Tom Lynch, said some firms had indicated they wished to update their procedures before signing the code.
Peter Stapleton, managing director of Lisney, said not signing the code was “no big deal” because it wasn’t mandatory. Lisney had updated its own code of practice and wanted to see how this worked in practice before agreeing to the authority’s code. Consumers were “more than sufficiently protected” under current arrangements, he said.
Keith Lowe of Douglas Newman Good said that having read the code he was of the view that his firm was not compliant, and therefore could not sign it. Over the past three months it had updated its procedures to become compliant, and would shortly sign the code.
“I don’t believe we were compliant. But, having read what the code requires, I don’t believe any other estate agent is compliant either.”
Hardly any agents included their registration number in advertisements, he pointed out, as required by the code.
Another provision, that estate agents not disclose the sale price of a house without the prior written consent of the vendor, has proved controversial in recent weeks. Last week, agents stopped providing newspapers with information about private treaty sale prices after it was alleged that some were supplying misleading prices.
At the time of the ensuing row, Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes said sale price information could only be disclosed with the permission of both the buyer and the seller. Last week, he told The Irish Times he saw no reason why estate agents couldn’t give generalised information about prices for particular types of house in particular areas.
Mr Lynch said the disclosure of sale prices wasn’t an issue for the National Property Services Regulatory Authority as it was a data protection matter. It was up to the industry to decide how prices were disclosed, but they had to be accurate.