Consider this:
I am a member of the Toronto Real Estate Board and am aware of the Competition Bureau’s actions against the Board.
It costs me approximately $1,300 a year to belong to the board and pay for errors and omissions insurance as well as CREA and OREA fees and Realtor.ca, and to pay to maintain the TorontoMLS database. That is the only way TREB pays its bills. There are approximately 30,000 agents in the GTA paying the same fees.
In the beginning of this fiasco I suggested to both CREA and TREB that since it costs me $1,200 per year (and I am a sustaining member) it is reasonable to charge at least that for each mere listing or FSBO listing their property on TREB. I was ignored.
To sell real estate well in Ontario I need:
1) A licence from RECO ($200)
2) Errors and omissions insurance ($400).
3) A database such as the one TREB has to find the information I need. ($700)
As long as I have the database, I don’t need TREB and its $700 in fees, CREA and OREA and their $300 of fees. I already have the licence and do not have to be a member of TREB, OREA or CREA to sell real estate.
You are trying to make full use of the database FREE to every consumer (now I am a consumer and want everything free too) in Ontario just by registering with a virtual office or making myself a customer of RealtySellers Real Estate, for example. That saves me $1,000 per year.
It will take about one REM or Globe and Mail article to alert all TREB, OREA and CREA members of this money-saving feature and once brokers figured this out, the majority, let’s say 28,000 TREB members, could save this $1,000 per year by resigning from TREB, OREA and CREA. Always saving pennies where we can.
To all of those out there who can add, subtract, multiply and do simple division, who do you think will be paying to maintain Stratus, Realtor.ca, OREA and CREA? The database would be unsupportable. The database would die.
Companies such as Re/Max, Royal LePage and Century 21 already have company owned databases that are corporate intellectual property and cannot be changed or accessed by a whimsical Competition Bureau CEO or a judge who wants to sell his home privately.
Come to think of it, each of those three companies, after bitter negotiations for price, could give the other two a link to their databases if they made such an agreement and paid each other for the privilege so we could keep competition in the resale market. All other companies could do the same for the same price. But they would already have access to the big Realtor.ca database that they fought in court to get, as long as they paid to keep it going and could find access to the information.
Congratulations RealtySellers and Competition Bureau, you have created this future. .All of you who think this is about competition, or free market sales, have a thought about that. You are creating the beginning of the end, with not a thought for the consumer.
And all of you who want to have a “Map for the Future”; you better put your thinking caps back on.
For those consumers who want access to all of this information, you can again find it at the land registry office in your jurisdiction. Ooops, but if your jurisdiction is like mine, it believes in little known (and totally ignored by the Competition Bureau) laws – PIPEDA and the Privacy Act, and you cannot get the information unless you have written permission from the owner. Ooops.
Marny Smith
Broker
Toronto
