Melanie Aitken (Photo: Couvrette/Ottawa)
To celebrate 25 years of serving Canada’s real estate community, REM asked a small group of real estate leaders this question:
“Who had the biggest impact – good or bad – on Canadian real estate in the last 25 years?
This is not a popularity contest or a marketing exercise. We want to know who you think had the biggest impact on the industry in the last 25 years – even if it was, in your opinion, a negative impact. Your choices could include Realtors, company executives, association executive officers, regulators, service company executives….even politicians! Who has had the most impact during the last 25 years in making the industry what it is today?”
REM took those consensus picks and added our own and the results will be revealed on REM online every day until the end of June. Take a look and see if you agree with these choices, and then let us know who we missed. Add your comments below or drop an email to [email protected].
Melanie Aitken
“Without a doubt, the person who had the single most important impact on Canadian real estate over the last 25 years is Melanie Aitken, former commissioner of the federal Competition Bureau,” says Brian Martindale, a retired sales rep and prolific commenter on REMonline stories.
Aitken was appointed Commissioner of Competition in 2009. She filed an application with the Competition Tribunal alleging that CREA’s rules regarding MLS access “deny consumer choice and stifle competition” and block real estate agents “from offering innovative services and pricing options to consumers.” In October 2010, CREA signed a controversial 10-year consent agreement with the bureau.
Michel Friedman, president of Orange Square Realty in Toronto, says: “She set out to eliminate what she said were anti-competitive practices in the real estate industry’s listing practices.” He says that in his opinion, the consent agreement led to “a rift between CREA and the real estate boards; undue hardships on real estate sales associates, a change in commission structures that reduced or eliminated what I perceive as essential services to clients; the appearance of ‘mere listing’ options where the buyer’s agents now have to take an extra step and negotiate their own commissions with a seller prior to presenting the offer; and last but not least, the ‘opening’ of the MLS information, which Realtors pay for, making it fully available to the public.”
Carolyne Lederer, broker of record at Carolyne Realty serving Brampton, Ont., and a REM columnist, says Aitken is responsible for “the most negative changes ever brought to the fore in the real estate world, under the guise of contributing to consumers getting better representation for less money…And the consumer ultimately did not benefit from the leftovers when all the smoke cleared.”
Aitken subsequently filed a complaint against the Toronto Real Estate Board, claiming that it has rules that “denied real estate agents the ability to introduce innovative Internet-based real estate brokerage services, such as Virtual Office Websites (VOWs).” The final outcome of that application is still pending. Aitken resigned as commissioner in September 2012.
