PANICKED estate agents faced with the prospect of being prevented from selling homes if they don’t have proper qualifications have asked for an extension of the January deadline.
With three months to go until the Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority (PPRA) implements the requirement for agents to obtain the Fidelity Fund Certificate for those who have been practitioners for more than two years – or face de-registration – a plea was gone out for leniency.
The course is made up of the NQF Level 4 internship and the Professional Designation Examination (PDE) which may take up to two years to complete.
Now the Real Estate Business Owners of South Africa has raised concerns that the implementation of the current deadline, which they claim could lead to 20 000 people losing their jobs nationally, include 4 000 who will be in the Western Cape.
One agent, Chriseldah Mphahlele, said she tried to complete her studies and her internship earlier this year, but was unable to do so due to circumstances outside her control.
“I lost my brother to a (car) accident. Shortly after that, I found out that I was pregnant. I couldn’t finish my training because of that. I was going through a lot because I am a single mother of two girls.
“We are mothers or parents and there are bills. I still need to pay the costs and my daughter is in matric and so there is a lot to do. We are on commission, we do not have a basic (salary). If I am de-registered, I will not be able to cope,” she said.
Chief executive of REBOSA, Jan le Roux, said that estate agents had had enough time to acquire the qualification, but highlighted possible job losses as a major consequence.
“I am not saying (the ruling) is fair or unfair, but I am just facing the consequences that this qualifying time cannot work.
“They still need to get the study materials and study for themselves. But the practitioners knew from 2008 that they needed to qualify within two years. They did not do it; the authority did not apply the rules since 2008.
“So the authority created this problem by not applying rules for more than a decade and now they apply it overnight,” he said.
He said as many as more than 4 000 jobs could be lost in the sector in the Western Cape alone and over 7 000 black agents countrywide could be affected, which would not help in efforts to transform the sector.
The Cape Peninsula University of Cape Town’s head of department for economics and real estate, Maarten van Doesburgh, said both sides of the equation needed to be taken into consideration when applying the requirement.
“You have to view this as objectively as you can. The PPRA is there to protect the consumers and ensure that the estate agents are fully qualified, so it is a little bit of a dilemma.
“They should try and find a compromise to tell all the estate agents that if you have to get registered by January 2023, it is going to create a problem. I am positive that there will be a solution and that the estate agents will make an official commitment to receiving the qualification and writing the exams,” he said.
PPRA spokesperson Carol Sebeela said candidates were encouraged to obtain the qualification back in 2013.
She said the board then ruled last year that the candidates needed to comply with the qualification requirement by June, but the time-frame was extended again until next January.
A trainer of property practitioners, who asked to be anonymous, said the qualification was not only important to protect the consumers, but to train agents to have negotiation skills to be able to run a successful business.
“They also need to have a lot of sales skills. They need to know how to list, how to prospect because they run a business within a business. They need to know how to get the business running so that they can earn the commission,” she said.