Real estate agents are rushing to take and pass a recognised industry examination by October 22.
Under the new Estate Agents Bill, real state companies and their sales staff will need to meet new standards in order to continue their profession.
Existing sales agents are now required to pass one of the eight state-recognised industry examinations prior to their registration with the new statutory board — Council for Estate Agencies (CEA).
Starting January 1, 2011, registration with CEA under the Ministry of National Development (MND) will become compulsory.
Sales staff who failed to meet the given deadline and have not completed a minimum of three property transactions over the past two years before October 22 would need to meet the full registration criteria for a new sales staff.
This means taking a course available from November before taking a new exam created by the CEA. Applicants must also possess a minimum of four O-level passes or the equivalent to meet the criteria of the CEA.
This is the reason behind the increase in numbers of those applying to take industry exams offered by several organisations like the Singapore Accredited Estate Agencies (SAEA).
Approximately 5,000 real estate sales agents have registered for the Common Examination for Salespersons (CES) in October alone, twice as much as in a usual month, said Tan Tee Khoon, chief executive of SAEA.
Interest in the exam started to climb in August 2009, after the MND and other agencies started to look into ways on how to intensify the regulatory framework, said Dr. Tan.
Almost 250 of HSR’s newly hired agents will be taking the last set of CES on October 16 and 17, said Patrick Liew, chief executive of the 20-year-old estate agency. Mr. Liew said he is concerned that newcomers from the August and September intakes would fail to meet the qualifications of CEA.
“A lot of these people have joined the industry recently…Usually, if you introduce a new law and it starts on Jan 1, usually everything else applies after January, but in this case they have retroactively applied the law to Oct 22,” said Mr. Liew.
“The people who can no longer take the November examination have to rush to take it in October. That’s the reason why all of us (in the industry) have a fair share of people who go through this last-minute rush.”