The Council for Estate Agencies (CEA), the new statutory board responsible for regulating and licensing real estate agents in Singapore had a tough first day of business on Monday.
The Toa Payoh premises of the CEA was swamped with people, mostly disgruntled agents or their bosses, who had come to sort out real estate transaction disputes or ask about licences that had not yet been issued.
Jimmy Ng, chief executive of Premiere Realty, came to find out why his 30 agents who were approved as practising agents in 2010, had not yet received their licences.
After unsuccessful attempts to contact the CEA’s hotline for two hours, he went to its offices in HDB Hub at 11am.
He spent the afternoon at the office, with his number finally called after four hours, only to find out that it would take another three days for the licences to be processed by CEA.
“’I’m running a business. I have five cases on hand right now that I can’t work on because we can’t do anything until we get our licences,” said Mr. Ng who spoke to The Straits Times. “Making us wait this long is just ridiculous. Our clients will be very unhappy with us.”
The CEA, established last year following several complaints on unethical practises and lack of professionalism among real estate agents, required the 32,800 existing agents in Singapore to register with it.
Nearly 27,800 did so and CEA put their names in a public online database after they took and passed examinations or proved that they had brokered at least three transactions in the previous two years.
CEA also requires all agents to be licensed to perform property transactions.
Responding to questions from The Straits Times, the CEA said it put six customer service officers and a manager to accept re-submitted applications that were earlier incomplete and to handle queries on licences.
“We have placed a priority on handling licensing and registration queries, and are beefing up counter service to register those who walk in as soon as possible if they are eventually found to be eligible,” said a spokesperson of CEA, adding that there were no plans of opening more counters in the office.