Liability of realtors in housing transactions may be tightened

Mediation activities in the real estate market can be regulated in Russia. Rospotrebnadzor has prepared a draft resolution that proposes to recognize the services of realtors as domestic and to hold agents responsible for the reliability of transactions. The document is undergoing a regulatory impact assessment procedure, and the new rules may come into force as early as September 1. This was announced on March 4 by the Delovoy Peterburg portal.

Currently, the very concept of "realtor" is absent in Russian legislation. The profession is mentioned only in Rosfinmonitoring documents: according to the "anti-money laundering" legislation, real estate agencies and individual entrepreneurs are required to inform the agency about real estate purchase and sale transactions in excess of 5 million rubles if they participate in the calculations or accompany the transaction.

According to the draft, intermediary services in the real estate market are proposed to be attributed to the household needs of citizens. Companies and individual entrepreneurs providing such services will have to provide the client with complete information about the property, ensure confidentiality and act solely in the interests of the customer.

At the same time, the document does not contain any qualification requirements for specialists. Moreover, when assessing the number of market participants, the authors of the project actually equated residential building management, which is carried out by HOA, housing and communal services and other management organizations, to real estate activity.

The Ministry of Construction, Housing and Communal Services of the Russian Federation recognizes that transactions in the secondary real estate market are associated with increased risks.

"We have regulated the work of developers to the point of impossibility, while the activities of realtors, unfortunately, are not so subject to the attention of the state," said Deputy Minister Nikita Stasishin.

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Experts spoke about the pros and cons of the bill.

Market participants, however, evaluate the initiative critically. Alexander Ginovker, Vice President of the Association of Realtors of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, believes that the proposed standards only briefly capture the practices that developed in the market back in the early 1990s.

According to Nikolay Zyryanov, a member of the legal committee of the Russian Guild of Realtors, the project does not solve the key problem of the industry — the lack of qualification requirements for specialists. He noted that the only restriction would be a ban on providing such services to the self-employed: only legal entities and individual entrepreneurs would be able to work in the market.

Maxim Yeltsov, head of the PIA Real Estate agency, also drew attention to the controversial nature of the very idea of classifying real estate services as household services along with, for example, shoe repair or tailoring.

Lawyers point out that the document establishes only the basic principles of regulation. Sergey Fomin, CEO of the law firm Jursfera, noted that the project actually recognizes real estate activity at the bylaw level for the first time, but does not introduce mandatory requirements for education, length of service or professional liability insurance.

The rule that a realtor should ensure the preparation and verification of documents for a transaction is particularly controversial. This wording may mean that the intermediary will be obliged to compensate for losses if the transaction is subsequently challenged due to errors in the documents.

At the same time, experts note that realtors do not have the authority to conduct a full—fledged legal review of documents - they can only use open information. Notaries, Rosreestr and the judicial system have the authority to confirm the legality of the transaction.

According to the RusProfile service, there are about 14.6 thousand real estate agencies and 38.1 thousand private realtors with the status of individual entrepreneurs in Russia. Approximately 1.3 thousand agencies and 3.8 thousand such specialists are registered in St. Petersburg.

On January 11, Oleg Sedov, co-founder and head of Moduldom Yug, said that over the past few years, home buyers have become more likely to use raised tones and show pickiness and exactingness when making deals. According to him, buyers already initially come with the intention of being able to "knock out" as much benefit as possible for themselves. One of the reasons for this behavior may be stress due to rising prices and surging mortgage rates. This is also influenced by watching news feeds, realtors' chats and real estate forecasts, which "charges" buyers for appropriate behavior.

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