Builders need to license sales agents

Posted by Maryland RealEstateRama

July 9, 2007

Construction companies scramble to meet state deadline

A new law requiring Maryland homebuilders to license their sales agents by the fall has many in the industry worried they may not be able to meet the deadline.

Starting in October, anyone who provides real estate brokerage services — including selling, buying, leasing or collecting rent — must be licensed by the state Real Estate Commission, according to a legislative analysis.

Developers who rent or sell homes they constructed are currently exempt from licensing requirements. Instead, the builder and staff sales agents are required to register with the Home Builder Registration Unit in the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s Office. As of June 2006, the unit had almost 3,900 registrants.

There are thousands of people who need to be licensed under the new regulation, and there is no clear path on how to get them all licensed in time, said Tom Ballentine, director of policy for the Home Builders Association of Maryland.

Builders and their new-home sales agents are already covered by the Home Builder Registration Act. That law’s penalties against builders who don’t meet obligations are much higher than those resulting from a consumer complaint with the Real Estate Commission, Ballentine said.

The potential cost of this mandate for builders has not been calculated yet. ‘‘That’s something that people are grappling with now,” Ballentine said.

There would be reasonable ways to address concerns within builder registration by making changes that don’t have the downside of diminishing consumer protection, increasing costs to homebuyers and having heavy impact and hardship on employees in the new home sales business, Ballentine said.

by Liza Gutierrez, gazette.net

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