Thoughts on TRESA

Phase Two of the new regulations in The Trust in Real Estate Services Act (TRESA) came into effect December 1. You’ve probably read a bit about it in the newspapers. The stated goal is to make it more clear to consumers what real estate agents can and can’t do to help them, what can and can’t be said, and what multiple representation really means (as well as “designated representation” and “brokerage representation”). To build more trust between the profession and the consumer.

The new Act also gives sellers the ability to disclose the contents of competing offers (and then to change their minds and keep those contents secret, and then to disclose them again, on and on into the night, which is, of course, a well-known way to build trust).

There are forms galore to be completed. And before any serious business can begin, there is a 12-page “Information Guide” that must be read and explained and acknowledged in writing. I realize this is very early days, and we’ll inevitably come to incorporate the new protocols more or less invisibly into our businesses, but my first thought is that the end result of all these supposed clarifications and explanations and simplifications is to muddy the real estate waters more than ever. In many cases consumers will be forced to sign on with a real estate agent before they’ve even looked at a single house together, and the bidding process is now infinitely more complicated and less transparent. I find myself shaking my head precisely when I’m supposed to be singing the new Act’s praises.

I’ve been a real estate agent for sixteen or seventeen years now (how in the world did that happen?), and I’ve read the new Information Guide carefully several times the last few weeks (it wasn’t made available to us until the second half of November). It is only now becoming clear to me (very slowly) exactly what message it is trying to impart, and why it is organized the way it is. The average consumer is likely to be both baffled and put off. And as for some of the endless acknowledgements and consents that will be required as the house search evolves, well presently they read like parts of a Monty Python sketch, or a CIA stress test.

I stood in the kitchen of a downtown listing last night and as the sun fell (and then the moon rose, and finally a terrible hunger set in) I explained to good young people who to that point had trusted me to help them, what had just happened to all the rules. They left our meeting overwhelmed and I think a little resentful of the homework I insisted they do before we could move forward with an offer.

I’ll get better at that speech, I’m sure. The obligations and responsibilities and duties I describe will sound less burdensome, less deliberately contorted, and the new regulations less self-serving. But truth is, this new act feels, in all its tortured switchback language and in the repetitive brain-numbing legalese of its new forms, like a complication of the process; less a refinement of service than the infliction of a punishment. My prediction is that these changes will actually make people less confident in organized real estate, and will make it less likely that clients will come out of the buying or selling process believing they know exactly what just happened to them. It will, in other words, achieve the exact opposite of its aims, and that’s some trick.

*If you’d like me to send you a copy of the new Information Guide just let me know.