Jim Reid BA, MBA, Bro­ker, ABR, ICI
Royal LeP­age – Your Com­mu­nity Realty
Rich­mond Hill, Ont.

In a career that already includes enor­mous pro­fes­sional respon­si­bil­i­ties and per­sonal mar­ket­ing expen­di­tures, I don’t need the government’s Com­pe­ti­tion Bureau becom­ing the spokesper­son for one, two or three dis­grun­tled busi­ness­men in an indus­try with over 90,000 mem­bers across Canada or 32,000 mem­bers in the GTA.

As for TREB mem­bers, we pay for our asso­ci­a­tion and the MLS sys­tem in order to help us serve our clients more effec­tively. It appears clear to me, and any­one else who is inter­ested, that the MLS sys­tem belongs to the mem­bers who have entrusted the asso­ci­a­tion to be stew­ards of the sys­tem. Thus, the mem­bers should be free to choose how the sys­tem will be designed and used. Also, mem­bers must respect the deci­sions of the mem­bers in this regard. The idea that one or even 10 mem­bers want a change to the sys­tem should not be forced upon all the mem­bers. In fact, some mem­bers may want to develop expen­sive appli­ca­tions for them­selves that will reduce the com­pet­i­tive­ness of the other mem­bers who don’t have large amounts of cap­i­tal. Such appli­ca­tions of the MLS sys­tem should not be approved by TREB or forced upon the mem­ber­ship by the Com­pe­ti­tion Bureau. In fact the bureau would truly be favour­ing big busi­ness and thus reduce competitiveness.

There are sev­eral indus­tries in Canada where cor­po­rate mem­bers have devel­oped shared data­bases, many of which are not acces­si­ble to the pub­lic (car insur­ance, life insur­ance, oil and gas indus­try, min­eral min­ing indus­try, med­ical indus­try, auto deal­ers, auc­tion­eers). These indus­tries have unequiv­o­cally merged into oli­gop­o­lies with wide­spread price fix­ing. To com­pare the real estate indus­try to these would be grossly unfair and dishonest.

The lob­by­ing power of a cou­ple of real estate bro­kers with the Com­pe­ti­tion Bureau is cap­i­tal­iz­ing upon the diver­sity and inde­pen­dence of the front line real estate sales rep­re­sen­ta­tives. We have no mech­a­nism in place to rally together and voice our com­mon out­rage at the manip­u­la­tion and deceit being foisted upon us by Melanie Aitken of the Com­pe­ti­tion Bureau. Even the terms and phrases being used by her are reported in a legal jar­gon that has been designed by a par­ti­san per­spec­tive in this mat­ter. These are not the words of a con­sumer advo­cate. They are the words of a dis­grun­tled Real­tor and their lawyers.

I truly hope that TREB will be able to match their legal jar­gon blow by blow and even­tu­ally defeat this mega­lo­ma­niac. I am not incor­rect in assum­ing that 99 per cent of front-line Real­tors would pre­fer to have the MLS sys­tem evolve in a man­ner approved by our mem­ber­ship and in a man­ner that will help us pro­vide excel­lent ser­vices to our clients. Sur­geons don’t teach their patient clients how to oper­ate, and Real­tors don’t need to try to make the pub­lic into knowl­edge­able unli­censed Realtors.

I sent a let­ter voic­ing my con­cerns to six cab­i­net mem­bers. The Prime Minister’s Office for­warded this let­ter to his Indus­try Min­is­ter, who then sent it on to the Com­pe­ti­tion Bureau. A junior bureau offi­cer called me this morn­ing in the hope he could appease me and reduce my con­cerns. He works for the com­mis­sioner head­ing the TREB inves­ti­ga­tion. His main com­ment was that the tri­bunal will be made up of inde­pen­dent individuals.

I asked for an inde­pen­dent enquiry by the min­is­ters but they sent my enquiry to the com­mis­sioner. I was com­pletely sur­prised by this behav­iour and atti­tude in response to my letter.

The point I empha­sized to the bureau’s offi­cer is that they intend to reg­u­late the estab­lish­ment of expen­sive web­site offices that will cer­tainly favour bro­ker­ages and teams of agents whilst mak­ing it too costly for inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors to com­pete. This will reduce com­pet­i­tive­ness in the Inter­net media mar­ket­ing channel.

The bureau did not appear to have thought through the full impli­ca­tions of their direc­tive. In fact, their action will only help the dis­count bro­kers to reduce their costs and human ser­vices. The dis­count bro­kers will be given access to the data­base that the inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors have paid for through our mem­ber­ship fees. Also, our asso­ci­a­tions will have to increase their expen­di­tures on main­te­nance, secu­rity, polic­ing and arbi­tra­tion in the future. There is also con­sid­er­able risk as these new for­mat bro­ker­ages fail and the data­bases are then open to data theft. The whole con­cept is fool­ish and not pro­gres­sive from the con­text of the per­son­al­ized real estate ser­vices that are the back­bone of orga­nized real estate in Canada.

I hope to retire in a cou­ple of years and have sig­nif­i­cantly cut back on my new busi­ness gen­er­a­tion activ­i­ties. Believe me, I am not send­ing these mis­sives for my own inter­ests as the CB offi­cer pre­sumed. My intent is to encour­age Real­tors to pro­tect their busi­ness model and to assert their rights to deter­mine how their fees are spent.

If the MLS sys­tem is to be used or deliv­ered in a mod­i­fied for­mat by the pub­lic or by spe­cial inter­est users, then these peo­ple should be on a “pay-as-you-go” basis and our MLS oper­at­ing fees should be elim­i­nated. The MLS should become a profit cen­tre for us and our asso­ci­a­tion, espe­cially since we are per­son­ally liable for the accu­racy of the data.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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