By Fred Seely
Editor
Florida’s real estate police don’t overlook the little things. So, if you simply assume you know the rules of the state’s licensing road, you might find your name in a very unpopular place:
The Florida Real Estate Commission’s disciplinary report.
It doesn’t take a major case of fraud to get in trouble with FREC, the state commission that oversees real estate licenses. If you received this newspaper, you’re under the jurisdiction of FREC.
“We spend a considerable amount of time dealing with what you might call ‘minor’ violations,” says Division of Real Estate Executive Director Tom O’Brien. “Every complaint gets the same treatment, whether it’s a mistake in advertising or a case of a major fraud.”
Did you ignore the continuing education requirement? That gets your name published and the frequent penalty is a $500 fine, six month’s probation and your attendance at two of FREC’s two-day meetings.
Did you help an unlicensed pal do real estate business? Looking over past discipline reports, that’s likely to bring a $2,000 fine, 12 month’s suspension, 12 month’s probation and two trips to Orlando for a FREC meeting.
Didn’t get your renewal done in time, and you still were out selling homes? That’s a $500 fine, a 90-day suspension, six month probation and a trip to Orlando.
Doing some of your broker’s work even though you only hold an associate’s license? That might be $1,000, a month’s suspension, six month’s probation and, yes indeedy, two trips to Orlando to watch the commission in action when you could have been out selling.
To be sure, the disciplinary reports are, for the most part, big violations done in a willful manner. If you happened to think these people are representative of the state’s real estate community, you’d head north on the nearest interstate. FREC’s disciplinary action lists reveal a nasty crowd to whom fraud, theft, scheming, negligence and all other sorts of dishonesty seem to be a matter of course.
But, of course, the real bad guys aren’t the norm.
The norm is the little guy who didn’t realize - through ignorance - that his door sign didn’t need the broker’s name, or that his actions as an agent exceeded his authority, or that his change of address was no one else’s business, or that the money really didn’t need to be deposited right away.
But what seems picky to you is serious to the regulators, who must enforce the state’s laws and the commission’s rules. And that means that O’Brien and the Division of Real Estate, which serves the real estate commissioners, must do the onsite work.
“The first steps are the same,” says O’Brien. “The complaint goes to the analyst and the legal section.”
O’Brien and his staff are trying to reach out to Realtors.
“If we can get to them face-to-face, we see a lot of success,” says O’Brien. “We have nine staff attorneys and we prefer that they spend their time dealing with the major problems. But, they have to spend time with every complaint.”
O’Brien is leading the charge, traveling around the state to meet with local boards.
“In the past few weeks, I’ve been in Miami, St. Petersburg, Tampa and Miami,” he said. “We have meetings and 80, 90, 150 show up. It’s a great time to go one-on-one to let them know what they should be looking for.”
The Division of Real Estate oversees real estate school licenses and that’s another point of attack.
“It’s another place where people are one-on-one,” said O’Brien. “We see the real estate instructors at their annual seminars and we make it very clear that we expect our licensees to know right from wrong.”
Local Realtors know that there are major violations but the smaller ones seem to bug them the most.
“One of the most prevalent violations is in advertising,” said Dirk Schroeder, the broker-owner of Century 21 St. Augustine Properties. “They tend to get sloppy and they do not put the name of their company in their ads. And, some individual agents and broker associates working for a brokerage company owned by someone other than themselves will advertise as if they are the broker.”
The recent days of “flipping” also produced problems.
“One of my customers was offering $500 to anyone who brought him a buyer,” said Carol O’Donoghue of All Real Estate Options. “I explained that he was acting as a Realtor without a license. He said he read it in a book and that tons of ‘flippers’ were doing it.”