Increased Licensing for Estate Agents

Any idea how many practising estate agency businesses there are in the UK? Of course you don’t, but you may be surprised to learn that the Government didn’t know either, well, not until recently.
 
Despite the requirement I already have to be approved or licensed by The Information Commissionaire for Data Protection, Money Laundering bodies, own a Consumer Credit License and to register with a complaints handling scheme, it turns out the authorities had never actually combined the information held by these departments into a coherent overview.
 
All estate agents now have to declare their business model to authorities who in turn collate this information for the Government. The agents have to pay £115 per office as an administration charge towards this.
 
You may wonder why they’re bothering, at least I did as I signed the cheque! There are two purposes. The industry is moving increasingly towards a more reputable system from the current remit where frankly any buffoon can open an estate agents business tomorrow if they wanted to. It’s been proposed that ALL individuals working in the industry should be licensed or have passed a qualification. Personally I don’t agree with this. I think it should be the business owners who need to be licensed and subsequently accountable for their staff. This would be much more viable to undertake in terms of the numbers affected and force business owners to instil the correct ethics in their team. To an extent this is already being done by The Property Ombudsmen and similar schemes that agents now HAVE to be a member of. The scheme fines agents if they’re found to have broken their set of guidelines.
 
The other reason they’ve introduced this new scheme is to combat Money Laundering. I gather that the sums of money currently being laundered through the UK property market and then directed into drugs and terrorism would send a chill down our spines. Making agents accountable for vetting the clients they deal with and establishing scary penalties for failing to do so is seen as the best way of countering this activity. Seeing as the punishment for the agent is imprisonment then they have certainly achieved the ‘scary’ element of the objective.
 
If filling in a few forms will help to increase public confidence in our industry and ensure that ethics are at the forefront of ALL estate agencies, then I’m all for it!