CAPE TOWN - THE ESTATE Agency Affairs Board (EAAB) intends to defend legal action taken against it by the Real Estate Business Owners of South Africa (Rebosa) organisation, due to a near decade-old issue of the regulator not issuing Fidelity Fund Certificates (FFC) on time.
Last week, Rebosa said it had resorted to taking the EAAB to court for shoddy services delivery, following “years of attempted collaboration” in trying to resolve the problem, Rebosa chairperson Tony Clarke said in a statement.
Rebosa was going to court on behalf of “hundreds of members” who had not been issued its FFC for 2021.
The certificate is an essential requirement of every estate agent and the timeous issue of the certificates has been a problem of the EAAB for seven to 10 years, with extensive backlogs from previous years.
The EAAB said on its website yesterday that the court application related to 210 agents who alleged that they did not receive FFCs. “We are going through the list and have noted that some have already been issued, some are duplicates, some have outstanding information and with those that are new where we have already issued the FFCs. “The FFCs were issued as from Saturday when we first received the list,” the regulator said.
And while Rebosa had claimed years of helping to try to sort out the problems, the EAAB said that the issue of the outstanding FFC’s had not been raised when teams between the EAAB and Rebosa had met in October 2020, “where it could have been timeously resolved.”
The EAAB said a task team had been established to look into this matter and make proposals to make sure that this situation did not arise again. It is a criminal offence for an estate agent to practice without an FFC.
“By failing to meet its legal obligation to issue FFCs to qualified agents, the EAAB is forcing property practitioners to either refrain from operating, indefinitely, or break the law in order to feed their families. This is unacceptable,” said Clarke.
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