Real estate brokers, like teachers, doctors and other professions, have long been panned and praised by anonymous users on countless generic “rate my” websites.
But for the first time in Canada, a new program launched by organized real estate will allow Quebecers to rate the men and women they hire to help buy and sell their homes.
In what’s becoming a national trend, with Alberta poised to launch similar initiatives this winter, the Quebec Federation of Real Estate Boards unveiled a program this week to improve its members’ customer service skills, while giving homeowners greater knowledge about their brokers’ track records.
“We want to be proactive – the reason a broker will be hired is for these value-added services,” said Claude Charron, president of the provincial federation’s board of directors.
“We are seeing more and more of these sites: rate my doctor, rate my dentist, rate my vet.
“If we don’t do it, others will.”
The certificationqsc.ca website is part of a bigger effort to promote members’ best practices at a time when the real estate profession is being challenged by growing opportunities for property owners to sell their own homes and avoid paying brokers’ commissions.
The Quebec initiative is based on the Quality Service Certification program in the United States, where participating brokers take a course and are then rated by buyers and sellers after each transaction.
The certification in Quebec – and a new similar course to be launched in Alberta at the beginning of 2012 – is to show brokers the importance of providing services to their clients, as opposed to just focusing on selling homes, or providing information that’s readily available on the Internet.
“Ultimately, what we want is to move toward a service-oriented industry,” Carmen Gray, director of operations at the Alberta Real Estate Association, told The Gazette. “I think we’ve done our industry a disservice by focusing so much on sales.”
But some observers are already skeptical about the utility of these real estate associations’ programs because they are voluntary for brokers. And while Quebec’s initiative goes further than Alberta’s program because it actually names participants, brokers have the choice of whether detailed feedback from their clients should be made available or not to the public.
“The data and the relevance would only be accurate if all participated,” said Don Campbell, the B.C.-based president of the Real Estate Investment Network. “Those who do not provide professional service and conduct would obviously opt out – even if they opt out in the second or third year due to a bunch of negative reviews.”
Since starting in early 2011, a total of 1,319 real estate brokers in Quebec have obtained the Quality Service Certification, including more than 700 in greater Montreal. There are approximately 15,000 brokers in Quebec.
What’s key to the program, Charron said, is that certified brokers would be rated by clients whose feedback is sent to “an independent research firm” in the United States.
Participating brokers with four or more responses from clients would have their average score results published as a “customer satisfaction rating.” To keep their Quality Service standard, brokers would have to maintain a customer satisfaction rating of “satisfactory” or better, and a score of at least 3.75 out of five.
Brokers could either choose to have all their clients’ feedback – or none of it – published on the site as well. “It’s all in or all out,” Charron said.
Brokers would have to pay about $175 to take the course, and another $60, approximately, per year to defray the costs of running the program, Charron said.
Eleni Akrivos, a Montreal broker with Century 21 Innovation, said she took the Quebec course because she has a background in customer service and wants feedback from her clients on how she performs.
“You’re really accountable to your clients,” Akrivos said of the new program.
Next month, Alberta’s association is launching an online survey for clients to describe their experiences buying and selling homes – either with or without a broker. Yet the broker would not be named on the site.
Similar feedback would be collected by the clients of brokers who pass the provincial association’s new course.
But once again, the broker’s individual rating, Gray acknowledged, wouldn’t be made available to the public.
Initially, Gray said the course would be optional for the association’s 10,500 members, although she could envisage it one day becoming mandatory. Eventually, she said, she’d like to also see a mechanism where brokers could be named and rated based on tangible criteria.
“It’s baby steps,” she said. “I think they need to get more comfortable with the concept. Once they get a handle on it then we’d like to start publishing names. I think we’ll get there. The industry needs to see it as a positive step – not a punishment.