Common situation where a real estate Agency provides poor service, cheating the customer or, having received the first installment, suddenly disappears.
In the state of new York to protect the interests of tenants, the Department of licensing at the state Department, which controls agents and sellers of real estate. At its discretion the Department may revoke or deny an Agency license and to impose a fine for the activity.
The work of such services is complicated by the fact that agencies often provide incomplete data, and consumers cannot know whether a mediator for any violations. Because of this, a growing number of situations in which consumers become victims of poor service. However, the maintenance of the register does not guarantee the availability of data on court cases with the participation of a realtor.
As it turned out, many things simply were not made to share. Senior Advisor Reinvent Albany Alex Camarda believes that the database requires significant improvement. According to the analysis conducted by The Real Deal, and archive of judicial decisions NYSAR (realtors Association of new York state), was discovered in 23 decisions on lawsuits on deprivation of the licence for the last 10 years, which is not in the online records of the state.
According to the data analysis of the Department of state, in the year issued around 40 decisions on the licensing of real estate. More than 80 court decisions in the period from 2010 to 2017, which are publicly available on the Department’s website, is not registered in the archives of NYSAR.
«This is an obvious cause for concern when you have an administrative record of the hearing, which must be entered into the database, but they are not there. Therefore, users do not get a full picture of the actions of the government», — says Chamard.
Despite the limitations of the register of cases concerning lawsuits on licensing, the new Yorker Tania Mejia managed to get back $2 thousand, which she paid in advance the firm Chrome Residential. In 2014, Mejia after a bad experience left an angry review on Yelp. The Agency refused to return her downpayment if she didn’t remove your comment. The woman filed for consideration to the Department of state a consumer’s complaint.
Two years after the incident, in September 2016, the administrative law judge has revoked the license Chrome Residential, but in the state database, this information is still missing. According to documents provided by the Department of state from 2009 to 2011 more than a dozen cases of active Agency operations led to the issuance of fines of $2 million, but neither one of them is not open online access. According to the representative of the Department, no documents were excluded from the database intentionally. It’s all about the incompleteness of databases and the limitations of the tools for data retrieval.
