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RSS FeedLawyer To Real Estate Licensee? |
Posted at My hometown Ocean City Maryland by Monica McNamara
July 14, 2008
Categorized in: Professionalism in Real Estate
Hot off the press blog entry from Monica
Lawyer To Real Estate Licensee????
The Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation are responsible for licensing and regulating the activities of over 175,000 individuals, corporations and partnerships. Twenty one occupations and professions are covered. The Occupational and Professional Licensing mission is to protect the public by assuring that licensees have met the educational requirements, and that these same licensees maintain a standard of competence in their chosen profession. They also address consumer complaints.***
It sounds like quite a daunting task to me. It has to be extremely difficult to regulate such a broad base of professions.
Somewhat recently a circumstance came to my attention that I found to be very disturbing. A Maryland Real Estate License was issued to an individual who had their Maryland Law License revoked.
What’s wrong with this picture? Am I the only one who sees a major flaw in allowing this to occur? In all candor, I do not know why this individual’s law license was revoked, but it can’t be because they were behaving in a fashion that exhibited ethical and legal business practices.
I did some research on the Maryland State Board of Law and their Admission Rules and Regulations. Being lawyers, (I guess), they’ve got a lot of rules. Those rules do not only cover the educational requirements for licensure, but also extensive emphasis is placed on a lawyer to always demonstrate upstanding “character and fitness”. The State Board of Law Examiners has a “Character Committee”. They sound pretty serious about their do’s and do nots.
So how can a person with a revoked law license obtain a real estate license within the same state?
This all harkens back to my theme (and pet peeve), of the lack of professionals who practice in our industry.
If I were a buyer or seller, I would never want to work with an individual who had a license revoked from another profession. Good grief, now they are selling real estate by default. (After all it’s so easy to get a real estate license).
This really upsets me. We hold ourselves out to be educated, honest, hard working (not to mention professional) REALTORS, (let’s not forget about the Code of Ethics here either), and yet something like this situation comes along to further erode the perception of our industry.
I’d love to hear from others with your thoughts on this subject. I know I can’t stand alone on this.
Monica McNamara
*** Source – Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation web site.
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