There are times when a seller may ask to co-list a property with another brokerage. This could be in hopes of greater exposure, or for assurance that they will have support should they want to work with a smaller brokerage who may not have the means to cover when licensees are out of town.

When co-listing a property, there are small but important differences to the paperwork requirements. Those requirements depend on which brokerages are co-listing the property and what their agency models are.

When a consumer completes a brokerage agreement, service contract or purchase agreement with software to secure an electronic signature, and the signature field includes a date stamp, there is no requirement to fill in the ‘Dated’ line in the final section of the form.

For example, a signature provided by dotloop identifies the date and time the signature was placed on the form, as seen below.

The Commission Board of Directors have approved a number of bylaw revisions to (1) introduce online voting in place of paper and proxy voting for the 2017 Annual General Meeting, and (2) to enhance the compliance recourse when licensees do not comply with the Commission during investigations or audits.

View the Bylaw here.

All real estate agreements expire. A specific date is always included to identify to the consumer the time period that they have agreed to receive services from the brokerage. Once the agreement expires, the client has no longer agreed to receive those services and, thus the brokerage must not continue to provide those services after that time.

Starting January 1, 2017, the Nova Scotia Real Estate Commission will require all brokerages to sign a brokerage agreement with buyers who agree to be clients of their brokerage. This move is aimed at enhancing consumer protection by improving transparency between the brokerage and buyer by clearly outlining expectations at the time they agree to work together.