The law in Washington State changed on July 1st. Now all of us in real estate that used to be agents are brokers, and those who used to be simply called brokers have additional titles to distinguish them. Former brokers are now ”designated” brokers, or “managing” brokers – they are the supervising brokers. People are updating their business cards. I had already decided to call myself a real estate professional on my cards a few months ago. This seems an apt description.
More than 80 of our statewide forms that are used for various transactions also had to be changed on July 1st. Most of the changes are in language, but some of the changes were more significant. For example listing agreements and buyer representation agreements had bigger changes, as did the purchase and sale agreements. We’ve been instructed to toss out all our old forms and start fresh. One interesting change is that before July 1st our office was a brokerage, but now it is a firm, so on our forms we have Listing Firms and Selling Firms.
Another interesting change is the inclusion of a place for email addresses of the selling broker and listing broker. There is some confusion here because the purchase and sale agreement also states:
E-mail transmission of any document or notice shall not be effective unless the parties to this Agreement otherwise agree in writing.
Some people were thinking we were going to be able to email our transactions, instead of faxing them, and ending up with nice, clear documents for a change. There is a provision in the optional clauses that could make this possible, but not on the purchase and sale agreement itself. But unless there is that written agreement, the documents would not be “effective.” We must remember to include those optional clauses in our deals. There is a nice reminder in the legal bulletin that for a fax to be effective the documents must be faxed to the firm, not to the individual broker. We know this, but it is good to be reminded.
There are lots of other changes, too. In fact with the changeover to Matrix as our NWMLS listing service, the changes in the law, and changes to forms we are dealing with more than enough changes in our region. There are indications that the changes will just keep coming for a while. Oh well…
Tags: brokers, documents, forms, law in Washington State, real estate
