The crackdown on wrongful price ads by agents immediately followed the passage of new quoting laws. It has been revealed that the quoting practices considered wrongful are still widespread among real estate agents, for example, in the west of Sydney.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the crackdown operation that was carried out by the Department of Fair Trading between Jan. 4 and 8 distinguished and found 176 "cases of noncompliance." The new advertising laws were announced on Jan. 1 and under these new laws, real estate agents are no longer allowed to use phrases like "offers above" or "offers over" or anything similar.
The Sydney Morning Herald further reports that the investigation that followed immediately after the new laws were broadcasted found out that many agents were still utilizing terms like "offers above" and "offers over" with variations like "starting from" and "expected bidding from."
There were those that were identified to be using the term "plus" or the plus symbol and "up" and "upwards" after a price on advertisements then the words "from" before the price.
The Penrith suburbs was discovered to have the highest recorded non-compliance with 27 breaches recorded between two real estate agents. Other areas, trailing behind Penrith, include Bella Vista (19 between four agents), Queanbeyan (15 by a single agent), Burwood (13 between two agents) and Riverstone (10 between two agents).
The Department of Fair Trading has decided to keep identities of those agents under wraps. Those real estate agents were not prosecuted yet because Fair Trading discusses that experience is a better teacher. So instead Fair Trading only reached out to the agents to ask them to fix non-compliant advertisements within two days.
According to regulation minister Victor Dominell, "The legislation states that advertising offers 'above' or 'over' with a price is prohibited, so simply replacing those words with offers 'plus' is clearly not within the law."
