Shawn O'Hara
Welcome everyone. Our guest is Cory Raven. Cory's career began in 1998 with Rennie Marketing doing pre-sale condo marketing and helped establish Rennie Resales, which evolved into Rennie and Associates. In 2010 he opened RE/MAX Select Realty and became broker owner in 2016. Cory was honoured as RE/MAX Manager of the Year in 2015. He served as a director of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, Van East Division from 2010 to 2015, and was a member of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver Professional Conduct Committee from 2011 to 2017.

He's currently on the Government Relations Committee for the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver and holds the positions of broker owner at RE/MAX Select Realty, RE/MAX Select Properties and RE/MAX West Coast. RE/MAX West Coast was recognized as the top office worldwide by Sales Volume in 2016.

He is a director at the BC Real Estate Association, a role he's held since 2017. He's also an expert witness on various cases and has been doing that since 2015. Known as a manager of change, Cory adopts a unique hands-on approach to education, coaching, services and support, which has garnered him high satisfaction ratings among agents. Welcome Cory.

Cory Raven
Thanks for having me.

Greg Dent
And I will add in my own intro of Cory, which is to say that I am an agent at Cory's office and have been very thankful for Cory's leadership. And what was the, what was the quote there, Shawn, extensive training and all the rest. I have personally got to benefit from all of that. And I would agree that Cory is a fantastic manager to work for and with.

Shawn O'Hara
"in his unique hands-on approach."

Greg Dent
No, that's the one. There it is.

Cory Raven
The only thing I would say is the guy that you described sounds like he must be really old. That's a lot of years of experience when we put it down like that.

Cory Raven
Thanks for having me.

Greg Dent
Yeah, so great. Want to jump into this? This is the True North Compliance podcast. We like to talk about all things compliance, which is its own little niche. I'll admit, but I think what was hoping to get from you today, particularly was based on all of that extensive experience we've talked about. And the the old guy view of this. I'm kidding on that part. Don't worry. But the how you've seen compliance change the regulatory landscape change and what the challenges that broker owners right now are facing in the industry.

Cory Raven
So to put it, to try not to be sensationalist, it is a completely different landscape today than it was 25 years ago. Not saying that to be hyperbolic. It is literally completely different. In 1998, we were a self-regulated industry regulated by the Real Estate Council of British Columbia which was primarily, although it was a regulatory body, it was real estate industry-driven and run. It still handed out fines when people did things wrong. It dealt with the licensing. All of that stuff was there, but it was within the industry.

We've moved to today being regulated by the BCFSA, which is a governmental body, a completely different thing. When I think back to years back, if I had a question for someone at the real estate council, I would pick up the phone and call someone's direct line that I had a relationship with. And we would, I would give them a hypothetical about some situation we would go through and we would have a discussion on that. And now you phone, you get the voicemail of a generic number, or if you email, you get their reply back. They're not building personal relationships. It's intentionally much more separated from the industry and just a different landscape.

Add on FINTRAC, which didn't exist when I first got into the business to coming into existence and slowly becoming, or I don't even know if it's slowly become, but the industry has slowly realized the scope and power and seriousness of it. And that's changed not just in the last 25 years or whatever the time it was that it came on board, but in the last five years even it's been a big, big shift. So the the old adage of 'maybe live in exciting times is something' that real estate agents and brokers always get to be thankful for because they're always exciting times.

Greg Dent
We've talked a bit about this over the years, I think it certainly feels like, and I've used the imagery of a bit of a squeeze where broker owners are increasingly challenged with all of this regulatory stuff. Is that a fair analogy? Is that first of all how it feels a little bit?

Cory Raven
Yes. And I certainly don't want to come on here with the violin and try to garner too many people feeling bad for me and the other brokers around, but it is. It is completely a different landscape. It squeezes the right word. And the unfortunate reality of it is that many brokers, myself included, feel like the balance when we think about the time spent on compliance versus running a business versus sales training versus those kinds of things is so much more on the compliance side than it used to be, that it's very hard now for brokers to really pay attention to things like sales training, things that we're supposed to be doing with agents to help educate them, not just on the compliance side, but on the how do you serve your clients and make a living and have a great year and all of those things, they still happen, but they're getting harder and harder because there's so much noise on the compliance end.

This is British Columbia specific as far as our regulator goes, the FINTRAC thing is federal. I sense that other jurisdictions feel the same, but yeah squeeze is certainly the appropriate way to describe it in BC.

Greg Dent
Well and I think you layer into that the changes to the brokerage model as well, that kind of makes it even more difficult. And that's a whole other conversation, not particularly compliance driven necessarily. You still come to work every day. You always have a bright smile on your face. You're always happy to help agents. How do you find a path through all of that right now? And what gives you kind of the hope that this will continue to be sustainable and manageable and all the rest?

Cory Raven
Well, I think one thing that I've been really fortunate for myself and my two business partners who helped me run the three groups, the three brokerages within our group is I've always been a bit of a compliance nerd. So I actually, other than the fact that, that there's a squeeze in the business and there's some stuff that has to happen, I actually enjoy the learning process of it and the looking back at when was this change, and an agent will ask me something about a real estate board or real estate regulator rule and having to look back at, yeah it used to be that way, but now it's this way, and help educate them on that.

I actually enjoy that process, which probably says a lot about me and not in a good way, but I find it to be very interesting, which is helpful. So I do say that it takes focus away from some other things. I actually don't mind. There's so much to learn and you know, we've got 300 agents in our three offices. I'm directly responsible for the 70 at my brokerage that Greg is at. But just the education piece. I mean there could be zero changes for in the next five years, and I think we could all agree today that's not going to be the case, but there could be zero changes in the next five years and I would still be educating because not everyone's on the same path as far as when they learn it and how they keep that information in.

Greg Dent
Do you think the compliance that's kind of an increasing, the increasing regulatory framework, I guess is probably a better way of looking at it. Is that a necessary evil, a reactionary step, a bit of both, good for the public, bad for the public, I guess is ultimately the lens that I like to view a lot of things in. Where do you think all of that fits in?

Cory Raven
All of the above. So the good for the public, bad for the public. I think a sector being heavily regulated and with strict rules on protecting the public is obviously a good thing. I think the public being protected is number one.

The potential bad for the public aspect, when I think about all of the different changes, is sometimes it feels like it's set up in a, we as an industry are set up in a way where it's nearly impossible for a full time busy agent to be up to speed on all of the things they need to be up to speed on, from a compliance point of view.

I don't sell real estate anymore. For the last 15 years, myself and my two part business partners have focused on educating and serving the needs of our agents and compliance and all these things that have to happen. With that full-time focus, I still find myself often having to look up resources and really do a deep dive into what needs to be done, what needs to be reported, what's required, this and that.

Your average agent who is out drumming up business, working on building relationships with their clients so they can help them achieve their real estate goals, they just don't have the bandwidth to be able to keep on top of things. So there's some risk that very well intentioned agents just don't know exactly what needs to happen in a certain situation. That's hopefully where good managing broker and other support can come in, but I think there's some risk there as far as are the changes that have happened,. Were they needed, or was it a bit of a knee-jerk reaction? I think again probably a bit of both.

I think certain changes needed to happen. I think we've seen the maximum fines in our industry grow very substantially. Years ago, the maximum fine our regulator could give a REALTOR® was $30,000 and that went up to $250,000 and brokerage's maximum fines up to $500,000. That's through our provincial regulator. And quite frankly, if you get into situations where people are really breaching the trust of the public, we need larger fines. So those types of things needed to happen and rules need to be in place so when those things happen, there's avenues of which people can be dealt with. There seems to be some worry of people that are well-intentioned, not doing something wrong, but they forget to tick a box and they worry about getting caught up in some of those larger things. So there's, I guess, that's my roundabout way of saying that there's pluses and minuses to all of it, but I certainly get why it's happened.

Shawn O'Hara
How would a fine that large affect a brokerage?

Cory Raven
Well, the maximum fine of $500 000 to a brokerage, I would imagine, and we haven't seen fines of that size despite them raising the maximum, so they're allowed to, or they're able to fine it that large amount. But I would think for many brokerages, it would mean the brokerage is just not going to exist anymore. If we think about, if we follow that sort of thought process down, as a brokerage let's say it's got 25 people in it. Something egregious happens and there's a fine of that size those 25 agents that were there are just going to go find, they're going to find another brokerage to hang their license at.

So that's where my worry comes in of just the large fines by themselves, aren't necessarily going to do the trick. We need to make sure that the agents that are out there, understand what they need to do so they can comply with it. That's what 99. some percent of agents want to do is serve their clients and follow the rules. They just find it tough from time to time to know what those rules are or to remember the steps of what those rules are.

Greg Dent
In a shifting landscape for sure. It makes it much more difficult. And I think you've pointed to something there that to me, I find I have some take some hope and solace in that increasing the level of education, the bar to entry, depending on how you want to phrase that, might actually help diminish the need for additional regulatory stuff. Would that be a, would that make sense to you in terms of how one of the one of the paths out of all of this for us?

Cory Raven
Yeah, I think, well, I don't think I know, and Greg knows, when you talk to agents that are in the marketplace that are working hard, trying to serve their clients and follow the rules and work to their clients, work within their clients best interest, there's a sentiment in our industry that the barrier to entry remains too low and that that low barrier is part of the issue of why we see from time to time people either not following the rules either intentionally or unintentionally.

And I think a higher bar to jump over to get in the industry, I believe personally is the right move or something along those lines. The problem isn't, Greg, you and I have talked about this offline before, is it's a generational issue still. Tomorrow they could announce that you need a six-year degree to become a new real estate agent; we're still 20 years out from the industry being full of the people that needed that to get in, unless they made it retroactive to the existing people which I just don't see happening. So regardless of what happens and raising the bar and all of these other things, we still need to deal with the reality today, which is we need to assist the 25,000 agents in BC in a way that helps the public have the trust, have the trust of the industry, sets the bar high, but allows people to conduct business within those parameters.

Greg Dent
So is that, is that where organized real estate ought to come in? Is that the like assisting with tools and knowledge and better education? I've certainly, credit to BCREA, I've seen them making a concerted effort to better support managing brokers. Provincially they've invested a bunch of salary and resources and there's a managing broker hotline and kind of new tools for brokers. Is that the right direction? Is that how we kind of start to make this less of a squeeze and more of a manageable business?

Cory Raven
I don't know that it'll move the bar as much as it sounds like in your question, you're hoping it will, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. How big of a step that is, I don't know, but having our provincial organization, certainly in the past couple of years, really seemed to be working in exactly that direction.

BCREA put out a Mastering Compliance course that was specific to FINTRAC, mostly geared towards managing brokers, but some others took it as well that really helped us understand some of the changing landscape there and the large scope of FINTRAC, which I think a lot of people didn't understand before the managing broker hotline that they've got. All of that stuff's great. It's a bit self-serving for me to say because I was on the board of directors for BCREA during some of the time that these changes sort of started. So it sounds like I'm patting myself on the back, but I haven't been a director there since 2020 and they are certainly in a better spot today than they were when I left. So all credit to them.

Shawn O'Hara
All this regulation also would be affecting succession, wouldn't it? Because you'd be familiar with the stats of the number of REALTORS® over the age of 60 or the managing brokers over the age of 60, who at some point may want to move on or be forced to move on. By death or whatever, but how's that affecting succession?

Cory Raven
I haven't seen any hard stats on it yet, but just talking to people out there and looking at the landscape, we talked about, I joked about at the start after being introduced with 25 years of experience, being the old guy, I'm still the young guy when it comes to managing brokers. Sadly enough, there aren't a lot of young skilled people becoming managing brokers today. They're getting into just a completely different environment that I got into 15 years ago as a salesperson, the FINTRAC compliance alone, which for clarity for the listeners, being a managing broker doesn't automatically make one a FINTRAC compliance officer. But the reality is almost all managing brokers are the FINTRAC compliance officers for their office so they're often intertwined. And just that compliance piece by itself, let alone the managing broker growing compliance pieces from regulators has just made it so it's not a terribly sexy role.

You know, I talked earlier about the having less time to deal with coaching and mentorship and sales training and the things that most people who get in to become a managing broker, that's the stuff that excites them. They're not thinking about, oh, I hope I can spend 15 minutes instead of 10 minutes reviewing a file and go through 45 pages of documents instead of 30. That would be exciting. So I'm not sure if it's come to fruition yet, but there's certainly going to be a problem in our industry with keeping, getting people into and keeping people into the managing broker role.

Greg Dent
The moment that was clarified for me was at the managing brokers conference back in November when from the stage they asked people of different ages to stand up and managing brokers over 65 were an overwhelming percentage of that room. And you know somebody later asked, well, what are we going to do when they all retire? And the person answering the question said "retire? Nobody said anything about retiring." They have nowhere to retire to. So I'm not sure how we solve that particular part of the question, but it is an interesting challenge.

Cory Raven
Well, we probably shouldn't get too far into and we don't have the time to get too far into business models, but I think the reality is brokerages, generally speaking, are going to probably have to find ways to increase their revenue. I think the model should be, I don't know if the reality is that they'll be able to go this way, but I think the ideal model would be splitting up the managing broker and the FINTRAC compliance officer roles. I think both of those, if you're a decent sized office, those are probably, there's probably enough work there for two full-time roles. And if you're not a decent size office, the revenue wouldn't be there to do so, but there's still just a lot of work for one person doing both of those things, especially if you do want to get back to, again, some of the traditional things like sales training and those kinds of things.

Greg Dent
Yeah, it's interesting. I think you've made a point that I'm not sure you realize how insightful it is. I spend a lot of time talking with broker owners across the country and the brokerages who are signing up for our FINTRAC express product where that's the one click subscription, these small brokerages are finding the most value in that because they just don't have the time resources to actually do this in an effective way.

The large brokerages have a different value add to the whole thing And that's a whole other conversation, but certainly to your point, the small brokerages have all of the same regulatory requirements, but then when you're an office of a five or an office of eight, and let's be clear, our sector is full of that. It's a lot of small little businesses, it's pretty tough to get a complete compliance program in place.

Cory Raven
Well, I don't want to go too far on a tangent, but Greg, you'll recall four or five years ago, our regulator put out a paper on some, not even proposed, but just looking at some potential changes to the business, to the structure of business. And one of the things that they were looking at was maxing out the amount of agents, licensees per managing broker. With the idea of some of these larger offices, there's just too many agents for a managing broker to be in charge of or to deal with or to help with compliance on. But the interesting thing is in looking at that, they actually found an inverse correlation to issues where the larger the office was, the less per capita issues there were with compliance.

And you know, there are amazing brokers with five or six agents, and there's probably brokers that have some things to learn that have a hundred agents. So I'm not suggesting it's a straight line, but I think the need with a lot of agents to constantly be on top of things versus the maybe more reactive style with less agents makes that the case, but an interesting aside, nonetheless.

Greg Dent
That is interesting, actually. And I'm not entirely surprised to hear that, when I get on calls with those larger shops, one of the things I do for a lot of our brokerage clients or for potential brokerage clients is I'll go through their policies and procedures, their current stuff. And when I review the bigger brokerages stuff, generally, they're in a better position, at least. Not necessarily every t crossed and every i dotted, but certainly in a much better position. So that's not intuitive, but it is interesting to see that you've seen stats backing that up.

I think you've got a unique, you do a lot of interesting work on being expert witness. You've had some kind of interesting roles, both BCREA, government relations now. So you've got this different vantage point of view of the industry. How does that both inform your day to day and does that add value to your business and your brokerage, or does that take away your time to doing things that you would otherwise could be doing in your brokerage?

Cory Raven
Yeah, it sounds, again, sort of like our last conversation, it's not, it doesn't seem logical, but the taking time to take part in various committees, and to be clear, the committees in organized real estate are generally volunteer committees taking part in so giving back time to whether it's professional conduct, government relations, et cetera.

And I am a firm believer in not only are those opportunities growth opportunities for myself, but they 100 percent have a great effect on the way that I can run the business and the perspective that I can give to my agents.

An example would be the professional conduct committee with, you know, if I've got 70 agents and I'm reviewing 200 deals a month let's say, that gives me exposure to 200 sets of facts, you know, as far as looking for compliance issues, conversations around those deals with the agents and this and that. And without patting myself on the back, we run a pretty good ship. Our deals that I'm reviewing generally don't have large issues with them.

The professional conduct committee gives me and those that were on the committee a chance to look at the things where the cases where things have gone wrong. Something's gone wrong to the point where someone's made a complaint to the board saying that somebody broke a rule. And so we get to look at, you know, how did that work and what can my agents avoid to or do differently or make sure that they take notes on or avoid to make sure that they aren't in front of this committee at some point.

And that frames, I mean, for years and years when I was on that committee, my sales meetings were full of, obviously not specifics about cases that we run, but the general things of, hey agents are getting themselves in trouble because they're not telling their clients this or they're submitting this piece of paperwork late or they're not calling agents back with this information or that information. So it just allows a sort of larger sort of global scope on what's going on, which I can then deliver to agents that I just wouldn't have access to with a certain amount of agents that are all doing a really good job of what they're doing. Cause frankly, I get a lot of phone calls and knock on wood, not a lot of them are complaints. So I to learn from the industry out there really helps.

Greg Dent
Yeah, no, that, that makes a ton of sense. It actually highlights for me something that I've often thought about and never really kind of understood. And I guess, well, I've never come to a good decision on, I suppose might be a better way of looking at it. And it's the line between what organized real estate can and should be doing to manage our behaviours and what the regulator can and should be doing to manage our behaviours.

And I think, you know, my view has been that we lost self-regulation in this province because we failed to regulate ourselves appropriately. And I think that's probably not a particularly controversial viewpoint at this point. Or I hope not anyway. The follow onto that I think would be that I would love to have seen organized real estate take a larger role on managing our own behaviours.

Do you think that's directionally the right idea, first of all? And are we even in a position to do that? Or is it just is that ship sailed and it's too late at this point?

Cory Raven
Well, to a certain degree, it's too late because an example would be during our losing of regulating ourselves and having BCFSA take over, our board was instructed, our local board, the Vancouver board was instructed when the public calls with a complaint, you don't deal with it. It doesn't matter if the public is saying you broke a board rule or a BCFSA rule, if it's a member of the public, send them to us the regulator. We want to hear from them. We want to deal with them. So there's no ability anymore for the board to deal with some of the things that come in, that just has to be put over to the regulator. There are still lots of opportunities though, because the board does have a bylaws. It's got the rules of cooperation.

It has the REALTOR® code that CREA puts out that by being a board member, you are a part of or any member is a part of. And there's a huge opportunity to make sure that we're governing ourselves to the point where regulators don't feel like they need to come in and be more heavy handed. And I'll give some credit to organize real estate. There are some things that have happened that were great. The real estate board of greater Vancouver actually lobbied several times the real estate council. That was the predecessor to BCFSA, our self-regulated regulator. Our board said many times, we want you guys, the regulator, to raise your maximum fines. We think your fines that you have are too low, you should be fining more. And the board actually internally raised their own maximum fine before the regulator raise their fines. We talked before about those fines going up. If someone is found through a professional conduct committee at the board to have broken a board rule and there's a punishment associated to it, that maximum fine that they can get is now a lot larger than it used to be. There's certainly steps being taken that are in the right direction.

I don't envy the folks in organized real estate having to make the decisions because Greg, you and I have talked about these things before. There's lots of things that I feel really passionately about as a board member and as a CREA member and as a BCREA member, that maybe others don't feel the same way. And so my version of what we need to do might be different than 24,999 other people's in the provinces idea of what needs to happen. So it's hard to make sort of wholesale changes so that's the credit side. The getting off of that side is we can certainly do more. We should have done much more and we should be doing much more to regulate our own activities and make it so, continue to make it so the public has trust in us. Cause mostly they do.

You hear stories about REALTORS® doing wrong things and they're always sexy media stories whenever something goes wrong. So they end up in the paper, they end up getting talked about. But you know, I said 99. whatever before I believe that's the number. I think that the vast, vast majority of REALTORS® are trying to do the right thing for their clients all the time. And we just need to make sure that when that isn't happening, we deal with it in a more effective way, I think.

Greg Dent
Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I think, maybe this is me being optimistic, but the greater Vancouver REALTORS®, as the organization is now called, has the pledge of professionalism that they brought out not that long ago. I think generally speaking, it seems like they're the focus of that particular organization is moving towards where I think we, you know, if we'd been there 10 years ago, maybe this conversation is a completely different conversation all of a sudden. So maybe we're just lagging where we should have been. I don't know.

Cory Raven
Yeah, I think, yes, I think kudos to them for the pledge and for a bunch of things that are happening. There's great, hardworking, passionate individuals at the staff and on the board of directors at the board and great things are coming. And hopefully things are being looked at from the same point of view as your question was asked, which is, sure some change, lots of changes have come. What can we change internally to make it so these things aren't forced upon us? Because quite frankly, whatever change looks like in the next year, if it's the right thing to do, why wouldn't we in organized real estate make those changes versus having a regulator tell us that we have to?

Greg Dent
Well, let's shift to that right now, because I think there's a, I have an answer to the question I'm about to ask you, and I suspect it's the same answer that you've got. But what do you think the largest compliance regulatory shift that is on our landscape that's coming and what do you think our industry should be doing to prepare for it?

Cory Raven
When you say that's coming are you talking about something that's not on our radar and we're predicting are you talking about...?

Greg Dent
Well, the one I'm thinking of is already very much on our radar, south of the border, it's happening as we speak. But I'm happy to go to a different place if you want to go somewhere else, for that matter.

Cory Raven
Well, I think compliance regulatory, I think we're still as an industry, not where we need to be with FINTRAC. So I think that's also going to be a large thing. We're reading about these, we went from, it seems like only in the last two years, but I'm not looking at my notes so it could be longer than that, but we seemingly went from a point of most agents seeing FINTRAC as a piece of paper that needs to be filled out. Most brokerages seeing FINTRAC as making sure that agents are filling out those pieces of paper and that those pieces of paper are in the file. To clearly FINTRAC saying that's not what we're all about. Brokerages hopefully learning that, but some large fines being handed out to brokerages along the way. So I think there's still like a five or ten year path on what that's going to look like.

The South of the border commission, NAR lawsuit settlement stuff is clearly going to make its way up into Canada in some form or another. It may not be the exact same, but that from a, what agents are going to be talking about and thinking about and their sort of day-to-day business, the NAR commission settlement is certainly the larger one. I just don't want to discount FINTRAC.

Greg Dent
Yeah, I think so too. I spend a lot of time talking about FINTRAC and you're right. The fines, average fine in the last four years levied to real estate brokerage is $143,000. So if any brokerages is on this call listening and isn't particularly scared, I think that's a legitimate business risk as well worth considering. But funnily enough, I have a different view on that because for my clients, we've solved that problem. We've solved FINTRAC in a way that's easy enough that I think most brokerages can see a path and can see the light on that. We're here to help on that.

I think if I were a brokerage right now, if I owned a brokerage right now, I'd be trying, and you know, if I were an industry leader running some sort of an association that had enough power to change things, I would be moving towards some sort of a buyer agency concept as quickly as possible. Because I think that to me is the biggest challenge that our industry faces, that has the potential to really disrupt a lot of things about our current practices.

Shawn O'Hara
Can you elaborate on that for people not in the industry?

Greg Dent
Certainly. Yeah, sorry. That's a good point. I'll give background and then I'll let Cory answer the question. So just for some background, the National Association of REALTORS®, which is an American association recently lost the lawsuit whereby they were accused essentially of, price fixing is not really the right terminology, it's more not giving buyers the opportunity to negotiate the rate that they were ultimately paying, even though they weren't directly paying it. And so they mean the complex thing to understand is when a buyer buys a piece of real estate in pretty much anywhere in North America, the buyer will enter an agreement to buy a particular home, the buyer's agent would be paid by the seller through the MLS®, well, as a result of the agreements on the MLS® systems. NARS recent lawsuit, sorry, the lawsuit they recently lost, the end result of it where they settled is that they will no longer be allowed to publish what a buyer's agent would be making should they sell any particular home. And just as importantly, what that means for those buyer's agents is that they're going to have to have real conversations with their clients about how they might get paid. It used to be something that buyer's agents would be able to kind of ignore or have in passing conversation because they knew they were going to get paid by the seller. And now that's in south of the line that is now a conversation that buyer's agents have to be having.

So it is groundbreaking enough that I think it has some repercussions to our industry here. And I guess that's where I'm looking at it, is there a thing in this, is there a way for the real estate sector to understand that the regulatory framework is going to shift on us and it might shift anyway, but can we beat that? And can we get ahead of that? Or at least be doing the right thing before it shifts on us, do you think?

Cory Raven
Well, and I think the interesting thing is, will it be organized real estate who makes the shift or will there be brokerages and agents or brands or some other group smaller than the whole of organized real estate that makes those shifts? And is there a competitive advantage to those that do early? I think if you talk to, let's pretend for a second that we're just behind the United States and the exact same thing is going to happen in Canada in 12 months. But I'm not saying that's the case. Let's pretend for a second. That's the case. So that gives us 12 months to prepare for what we know is already coming. And we don't know for sure that it's going to be exactly that. But let's again, let's bear with me.

If you talk to anyone in the United States right now and said, if we could have, if we could go back 12 months to prepare for what we now know is the case, and instead of just having this dropped on us, every single one of them would be down. Just say, yes I can't believe this. I can't believe down on their knees saying, thank you. Thank you. I can't believe we got this extra opportunity. And human nature is such that sometimes we don't pay attention to things until we absolutely have to. There is an absolute advantage to us up in Canada right now. Someone described it to me as we've got a time machine. We got to go back in time and prepare for this before it comes up. Because some version, if we look a year or two years from now, things will not be exactly the same as they are today as far as how commissions are paid, how buyers are dealt with, how commissions are advertised. I think that that is almost a certainty.

I look back at Greg, you for our brokerage, you did a session on working with buyers, having a buyer's agency dealt with and really treating buyers with the same sort of process and respect that you did sellers. I would say that was five or six years ago. And you've been doing processes in that regard for even longer than that, but it was something that was on the radar where, hey we should probably let some other agents know how this is working long, long ago. So I believe, and Greg, I'm going to speak for you and say that you believe, that many in the industry were not giving buyers the same amount of effort and respect in building relationship at the starting.

Because like Greg said, there was an advertised commission. So if they bought something and if it was with me and if it was through MLS®, I was going to get paid. So it was a conversation I could avoid having. I think we're going to get to the point where the conversation has to happen, but more importantly, there's an absolute opportunity for a buyer's agent to now, like you do when you're trying to help someone sell their place, to help convey value, tell them what it is you do. How you get paid, the services you're going to provide, all of those kinds of things can happen.

Huge opportunity to get out in front of this, treat the potential relationship with a buyer as a business opportunity that you've got, treated as such. Don't say and never should have said that working with a buyer's agent is free. The way that buyer's agents were compensated was through an agreement through MLS® where it was where the seller had previously agreed to it, but buyer's agents weren't working for free. They never were. They never should have said that they were. Off of my soapbox.

Greg Dent
Nah, fair enough. I think it's, to me it ties in and you know, this is the compliance podcast I'll admit, but I think to me this fills into the regulatory compliance space because I think we as an industry are either going to make this change and/or it's going to be regulated. And it's probably both if I'm looking at it at this point, but I think the opportunity from that comes from adapting early as you said.

Cory Raven
Can I give an example/highlight of why things are so difficult for organized real estate in our world?

BCREA sent out not four or five months ago, they sent out a survey to membership and it was about, the question that BCREA posed was, "Dear members, do you want us, BCREA, to go to our regulator and suggest that buyer's agency agreements [so similar to when you work with a seller and you sign a listing agreement, buyer's agency where I'm working with a buyer] do you members want us to go to the regulator and suggest that those agreements become mandatory? Become something that buyers when working with, sorry, REALTORS® when working with buyers need to get one of these signed.”

And for the listener, just so you know, we've got a rule in place that if I'm working with a seller or a real estate agent working with a seller, we have to get that agreement in writing. That's already a rule that exists with buyers. We don't have such a rule. So it was, should we go down that path? This was the NAR. The NAR thing was already happening down south. They had already lost the lawsuit. The settlement hadn't happened, but it was, the writing was on the wall and much of our membership, much of the BCREA membership said, why would you do this? Why would we try to make something mandatory that doesn't mean to be mandatory? What if this. what if that? So there was push against it, even though the writing's on the wall and this is likely coming. So we can either ignore it and wait.

Cause we talked before about, you know, what can we do to make it so these changes aren't coming at us from regulatory bodies in such a way that we don't have control over when and how and all the rest of it. Well our provincial organization took that step and said, you know, what do you want us to do about it? And you know, I don't know what the stats were on numbers, but I saw many comments online of people saying, this is ridiculous, this is not your lane. Don't do it. And when we think that way about let's just keep things the way that they are, bad things happen, is my general thought on that.

Greg Dent
I've always believed and I've shared this belief with you before. I've always believed that the consumer always wins and it's just a matter of time. And so I think on this one, I agree with you and I'm worried that the consumer might win in a way that those same people were complaining, are going to regret having complained and not gotten on board in the first place.

Greg Dent
Fair enough. Or an opportunity, depending on how you look at it. And I think that probably ties into the last question that I certainly have, which I think to me, whether it's a FINTRAC compliance program, a compliance program for your BCFSA obligations, just any sort of that kind of a regulatory framework and compliance program that you're going to build within a brokerage there's actually a really good business case for this. And I think that's where there's often a misunderstanding. I think. It is a cost center and I appreciate that there is some costs associated with a proper compliance program. I sell compliance programs, I get that. But I also know that when that's done properly, I think you actually can boost your business and/or your business can be the one that does better in times of significant change and/or uncertainty.

Do you think that's a fair way of framing it? First of all, and then have you had a chance to observe that in your business?

Cory Raven
Yes, I think certainly if I look at conversations that I've had with agents that are within our group, there's certain things that people that decide to hang their license with our group like, and feedback that we get on the way that we run our businesses and why people choose to stay.

For the listener and it's a compliance podcast, I'm sure that listeners are generally already within our industry and they know this, but agents can choose where to run their business. They're generally independent contractors and are free to hang their license where they choose to. So there's certainly a need to have a compelling reason why someone should be with your office instead of someone else's.

And I think there's a few different reasons for it, but one of the largest ones, you know, I talked before about how I'm a bit of a compliance nerd and how I took what I learned in professional conduct committee and some of these other committees and helped sort of form what gets talked about in training and sales meetings with my agents.

I think a huge value add is that our agents in our three offices know when they call one of the three managing brokers that they're going to get a factual answer on what's going on. So there's this, what's changed and when? and what do I have to do with this form again? And when having someone that you can contact and know that you're going to get that answer, I think is certainly a value add, and getting to hopefully what I think is the point we're at in the marketplace where we've actually, I got a reputation for that in the marketplace as being aware of what's going on with compliance. I think certainly is a value add and, and it's not just us. There's many brokerages around that you, you can point to where you think, okay, they know what they're doing. It would be a surprise for them to be written up with a large fine for doing something wrong as a brokerage as far as not understanding what compliance is. So yeah, I think there's certainly some value there and part of the value added why agents decide to work with us.

Greg Dent
Perfect. Beautiful. I love it.

Shawn O'Hara
Neat. Thank you.

Cory Raven
Thanks for having me, gentlemen.

Greg Dent
Yeah, I appreciate. I appreciate your time, Cory. I appreciate who you are. I appreciate what you do for me and my businesses. And thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

Cory Raven
Right back at you. Thanks guys, have a great afternoon.