A second B.C. real estate agent has been ordered to pay more than $30,000 for failing to notify his clients about an impending special levy before they purchased a condo in White Rock.
He must also complete the Real Estate Trading Services Remedial Education Course at UBC’s Sauder School of Business within three months, according to the order.
The discipline stems from an incident that occurred in 2018. At the time, Dehideniya had only recently joined Sutton Group – West Coast Realty and was a junior member of the group that marketed itself as “The BC Elite Real Estate Group,” according to the consent order.
A retired couple from Langley approached the team’s lead – identified in the order only as SY – looking to move to White Rock. Dehideniya and SY conducted a property search, and the buyers eventually entered into an agreement to purchase a condo in a four-storey, 39-unit strata building that was built in 1986.
The agreement was subject to the review of strata documents – including meeting minutes, bylaws, financial statements and more – by the buyers.
According to the consent order, those documents were provided to Dehideniya the day before subject conditions were due to be removed and a deposit paid.
The order indicates Dehideniya didn’t share the documents with the buyers until June 8, 2018, well after they had completed their purchase and moved into the condo.
If they had received the documents on time, they likely would have known that the strata council was planning a special levy to pay for improvements to the building envelope, with a total cost anticipated to be around $2 million.
Instead, according to the order, the couple found out about their potentially large liability from one of their new neighbours – a strata council member – as they were moving in.
The final cost of the special levy for the buyers’ unit ended up being more than $61,000, a total they couldn’t afford. They ended up selling the property a little more than a year after buying it.
“Mr. Dehideniya told BCFSA that he did not provide the strata documents to the buyers as they did not have email and he could not print hundreds of pages and mail them,” the consent order reads.
2ND MISCONDUCT PENALTY IN CASE
In the consent order, Dehideniya agrees that his handling of the situation amounted to professional misconduct.
He acknowledges that he “failed to make inquiries into the strata’s building envelope remediation project,” “failed to obtain, review, and provide to the buyers a complete set of strata documents” prior to their purchase, and “failed to advise the buyers to seek independent professional advice regarding the potential risks associated with the building envelope remediation project.”
Dehideniya is the second member of the Sutton Group–West Coast Realty team to be fined for professional misconduct in relation to his handling of the White Rock condo purchase.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
