Agency Law Overview
Well, greetings. Robert Locke here with trainingpropertymanagers.com. And the topic of this video today is when agency duties and the law collide. I've been in the sales business for about 20 years before I came into property management. I kind of thought I knew something about agency law.
That's a topic that is kind of hammered into you in pre-licensing and all the post-licensing classes. Agency law is a very big deal in the sales and brokerage business as it is in property management, but they kind of give you a certain slant on the training in the sales business. I never had any difficulty with agency there.
Conflict in Property Management
But about five years into the property management business, I realized that what I thought I understood about agency law had some real problems, some tension with it. And the conversation we're going to have today is basically when things happen in your business where the law and agency duties are in conflict with each other. In other words, there will be times in property management that it will not be clear what my agency duty is versus what the law is, and you're going to be put into all kinds of situations where your agency duty as you kind of understood them in the sales business and your duties under the law in dealing with a tenant situation, and we're going to try to answer the question, what do you do?
What do you do when agency duties and the law are in conflict with each other? So whether you're a newbie in the business or a veteran, this is kind of a dissecting and pulling apart and really kind of addressing very surgically exactly what these issues are and help with how do we make these decisions when they come up. Now, there's one way to put it is when do I violate my agency duty to protect the owner and myself? Now, I want to make very clear, I'm not suggesting that you violate agency duty, but it's not quite as clear as that. There are times when you're going to feel that your duties to follow the owner's instructions under agency and the circumstances that present themselves that could cause great harm to
you or to the tenant, or even long-term to the owner, are going to be harder to decide because these issues get wormy, they get sticky, and if you haven't thought it through in advance, this is going to become a problem for you.
Training Approach
Now, what instructors are supposed to do is present a problem and then give you answers for it. The idea of good training is to create tension, create confusion, to lay a problem out that's going to create a little stress in the student, and then over a period of 20, 30 minutes, kind of solve that problem and make them a lot happier in the end. Well, in this particular class, I'm not going to be able to do that very well. This workshop will create anxiety and tension.
I don't know if it'll create it, but it'll kind of pull the curtain back on it and kind of examine it because it's there. It's created by the business that you're in.
Preparation and Advice
You're going to face anxiety and tension on a lot of different issues, and if you understand in advance that just because the law says one thing and your owner is telling you something else, and your agency duty kind of makes you think about, should I follow the owner's instructions or should I do something else to protect the tenant, to protect yourself, maybe even to protect the owner? So let's do a little housekeeping before we get started so that we make sure we're all on the same page. Okay? A little housekeeping.
First of all, this is not state-specific. This works in Alabama and California and Michigan. It's exactly the same way around the country. So don't think that because Robert is in the Georgia market that it's any different from you. It is not.
Secondly, I'm not your broker. Now, that's not news to you, but what I want to kind of emphasize is that when you have tensions in this area about agency duties and the law, you should go to your broker. They're the ones with, hopefully, the most experience and can help you kind of sort through these issues. Okay? Next, I'm not your commissioner, and I'm not a lawyer.
Now, I know a lot about the law, and I've studied the law. I've been doing property management 35 years. You can't help but get knee-deep in the law in property management in that period of time. But if you get an area of confusion, you probably should open up your manual of your license law, or maybe talk to your broker and an attorney to kind of sort some of these things out because your liability as a property manager is much higher in the property management world than it is in the sales world because these issues of agency are so sticky.
And then lastly, the best disclosure I've ever written out in terms of see me as a trainer and an instructor, not your boss, is this one, don't believe anything I tell you. And you should kind of see that of any instructor. You should kind of say, I'm going to listen, I'm going to take notes, but my real authority is ultimately the commission, the real estate commission in my state. Maybe the judge behind the bench is going to rule on some of these things, but your broker certainly is the one that you should go to on these kind of topics. So lastly, I'm going to give you a download code at the end of this class because you can download the slides and then some other handouts that we want
you to have to kind of help you implement and accentuate some of the topics that we're going to talk about today. So we're going to have a little five-second break, and we appreciate you hanging with us, and we'll get into the topic for the day. Don't go away.
