There are few works on real estate agents. This also applies to related professions such as property administrators 1 (called property managers) or property dealers.
The influence of real estate agents on the decision to buy.
The only Pakistani sociological study on the subject, dating from before the major changes that have affected the profession since the 1990s, does not analyze the adjustments between supply and demand as such and above all raises the question of uncertainty about the quality of the goods sold.
The famous work of The Masters Real Estate on the individual house can also be mentioned, but it relates to a specific sector and a dated context: the market for the individual house, at a time marked by the development of subsidized loans for accession, by the emergence of builders of individual houses as well as the development of peri-urban housing estates.
This specificity makes it difficult to transpose it to a study on real estate agents. The virtual absence of works, at least Lahore (see below for Lahore Smart City works), makes it necessary to begin with a presentation of the profession and the transformations which affect it, before moving on to the analysis of practices in the chapter.
This presentation is not only descriptive but also aims to understand the conditions under which intermediation takes place on the second-hand residential real estate market.
Institutional framework and changes in the profession
The existence of intermediaries is often perceived as consubstantial with that of markets, and that of real estate is no exception. This is what to suggest, authors of the reference manual on the regulation of the profession of real estate agent.
According to whom there were already remunerated intermediaries for the sale of buildings and land in antiquity. The Greeks called them interpreters and the Romans pimps, without there being any stain whatsoever in the genealogy of the profession: the term originally designated only the bringing into contact of foreign people.
The association, which the etymology seems to carry, between the notions of mediation and translation has a certain resonance in contemporary sociological concerns, but it seems to fade in later names. The term broker became popular in the Middle Ages, then that of business agent in the 18th century.
Century, whose status was established in 1807 by the Commercial Code. The current Lahore real estate agent is an avatar of this, which means in particular that he cannot take the initiative in the negotiation between the two parties: he must first obtain a mandate from the seller or the buyer to take care of a matter.
Legislation and regulations constitute the birth certificate of the profession in its current form, a form clarified and retouched by case law and reform. Indeed, if a profession – and even more, the practices it covers – is irreducible to the regulations that govern it, or even to any prescription, it can find there a source of identity and legitimacy.
In this respect, we know that recognition by the State is the main means in France of enshrining the professionalization of trades and occupations 6 .
Its purpose is to restrict access to commercial professions in the event of previous convictions.
In fact, during the twentiethcentury, professional organizations have sought to enshrine their practices in the law and are at the origin of most of the current provisions. A first union chamber of real estate agents was created in France in 1921, but the current unions were founded after the war.
In 1945 for the CNAB (National Confederation of Property Administrators) which became UNIS in 2009 and 1946 for the FNAIM (National Federation of real estate), meeting of local trade union chambers and still organized in a federative form.
The creations are later for the SNPI (National Union of Real Estate Professionals) and the UNIT (National Union of Real Estate) in 1960 and 1973 respectively. (CSAB) founded in 1996 after a split within the CNAB.o 47-1635 of August 30, 1947 7 relating to the cleaning up of the commercial professions amends the regulations.
The following steps will be the prohibition to receive money from the client until the transaction has actually taken place 8 , with the exception of escrow operations 9 , then the separation from the administrators of property and the establishment of the mandate 10.
The culmination of this course is law 70-9 of January 2, 1970, known as the Hoguet law. Coming into force in 1973, it was slightly modified in 2004 11 . This law ensures since the base of the regulation.
The history of Capital Smart City remains to be written, but these brief milestones invite us to begin by looking at the frameworks of the real estate agent's activity in a given context, rather than the impression of permanence given by the presence of intermediaries in each market.
It is certain that intermediation activities develop in the space created by the difficulties of adjustment between supply and demand. However, these obstacles do not entirely determine the forms of intermediation, nor the distribution between the different types of intermediaries. In this respect, the French situation presents a certain number of particularities.
Real estate agents have only a weak influence on the economy. Their market position is characterized by a significant gap between the number of cases in which they intervene and their actual market share.
