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Foreign firms are taking over real estate agency in the country and something needs to be done about it urgently, the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV) has said.
The professional body said it had been saddled with fighting quackery on the local level but that in recent times, foreign firms had been dominating the practice of estate agency and had almost taken over the industry.
To fight this, the Business Division of Estate Agency and Marketing, NIESV, is putting together a seminar and interactive session to find ways of protecting not just the profession, but the consuming public and the country at large.
The Chairman of the faculty, Mr. Sam Eboigbe, stated that international incursion into the profession of estate agency had taken a new dimension with foreign firms brazenly displaying their boards in Lagos and other cities across the country.
He said, “This time, we intend to ensure that we solve a major challenge in our profession. If we continue to keep quiet, we are not doing justice to the profession. Before now, it was local quackery, but we have found out that international incursion has taken a new dimension.
“So, we as professionals are coming together to look at the problem, as it were, and see what we are doing right or wrong. Competition should be about collaboration, but what we found is that these foreign firms are almost dominating the industry. Other professions that allowed that have been subsumed.”
Eboigbe said the seminar, tagged, ‘Prospects and challenges of international competition in the business of real estate’, would hold in Lagos on September 19.
According to him, a communique will be issued at the end of the seminar to the government and other relevant authorities to ensure swift action.
He stated that to further solve the problem of incursion into the profession, the Estate Surveyors and Valuers Registration Board of Nigeria had approved the use of pseudonyms to help estate surveyors to build stronger practicing firms.
The Chairman, Planning Committee of the seminar, Mr. Kayode Ogunji, explained that it would be in two sessions of plenary and interactive, while renowned professionals in the industry had been invited to help with the process of curtailing foreign incursion, among other issues.
Credit: Punch Newspaper