Brian Cannan: Hi I'm Brian Cannan and I have Andrew Coulson from Think Real Estate with me today. Hello Andrew.
Andrew Coulson: Hello Brian.
Brian: And we're going to be talking about the fraud prevention guidelines.
Andrew: Yeah the government's brought in the set of guidelines for agents to be able to identify who the owner of the property is before we start transacting with.
Brian: I think the important part there was "guidelines", it's not law.
Andrew: That's correct, we have a duty of care to protect the consumer, so we need to identify that the owner is who they portray to be.
Brian: So what you're saying is that if I'm going to sign an agency agreement with you I can say that I'm Andrew Coulston and sign the signature and if you don't check that I'm not Andrew Coulston, then you're going to get in a lot of trouble.
Andrew: That's exactly right Brian. So we have this duty of care to be able to identify them, we may have transacted with them in the past and we can vouch for them by saying yes we have done that in the past and we would keep some form of documentation that we have been able to identify who they are.
Brian: So who decides what documentation we have to keep?
Andrew: Well it's a guideline remember, Fair Trading has given us a form that we can complete and within that form it asks for photo ID be at a driver's license or a passport or if we don't have access to those it may be secondary information such as a Medicare card or a credit card or a rates notice. Some of those forms and then we'd keep those records as evidence.
Brian: So what you're really telling me is that we should probably have a policy on this in the office and the office will decide on the guidelines and what sort of identification they would like to get and everyone that office follows the policy and procedure.
Andrew: It would be very very simple if we got into a habit of when we take out our agency agreement, be it management or sales we immediately take out a fraud prevention checklist and we can complete that and we've completed our obligations.
Brian: I find that what most agents do is say "Can I have your drivers license" because then you're getting their real name, their legal name, getting their spelling right and it makes your agency agreement 100%.
