Dubai to rank property brokers based on performance

Dubai brokers would be categorised based on performance educators, with the gold ranking the top tier. Antonie Robertson / The National

The Dubai Land Department is set to introduce a new system to rank the emirate’s property brokers based on their performance.

Ali Abdulla Al Ali, the director of real estate licensing at the department, told the Cityscape Global conference yesterday that the new system would be introduced in January.

Brokers will be scored on five factors – experience, number of transactions, commitment to real estate regulations, structure of their offices and social works.

The ranking will be weighted, with 15 per cent of the score based on the experience of the firm and the brokers, 30 per cent on the size of transactions carried out, 40 per cent on their adherence to DLD regulations, 10 per cent on the structure of their organisation and 5 per cent on community activity.

Half of the community activity category is based on Emiratisation targets, and the other half is on corporate social responsibility.

Mr Al Ali said that once scores are up, brokers will fall into one of four categories. Those that achieve a score of up to 70 per cent will be placed in a general category, while those achieving more than 70, 80 and 90 per cent will be ranked in the bronze, silver and gold categories, respectively.

“The main reason for this,” Mr Al Ali said, “is to enhance the efficiencies of real estate brokers, to create competitiveness between brokers to provide a better type of service for their clients and to reduce the number of violations in the market from brokers.”

He said that Dubai has about 3,550 brokerage firms and more than 7,500 registered brokers. Once the ranking for brokerages is complete, the department will begin to work on an index for ranking brokers.

Although it produced rankings for individual brokers as part of its recently launched smartphone app, these were based purely on the volume of transactions that each had carried out.

Mario Volpi, the head of projects at Asteco Property Managment and a columnist for The National, pointed out that there were some brokers who scored highly under the DLD's app simply because they registered many transactions for their firms on behalf of other brokers at the DLD's licensing centres.

One top broker, he said, “worked for a company and signed off every single deal.”

Mr Al Ali admitted that it was a problem that the app was based on just one criterion. He said it would be widened in the future, but also added that individual brokers should register their own deals.

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