COLLEGE STATION, Tex. (Real Estate Center) – A bad economy fuels litigation, and the attorney with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, Judon Fambrough, is advising real estate licensees to get the “sue shot.”
His prescription for real estate agents is to get a booster on the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which protects consumers from false, deceptive and misleading business practices.
“Real estate practitioners are more apt to be sued in the next few years than they were in the last ten to 15,” writes Fambrough in the October issue of Tierra Grande, the Center’s magazine.
“Licensees can protect themselves from lawsuits by understanding what violates the law,” he said, “what transactions are exempt, what makes a consumer waiver enforceable, what a claimant must prove and when a third-party defense is possible?”
The statute does not define “false, misleading and deceptive business practices.” But it does list 27 prohibited practices. Consumers who bring an action for a violation must prove that:
the defendant engaged in one or more of these practices,
they (the consumer) relied on the practice to their detriment, and
These practices were the producing cause of their economic damages.
The violations alleged most often against real estate professionals include:
• Representing that goods (including real estate) or services have . . . characteristics . . . uses . . . benefits or qualities they do not have.
• Representing that goods are original or new if they are deteriorated, reconditioned, reclaimed, used or secondhand.
• Failing to disclose information concerning goods or services that was known at the time of the transaction if such failure to disclose . . . was intended to induce the customer into a transaction . . . the consumer would not have entered had the information been disclosed.
• Claiming an agreement confers rights, remedies or obligations that it does not.
• Alleging work or services have been performed when they have not.
