EXCLUSIVE: Mortgage senior says ‘it’s time to regulate estate agents’

Robert Sinclair, the chief executive of the Asssociation of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI), says the latest batch of fines to agents from HMRC means that the time has surely come to regulate the sector. Speaking exclusively to The Neg, Sinclair (pictured) said the time had come for estate agents, letting agents and sale agents to finally come under statutory regulation and weed out bad practice which evidently still exists. He says: “On a day when over 50 estate agency firms were fined a huge amount of money for breaching anti-money laundering rules it would seem to me that the only effective regulator in this market appears to be HMRC. “There should be a proper regulator of estate agent and letting agents and selling agents so that there is a proper set of rules that exists that monitors and enforces.” CONSUMER CREDIT Pressed on how this could be achieved Sinclair points to how consumer credit was finally regulated. The AMI boss told The Neg: “If you go back to where we were 15 years ago, unsecured credit was looked after by the now defunct OFT. The consumer credit act was meant to be policed by local trading standards. But what happened was…