The Island’s Law Society say that the payment of referral fees to estate agents is not in the interests of the consumer, and voted to ban them at a meeting on Friday.
But the ban will have no impact on the estate agents, according to the president of the Jersey Estate Agents Association, Alan MacLean.
He said that the referral fees were ‘peanuts’ and that ‘the big furore on the subject was much ado about nothing’.
Mr MacLean said: ‘Agents would not refer unless they had good experience with that lawyer in the past, otherwise they would risk losing their commission on the sale.
From the estate agents’ point of view, we get our fees from commissions on the sale of a house.
Any sort of referral payment is peanuts.
It’s like being given a case of champagne or a bunch of flowers.’ However, the Jersey Law Society president, Alan Binnington, said that they had received complaints from members that some legal professionals were paying the fees to estate agents for the introduction of conveyancing business, and that after canvassing views, the society had decided to ban them.
